“…and a sense of humor.”

Ordinary Time IV; January 28, 2007

Ordination & Installation of Officers

Luke 4:21-30

No matter how I try to read this story, it always ends up sounding to me as though Jesus was trying to tick off the people of Nazareth on purpose. Notice their initial reaction to his message: What a great speaker! His parents sure must be proud. He played football with my son! I remember when he was a teenager, he used to cut my grass.

Yes, I’m letting my imagination run away with itself. You get the picture: home-town boy becomes famous, comes back to give a speech, and the neighbors are all busting their buttons with pride. Is anyone actually listening to what he has to say?

I do not think this is Jesus’ finest moment, because I suspect that if he had tried, he might have been able to get through to a few of them. He starts out frustrated and moves on to confrontational and nearly gets thrown off a cliff for his trouble. Fortunately, cooler heads prevail and he walks away.

There are other moments in the Gospels when Jesus faces an explosive situation and defuses it with humor. Here is a peaceful situation and Jesus inflames it. Surely he has his reasons; he always has his reasons. But perhaps this would have been a good moment for one of his wonderful stories, poking fun at the main character. Then, instead of getting them angry enough to throw him off a cliff, he might have got a few of them laughing at themselves.

Generally, that seems to me to be one of the purposes of the stories Jesus tells: to get people to recognize themselves in the story, to see how ridiculous they are, and laugh at themselves. For example: the man who came huffing up to Jesus demanding that Jesus make his brother share the inheritance with him (Luke 12:13-22). Jesus tells the story of the rich farmer whose harvest exceeds the capacity of his available storage. The farmer’s solution is to build a bigger barn. Then he drops dead without heirs and without friends and God laughs at him and calls him a fool. If the man who demanded that Jesus make his brother be fair didn’t see himself in the story and get the point, then he is a chucklehead and God will doubtless laugh at him as well. If he did see himself in the story, then he laughed at himself and reordered his priorities.

And there, I believe, is the secret of maturity: to learn to laugh at ourselves. Perhaps part of the problem Jesus has here in Nazareth is taking himself entirely too seriously. After all, he is young and it is early in his work; after a few months he will become more seasoned.

Everyone over thirty ought to be able to understand this; some of you younger folks will too and the rest of you should eventually. I look back now on my teens and twenties and I shake my head in wonder: so much of my life seemed so burdensome and malignant and oh-so-serious. Many things were dark and oppressive; when I look back on that time now, I am tempted to laugh at the young man I was, for being so very serious about myself. But that would be wrong; when you are young, these things truly are serious and we older folks should not laugh at the young nor laugh at the youngsters we were. But we should outgrow it and learn to laugh at ourselves when tempted to take ourselves too seriously.

Here is a story. Two men are working on a project together. One leaves a note for the other, giving helpful suggestions to the other on his part of the project, based on his own experience. How does the other react? If he is mature, he is grateful for the suggestions, but will still do his part of the project his own way. If he takes himself too seriously, he will be angry at his partner, thinking, “All he wants to do is run me down. He doesn’t think I can do this myself. He doesn’t respect me.”

I am not saying categorically that Jesus takes himself too seriously at this point in the Gospel; I would never say that about my Lord and Savior. But I do suspect he would benefit from listening to one of his own stories.

A number of books have been very helpful to me in the ministry; one of them is a small volume called The Penguin Principles (David S. Belasic and Paul M. Schmidt: C. S. S. Publishing Co., 1986). The principles themselves have been helpful, but the most helpful aspect of the book is the picture behind the title. You have seen penguins in a zoo, or in March of the Penguins or Happy Feet. Look at a penguin, standing there; it looks so dignified in its formal black-and-white. Then watch it move: it waddles. The authors remind pastors that our work feels as though it carries such importance, such dignity, whereas in reality much of what we do seems as ridiculous as the waddle of a penguin (p. 10). When I look at the way we Presbyterian pastors usually dress (pulpit gown, etc.), the comparison is even more apt.

In my last Presbytery I was part of a group of ministers that met monthly for lunch. One time we were joined by a reporter for the city’s major newspaper. He was doing a series, “Lunch with Cliff,” in which he had lunch with folks and then wrote about them in the paper. Usually he joined small groups of people who lunched together regularly. The day he was with us, he observed along about coffee-and-dessert time, “You folks sure laugh a lot.” One of us replied, “You see, we take God very seriously, but ourselves not at all.”

A couple of decades ago I attended the installation of a schoolmate to the pastorate of a church. The Moderator of the Presbytery messed with the ordination vows a little bit. One of the vows is, “Will you seek to serve the people with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love?” (G-14.0207h) The Moderator asked my schoolmate, “Will you seek to serve the people with energy, intelligence, imagination, love and a sense of humor?” That’s not in the Constitution, but it strikes me as important in leadership, whether in the Church or in any other enterprise.

Whether one is a deacon, an elder or a minister of the Word and Sacrament, a sense of humor is important for good leadership. That is true of leadership in business and government, as well. I do not mean that it is important to be able to tell jokes; that isn’t it at all. Rather, it is important to be able to laugh at oneself, not to be too stuck on one’s dignity. How much dignity do we have, really? A speaker at a stewardship conference I attended reminded us, “We are only temporarily not dirt.” (Shannon Jung) Remember God’s words to Adam and Eve: “From dust you came and to dust you shall return.” (Genesis 3:19) The boy asked his mother if that was true and she said yes, it was. He said, “Well, look under my bed: someone’s either coming or going!”

One of the great sagas of the Bible is the story of King David. We venerate David’s memory and his accomplishments; we relish the picture of him vanquishing his enemies, swearing eternal loyalty to Jonathan, falling in love with Abigail, and dancing before the Ark of God. We see David’s glory and kingly dignity, his loves and hates, his great virtues and his colossal sins.

But most of the time we overlook the end of the story. There is a character in the story of David whom we rarely mention: Abishag the Shunammite (I Kings 1:1-4). She is a young woman that David’s advisors recruit when he is very old. Her job is to get in bed with him and try to keep him warm. Frederick Buechner says she reminds us that “in peace as well as in war there’s no tragic folly you can’t talk a nation’s youth into simply by calling it patriotic duty.” (Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who’s Who: Harper & Row, 1979, p. 2) She is also a reminder that even one of the great figures of the Bible grows old and wheezy, unable to feel warm or comfortable, even with the help of a beautiful young woman. What has become of the King’s dignity?

The point of not taking ourselves too seriously is to be able to take God seriously. I fear that it is all too easy for human beings to stand on our own dignity and thumb our noses at God. In a situation like that, I’ll leave it to your imagination who will get the last laugh. The gift of a sense of humor is the ability to keep things in perspective. The new Moderator of our Presbytery, Elder John Morey, reminded us at his installation of some wise words that deserve to be repeated endlessly, until they are engraved in our minds: The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

It won’t be in the vows the new officers take today, because I don’t play fast-and-loose with the Church’s constitution. But hear it in your mind’s ear anyway. Elders, deacons, ministers and the whole people of God: to keep the main thing the main thing, a sense of humor helps.

Loving God, you have dignified our lives by sharing them in your Son, yet have shamed our tendency to lose our focus. Give us grace to laugh at ourselves and to praise you in Jesus Christ our Lord; amen.

Robert A. Keefer

Westminster Presbyterian Church

Clarinda, Iowa