Early in his ministry, critics came to Jesus saying, "The disciples of John fast often, but yours eat and drink." Jesus replied, "can the wedding guest fast when the bridegroom arrives?"

Do you find it interesting that one of the earliest charges against Jesus' people is that they had too much fun?

"Why don't your disciples go around fasting, wearing sad faces and mournful looks -- like the disciples of John the Baptist?  We can tell that John's disciples are religious -- they're miserable!"

Would the same be said of Jesus' followers today?

I have never gotten into trouble for being too serious. Humor is my downfall. People are more troubled that a preacher should be funny than that a preacher should be wrong.

"It's just not appropriate for church," they say on their way out the door.

In the theology magazine which I help to edit, the most difficult articles to obtain are those which are humorous.  We get dozens of pieces on war, the arms race, capital punishment, Central America, poverty. Page after page of heartbreak, pain, sadness, righteous indignation. Isn't that what religion is all about?

Perhaps that's why it's so difficult for people -- particularly sincere, devout, religious people -- to laugh. With all the hurt and pain in the world, one must be incredibly insensitive and calloused to laugh. For what is there to laugh when there is war, the arms race, capital punishment, Central America, poverty, death?

So it's always Maundy Thursday and Good Friday in the church.

Everybody believes in Good Friday. It doesn't take talent to preach on Maundy Thursday or Good Friday. After all, you read the papers. You watch the 6:30 News. You have seen enough cowardice, violence, cruelty, betrayal in your day to believe it in Jesus' day. You know: the good get it in the end, evil always has the last word. You have seen the cross raised on battlefields, ghettos, concentration camps, Ethiopian deserts     therefore you know about the cross raised on Golgotha.

Feel good? Come to church, we'll cure you of it! Church is for mourning, laments, and dirges. Worship is getting together and feeling sad. Sunday is about the terrible thing which happened to Jesus, the terrible things done to the poor, the hungry, the oppressed; the sad, lamentable, doleful injustice.

Speaking of injustice, have you noted how many of our comedians come from people who have known hard times, folk who know, really know, what it means to be on the receiving end of injustice? Woody Allen, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy. Why are they able to laugh? They laugh because it hurts, because laughter is more productive than tears.

What makes us laugh?  A rotund, pompous banker struts down the street. His foot hits a banana peel and he goes sprawling on the sidewalk. Why do we laugh?  We laugh at the incongruity between what is and what ought to be.  When the everyday, normal, accepted, expected, and reasonable is turned upside down, we smile.

Poet, James Dickey, remarked that Southerners have a great capacity to overcome adversity through humor. What did he mean? As Southerners often do, Dickey told a story: A man got some money. He decided that since he had so much money he would, for the first time in his life, go out a buy a suit, a fine suit. So, he went to Sears Roebuck and ordered a suit. A week later, when the suit came, he put it on, but it was cut all wrong. A sleeve was six inches longer than the other. One of the legs of the trousers was nearly a foot short. He took the suit back to the man at Sears to complain. "The suit's all wrong," he said.

"Put it on," said the clerk. "Now, let's see. Pull your left arm up like this. Yes, and drop your right arm down a few inches. Right. And lift up your left leg. Good. There ain't nothing wrong with this suit."

So he made his way out of Sears, waddling down the street, barely able to walk. He met two of his friends. They spoke as he waddled past.

When the friends got a ways off one said, "Man, poor old Joe is just eat up with arthritis, ain't he?"

"He sure is," said the other one. "Bad off. But one thing you can say. Don't that suit fit him good."

Now why do we laugh? We laugh because something is dislodged, out of place. We smile at delightful incongruity.

Paul says that the cross throws the world out of kilter. The cross, he says, is a stumbling block to some, sheer nonsense to others, folly, a joke.(1 Corin. 1:22-23)

When old Abram and Sarai were old, very old, God told Abraham that his octogenarian wife would have a child from whence would come a great nation.

Abram fell on the ground, laughing until tears ran down his cheeks. Sarai gave a toothless laugh.  Nine months later, the joke was on them.  They have a son, whom they call Isaac which means, "laughter."  Sarai laughed all the way from the geriatric ward into the maternity ward! God wasn't going to be stumped by Sarai's age. God, it would seem, likes nothing better than to put one over on us. Humor, divine, biblical humor, happens when we get everything tied down, neat, in its place, all figured out, just so. Then, bang!  The whole thing is flipped on its head.  And we laugh!

We think we know how the world works, we think we have everything figured out and tied down. But then, something intrudes, something is thrown out of kilter and we laugh.

Well, what do you do when things are out of kilter in your life? What do you do when you have planned and saved for your retirement and, the month that you retire, find that you have cancer?

What do you do when you have dreamed about this special person with whom you plan to spend the rest of your life and you get this letter, this Dear John, Dear Jane, which says that your plans are not to be?

What do you do with a nation founded upon freedom spending billions for the machines of war, bedding down with tyrannical regimes?  What do you do?

You can cry. And tears are OK, as far as they go. But sometimes, we laugh. We laugh because laughter is more redemptive than weeping. We laugh, because to take it too seriously, would be to take it with a seriousness which would be -- deadly.

Laughter liberates.  Is that why laughter is always the enemy of tyrants and demagogues?

There was this student, a football player, I think. He needed to improve his grade average. His coach told him to take ornithology.  He enrolled in ornithology. To his surprise, it was a course about birds. They studied the nests of birds, the habitat, the migrations of birds, all about birds. When at last the final exam came, he studied all night.  He walked in for the exam, and, when the professor handed it out, it was nothing but a sheet full of feet, bird feet and legs. "Identify these birds," it said. He couldn't belief it. An exam with nothing but feet!

Disgusted, he went up to the professor's desk and said, "This is the dumbest, stupidest, exam I have ever seen."

The professor was enraged. "You upstart!  You impudent student! I'm going to report you to the Dean! What is your name?"

The student stepped back, hiked up his trouser legs and said, "You're so smart, you tell me."

Do you know why that story is from a book on how to be a better teacher? You get this sort of humor in Jesus:

There was a rich man. He had it made. He had large barns -- had to build even bigger ones to hold all of his grain. "Take it easy," he told himself as he settled down into his easy chair.

"Hello, fool," said the angel of death.

There were two brothers. One was hard working, conscientious, good. The other was a profligate, spend-thrift, no-good. When the no-good one wasted all of his father's hard-earned money on harlots, he finally returned home in rags. His father -- threw a party to celebrate his homecoming.

We laugh at the incongruity. We laugh at how differently God looks at things, from the way we look at things. He smile at how God isn't limited by our definitions of what's possible. Thus laughter is close to faith, the very source of hope.

Perhaps that's how Norman Cousins discovered that laughter is a source of health. You know how he facilitated his recovery from a serious illness by watching old Candid Camera films. Health is related to hope, and hope springs from humor.

Wherein is our hope?

It was Sunday evening. A couple of disciples were trudging their weary way down the road from Jerusalem to a village called, Emmaus. The eyes of the travelers were fixed upon their feet as they walked. They talked in low, solemn tones. Suddenly they became aware of a third person, who walked beside them as they began their ascent up another hill.

"What are you talking about?" he asked the travelers.

They stopped at the peak of the hill, catching their breath, answering the stranger without lifting their eyes to his face. "Are you the only one in town who doesn't know what has happened in Jerusalem this weekend? Don't you read the papers?"

"What things?" asked the stranger.

"What things? Things concerning Jesus -- a great prophet of mighty deeds. But now the authorities have put him to death. We had hoped he would be the Messiah. We had hoped that he would redeem Israel. But the authorities feared him, the people turned against him, his disciples forsook him. What can a person do?  You can't fight City Hall. It was good while it lasted. You win some; you lose some.  It is over."

"Some of our women, hysterical women, came running in this morning with the tale that his body was gone from the tomb.  But what do they know?" asked the other disciple.

"O foolish men!" exclaims the stranger.  "How dull can you be?"

At last they came to the little village. The disciples begged the stranger to stay and have supper.

That evening at the table, the stranger took the bread, held it in his hands, blessed it, thanking God, broke the bread. At last, their eyes opened and they recognized the stranger.

"We have seen the Lord!" they cried as they ran all the way back to Jerusalem to tell the others.

Can you see the -- humor? The stranger, teasing the disciples who wallowed in their despair? The women were right! He's loose! You could hear them laughing back in Jerusalem when the word reached them, laughing in Jerusalem, and Judea, and Samaria and all over the world, you could hear them laughing at the great, cosmic, joke which God put over on Death at Easter.

Great Death, sitting on his almighty throne said, "Who laughed? I hear somebody laughing? What's so funny?"

Still, whenever disciples gather to tell this Easter story, the surprise, the shock, the joke which God played on old Death, you can hear them laughing. You can hear them laughing in church, in cancer wards, in South African jails, at funerals, whenever things seem tight, closed, dead, pompous, you can hear them laughing at what God is doing to the world.

It wasn't long after Easter and some of Jesus' people were gathered in a room in Jerusalem. Perhaps it was the same room where they gathered on Maundy Thursday to mourn. They began telling again what had happened over the last few days, how he was with them.  "We really put one over on Caesar, didn't we?" "Can't you see the face of the High priest up at the temple when he hears the news?" They started laughing again. People who had before had nothing but tears, laughed.  Somebody passed a loaf of bread. Then the wine. One thing led to another, the spirit got loose, people were shouting, laughing.

Out in the street, bystanders heard the commotion and said, "They're at it again, those followers of Jesus.  They're behaving as they did when Jesus was with them. They're drunk!"

Peter came out and told the crowd, "We couldn't be drunk. It's only ten in the morning!

Oh, they were drunk. But not with wine. They were drunk with the wild possibility now that Jesus is loose. The future is wide open, everything topsy-turvy, up for grabs, cut loose.

As Peter told them in his sermon, “This Jesus, you crucified and killed [for that's the way the world handles people like him]…But God raised him up, having loosed the pangs of death."(Acts 2:43-47)

Oh Satan, Oh Death, Oh Defeat, whose laughing now?