So We Laugh

"So We Laugh"--May 5, 2017

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth in to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith--being more precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire--may be found to result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed." [1 Peter 1:3-7]

Easter people laugh.

We laugh, not because we are trying to pretend that rotten things don't happen in the world.  They do.  They happen to everybody, and they happen to us, who are a smaller subset within "everybody."  Easter people laugh even though it is also true that we are called to weep with those who weep.

But we laugh because the resurrection of Jesus gives us the ability to disarm the powers of death and sin and cruelty.  The resurrection gives us a way to see the worst that they can do, and still say back, almost taunting, "You do not get the last word."

Laughter, then, for the followers of Jesus, isn't a distraction, or a way of ignoring the awful things, the sadness, the injustice, the brokenness, and the violence of the world.  Laughter becomes our way, or as First Peter here says it, "rejoicing" is our way, because we are in on the great cosmic eternal joke that death thought it had won over Jesus the innocent victim, but resurrection shows death that it has been duped.  The powers that killed Jesus were fooled into thinking they got the last word, too.  The rulers of the day were convinced that they could make an example of Jesus and silence any opposition... but the rolled-away stone shows us that they could not stop his momentum. And still today, laughter is our way of disarming and disrupting the dismal dark.

I am reminded of a remark Mel Brooks would often make in interviews, when people would ask about the repeated habit he has of making fun of Hitler and the Nazis in his movies and comedy.  Whether it's the all out parody musical "Springtime for Hitler" in The Producers, or the shots he takes in History of the World, Part One, or wherever else in his movies you find it, Mel Brooks has often said that laughing at Hitler is part of what undercuts the power of his hate and cruelty all these decades later. When The Producers was being adapted from a movie into a stage show in the early 2000s, he gave an interview where he said, for example, "by using comedy, we can rob Hitler of his posthumous power and myths." 

In other words, without denying the atrocities of what evil can do, one kind of effective resistance is to poke fun, to laugh, to ridicule the powers that think they are in total control.  By using laughter to combat the powers of the day, their insecurity is revealed, and we point to another, truer, Power--the power of abundant life, the power of resurrection, the power of the risen Jesus.

First Peter calls us to that kind of response to evil, to suffering, and to the powers of cruelty and death.  We will "rejoice"--which is to say, we will laugh--and get under the thin skin of the those powers, and unmask them as impostors.  First Peter says that the resurrection gives us the kind of hope it takes to learn to rejoice in the midst of suffering, even of persecution, and to let that joyful laughter be part of our resistance against death, against greed, against sin, and against cruelty.

This is critical, and this is revolutionary, if you think about it.  Our own gut tendency is to want to get very serious in the face of the powers that persecute.  In the first century when First Peter was written, there was the specter of official persecution from the empire, and of unofficial persecution from local pockets of people who didn't like these Christ-followers.  There were people in the administration of the empire who were trying to stamp out early Christianity, and there were others who just viewed Christ-followers with suspicion (us and our crazy way of including poor and rich, free and slave, men and women, like those old boundaries and distinctions do not hold anymore!).  From the beginning, Christians have lived in cultures that were hostile in varying degrees.   But First Peter's word to us is that we aren't supposed to make a fuss and insist on official protection from that hostility.  Followers of Jesus are not supposed to go around complaining that it's not fair, or that we should be free from the persecution.  And we are certainly not called to spend our energy trying to make things "easier" for ourselves--that just smacks of self-serving and self-interest and the impulse to stay comfortable.  Instead, First Peter says, our calling in the midst of hostility is to rejoice--to laugh.  Laughing provokes bullies to overplay their hand.  Laughing shrugs off whatever angry threats the powers of the day will make.  Laughing strips them of their power... and instead, finds joyful hope in the resurrection.

For followers of Jesus two thousand years later, we still struggle with the question of how to live in a wider culture that doesn't often line up with the things we believe Jesus is teaching us to hold dear.  Much like in the first century Roman Empire, sometimes the tension is with the official powers who govern, and sometimes it is from being at odds with the general "feel" or atmosphere of culture at large.  And, yeah, sometimes we run the risk of standing out from the crowd, or saying unpopular things.  But First Peter calls us, like he is simply following Jesus' lead, to rejoice in the midst of being rejected by others--to laugh in the midst of it all.  We don't go looking for special treatment, or for special protection, and we don't expect to get an easy time with the powers of the day.  Instead, we rejoice, and we take away the power that was meant to make us afraid.  And so we laugh.

Today, laugh. Laugh full and deep.  Because you and I are in on the biggest punch-line in the history of the universe.  We are Easter people.

Lord Jesus, give us the courage to be joyful, no matter what.