January 23, 2000

Pastor David G. Mullen

Mark 1:14-20

Humor and grace go together. Which is to say, humor, and being convinced that God in fact really does love us just as we are, go together. Good humor rises up out of a deep love for humanity, and love so deep it will poke fun at the way we pretend to be what we are not: gods! For what makes something funny? The way a situation or clever comment highlights the absurdity of the human condition. But we don’t dare to see how ridiculous we sometimes are, unless underneath that we have a sense we’re going to be OK. The best humor is always loving humor, urging us to just be human and not fake gods.

There is a kind of loving humor in Mark’s narrative of the call of the first disciples: Jesus is strolling by the shore of Lake Galilee. He sees the four fishermen, and calls to them, "Come with me!" And immediately Simon and Andrew and James and John drop everything and follow. Now all piety aside about the charismatic glow of Christ, you sort of have to question behavior like that. After all, what would you say about someone today who suddenly quit everything and took off and joined a commune. And this immediate following is doubly amazing in view of the disciples’ failure to understand Jesus. St. Mark takes a kind of perverse delight in showing over and over how dim-witted the disciples were, how they seemed deliberately, almost perversely, intent on not getting it, and at the end, desert him!

Can we see ourselves in that? Only if we can laugh at ourselves once in a while. Truly, today’s strange mix of lessons suggest to me that caught up in the immediacy of daily life, God’s people usually take themselves too seriously, and forget that life is about what God is doing, and mainly what God is doing is loving us. Another way to say it is that God is kept busy trying to save us from our own foolishness.

Look at the evidence: the most reluctant preacher who ever lived (Jonah) is used by God to turn a whole city around–and then Jonah goes off and sulks about it. But God keeps on loving Jonah, anyway. The greatest interpreter of the faith, St. Paul, gets the timetable of the end wrong, and even sounds fanatical. I mean, what are married people to do with his weird suggestion that we live as though we were not married! What on earth does that mean? Yet, out lasting his rantings on the end of the world, is Paul’s brilliant insight into the meaning of the gospel, and God makes him the preeminent teacher of the Church. And the disciples, who in the end deserted Jesus, find out on Easter morning about the power of God–and become, in spite of themselves, apostles of the kingdom of God.

I hope this sounds a least a little bit subversive–as subversive as our Lord Christ. Don’t you ever wonder why Jesus was always in so much trouble with the authorities? If all he was doing was being kind to people, why should that have bothered any one? But no, it’s what he was really up to that was the problem. His ministry as the presence of God among the poor and the marginal was a sign of the failure of the religious and political system that took itself far too seriously. His joy in the poor and the outcast poked fun at the pretensions of the high and mighty unloving uppercrust.

As for us, even Christians get so enamored of the things that ultimately don’t matter, we miss the good news that we are called by a loving God into a new way of life–in Christ, lighten up! But people enjoy a good fight and will go to any lengths to justify their rage against anyone who questions them. That’s why the leaders put Jesus on the Cross. His criticism of the old way was intolerable–intolerable because those good folks took themselves far too seriously. Dictators and oppressors are humorless–and therefore dangerous.

Recently the vote the ELCA took to enter into full communion and the historic episcopate with the Episcopalian church is causing a lot of heartburn. Some Lutherans are holding special meetings to argue that because of the vote, a strong witness to the gospel will be lost in our churches. Do these critics really mean to suggest that God will no longer be among us if we shake hands with our Episcopal brothers and sisters? Maybe it’s more like this: if God calls us together, then together we are and we’ll just have to learn to deal with it! Lighten up, you angry Lutherans!

Humor is a great quality to have in the Church. Many a meeting has been saved by humor. I recall one church convention when the whole thing about being an inclusive church was the big deal–as though by promoting the idea of inclusivity we become inclusive. So the word spread around that us Lutherans could no longer tell Norwegian jokes–because that would be culturally exclusive and so on. Well, we could all understand the concern, but really--. So the former president of a Lutheran church body, Dr. David Preus came to speak to us. And he commented on how he knew we could no longer tell Norwegian jokes, so he began his message with, "Well, there were these two Hittites, Ole and Lena." And the whole convention roared with laughter. Perfect way to puncture our inflated political correctness attitudes.

I meet weekly with some of the local pastors. I love em all, but I have to tell you, some of those guys are pretty conservative. One day a few of them launched into a tirade about evolution. Thumping on their Bibles, they declared that no ancestors of theirs descended from monkeys! To which one of the mainline pastors remarked, "Well, now, I wouldn’t be too sure about that. You never met some of my ex-wife’s relatives." We all cracked up and we once again could talk with each other like Christian brothers.

Humor and grace go together. In the midst of the daily grind, how blessed are we when we see the smiling face of Jesus and hear him say, Come on, follow me! There is something greater here than the worrisome fishnets of your daily life. You don’t have to understand everything right now, in fact, in this life, understanding only will come over time as I lead you to the Cross, through Good Fridays and Easters, into the dawn of life in God’s kingdom.

Come with me. Us Lord? Yes, us, the sulky prophets who’d rather flee but then just can’t give up on our struggling communities; us, the beginning believers who often get the vision thing wrong but never forget the good news of God’s love; us, the confused fishermen who, stumbling into the power of God, become apostles of humor and grace to the broken world around us. Amen