First Presbyterian Church
Jokes and Theology Help
Sermon for March 19, 2006
by Pastor Susan Barnes

Children's time: Time to Tell a Joke

I took out two glow sticks and bent them so they would glow. Then I asked the children these questions: When was the last time you've seen one of these glow sticks? Where? (My daughter said, “The dollar store.” I was hoping someone would say a fair or carnival.) When's a good time to have one of these? (The children agreed at night, when it's dark.) When's a bad time to have one of these? (The children said in bright daylight.)

When is a good time to tell a joke? (When you think of it.)

When is a bad time to tell a joke? (They couldn't think of a bad time.) I said when someone is concentrating on something important, like driving.

I think this is a good time to tell some jokes. Do you know any?

I have a few. What weighs 5,000 pounds and wears glass slippers? Cinderelephant.

What games do elephants like to play most? Squash.

What did the cat say to the elephant? Meow.

What did the grape say to the elephant? Nothing. Grapes can't talk.

What do you think God is thinking about these jokes? Laughing.

Our scripture reading is found on page 166 of your pew Bibles. This is from Paul's introduction to his letter to the Corinthians, who apparently have complained that his teaching doesn't hold a candle to popular Greek philosophical wisdom. Philosophy teachers enjoyed high status, based on the number of their students and the popularity of their philosophy. Corinthian Christians wanted more status. Listen for the word of God as it is found in 1 Corinthians 1:18-25.

For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart."

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength.

This ends our reading of God's word.

Let us listen to the choir sing about God's foolishness and God's weakness as they sing of God's wondrous love.

Let us pray. Loving God, you have so made us that we cannot live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from your mouth. Give us a hunger for your Word, and in that food satisfy our daily need; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Well, it's been quite a week here at First Presbyterian Church. We've hosted three memorial services since we last worshiped together last Sunday. The Deacons have been hard at work, putting out tablecloths and flowers for the memorial services. First they did it on Monday morning. After that the community choir had to move the tables around for their rehearsal Monday night. Tuesday we moved the tables for the Soup Supper and session meeting. Wednesday the Women's Support Group set up the tables again and the Deacons set up the serving tables on Thursday morning for the service on Friday. Except that the Democrats were meeting here on Thursday. So one of our members who is also a Democrat had to undo the tables and then put everything back again. Friday after that service, for the first time, the Deacons got to leave almost everything in place for the memorial service on Saturday. We have to laugh or we'd cry.

The deacons, with the help of many others, hosted refreshments after each memorial service. Three families were ministered to here. I am glad to be a part of your ministry. No one complained about all the work they had to do; we all just recognized that many people were working together to help grieving families. It's nice to know there is something significant we can physically do to show our love to people in grief. Church is a place for us to recognize and remember the significance of a person's life and to offer comfort and hope when that life is ending. The world does not offer many safe places to do that.

Lately it seems many of us are facing serious illnesses. We have church members, relatives, and friends with cancer, so I wanted to talk about that today in the context of God's foolishness and God's weakness being wiser and stronger than the world's wisdom and strength.

Douglas John Hall is a Canadian theology professor and has been treating his cancer for a year and a half. He writes “I have been fortunate; no serious nausea, no great hair loss, only minor reactions like hiccups and periodic weariness oddly juxtaposed with bursts of unnatural energy.”

He notes that “Many people are so frightened of contracting some form of this condition that they look for it in every skin blemish or body ache. Others are so debilitated by the very thought of cancer that they have enormous difficulty relating to people, --often their close relatives—who suffer from it. A neighbor of mine, when I mentioned that I was ‘on chemotherapy' simply gasped, touched me in a strange, fatalistic way, and never mentioned the subject again. In fact, he has stopped speaking to me” altogether.

But most people have been supportive. He wrote his friends “In the face of this great disruption, I found myself turning in new and very practical ways to the theological background on which I had been reflecting and writing and speaking for decades.”

He wrote a book twenty years ago called God and Human Suffering which I found very helpful as a pastor and as a Christian. Some suffering is redemptive, like when we fall down as we learn to walk, or ride bike or skate or ski. Or like when we run out gas on the freeway because we forgot to put gas in the car even though we ate dinner right next to a gas station. Notice how personally I can speak of that one.

But then there's the kind of suffering that doesn't result from our behavior, the accidents that just happen to us. Someone gets lung cancer who has never smoked. A child is hit by a drunk driver. These great tragedies teach us nothing except that suffering is painful.

Hall talks about God as one who knows suffering—the suffering of the cross. God suffers when we suffer. The world is becoming the kingdom of God, but is not quite there yet, and so there is suffering.

And that is foolishness and weakness to those who think of God as one who is just an all-powerful omnipotent and omniscient being.

So Douglas John Hall said with joy “I wrote my friends ‘Theology helps!' He discovered a great comfort in reading theology old and new. He wrote “theological reflection …brings to the contemplation of one's end-condition a certain calm that passes understanding, to be sure, but unlike a good deal of ‘religion' does not bypass it.” 1 He encourages pastors to recognize that because of their theology and training, they have a vantage point of meaning and courage that we can make accessible to others. I've thought of how to do that this week as I've ministered to grieving families. I'm not going to quote from Kierkegaard, although Hall encouraged pastors to read him. But I will quote a little more from Douglas John Hall.

“There is a picture above my bed that I find myself contemplating very often now. It is an enlargement of a faded photograph showing a small family standing beside their stone house in old Ontario—father mother, and two year old son. It is the year 1930, and the clothing of the little group reflects that fact. Like most of their contemporaries, they have been hit hard by the Great Depression, and the young parents' faces reveal something of that reality. Yet they stand together, leaning in toward each other. And if the parents are anxious about the future, the little boy doesn't seem to be. His face is full of curiosity. Why should he be anxious? He is standing on a rock that is more dependable than the great granite stones of the house in the background; the rock of his parents' love and delight in his being.

I was that little boy. And as I try to trace, in memory, the course of my life from childhood on, I become conscious again and again of the secret that is already present in the photograph, for remembering reveals that it has been manifested many times over. And it is this; I have been accompanied, befriended, upheld, supported, in short –loved- all the way though. The persons who mediated that love—old ladies and gentlemen of my youth, friends, teachers, colleagues, students, strangers, my wife and children—were and are themselves needy souls; their love was not sufficient by itself to sustain me, any more than my love was sufficient to sustain them. But through this great…mixture of things we call life, a love has been communicated to me that incorporates while it transcends all the relationships in which it has incarnated itself.

How could I imagine that I will be left all alone and unfriended in death when from the earliest days I have been accompanied by a love that I neither fabricated nor ever wholly deserved? No, nothing will separate me from that love” as Paul says in Romans 8.

That is God's foolishness, wiser than human wisdom.

I hope that the church can be a safe and solid place for our children to stand on. I hope our children feel that we love and delight in their being.

At one church I served, I knew twin teenagers, Kathy and Christi, both natural blondes. They knew I loved and delighted in them, even if I could defy probability and get their names wrong more than half the time. Kathy loved blonde jokes. She would put her hair up in a ponytail when she told them, so she could swish it around as she delivered the punchline. I still remember her saying, “Ask me what's the capitol of Oregon?” “O.”

Two blondes are on either side of lake. One calls to the other, “How do I get over there?” The other says, “You are over there.” “Why do blondes wear shoulderpads?” (swishing head from side to side) “I dunno.” I suppose that was funnier in the eighties, when women wore those big shoulder pads.

But telling jokes about being blonde allowed her to be in charge of being blonde.

I'm guessing you haven't heard many jokes about cancer. I ran across a cancer website that had a bunch of jokes on it. The host, Arlene Harder wrote “Even If Cancer Doesn't Have a Sense of Humor, You Can. Laughter can soothe and heal tender hearts. Not laughing—simply because your life isn't going the way you would prefer - gives cancer power to have greater control over your life than it deserves.

Even the ordinary life of healthy people can become pretty grim if we can't make fun of the vicissitudes and vagaries that come our way. Some days the only way to get through is to laugh about the absurdity of trying to be in control of things over which we have no control. And some days that goes double when you have a serious, somber, grave, non-frivolous, solemn, grim, life-challenging illness.”

In that vein, here's a true story.

“A man named Glenn Jeffrey was undergoing cancer treatment. He said “After my first radiation treatment, I was laying in bed that night. The children were finally all asleep. Carol and I could, at last, talk about the day's events. We talked about several things, always dancing around how the radiation treatment had gone.

Finally, Carol asked how I was feeling. I told her pretty good, but my skin was a little tender. Carol offered to take a look, pulled the covers back and gasped -- there was a strange green glow coming out from under the blankets.

I had taken a ‘Glow-stick' and hidden it under the covers.

Great trick for anyone getting radiation . . . just make sure your spouse has a good sense of humor.” 2

And so, I encourage you to continue to think about God and faith and the meaning of your life. All that is theology. Thinking about it now will offer comfort now, and later. And when trying to understand even just a tiny bit of God's wisdom becomes too heady or confusing, the time is right for enjoying a good laugh and God's foolishness.

1 Hall, Douglas John, “Preaching to People with Cancer; the Eschatology of the Body,” Journal for Preachers, Lent 2006, p. 28.

2 Copyright, 1998, Glenn Jeffrey , used with permission of Arlene Harder, personal communication 3-15-06, from www.learningplaceonline.com/illness/humor/jokes/02-archive.htm