It got a laugh

A basic rule of preaching seems to be that, no matter how long your sermon is, you’re allowed to take up a minute or two at the start telling a joke.

Sometimes it’s an anecdote snipped from a local newspaper, or a personal story about a humorous calamity. Ideally the joke should in some way be linked to the text or topic of the sermon, but the overall intention of that comic introduction is to do one thing: get a laugh.

I’m a professional comedy writer and have been since, well, I failed to get any other job. I like jokes. But these jokes are a problem.

The comedy of Jesus

Normally in a church context, an aversion to jokes isn’t associated with professional pride or comedy snobbery: it’s due to an over-inflated sense of holiness. “Nowhere in the Bible does it say that Christ laughed!”

That’s true. In the Gospels we see Christ being angry, hostile, sad and enigmatic. But laughing? No. So is it un-Christlike to tell jokes?

By no means! While there is no ‘Jesus laughed’ verse, there are many verses in which Jesus says things that can only really be described as jokes. The most obvious examples would be his use of hyperbole with specks and planks in the eye, and swallowing camels. This is undoubtedly intentionally comic. One can also imagine gasps and sniggers as Jesus called his powerful haters ‘vipers’ and ‘whitewashed tombs’. So the pulpit need not be a laughter-free zone.

Was Jesus a comedian? Perhaps in the sense that he didn’t laugh at his own jokes. He used comedy, and he was funny. His very incarnation as the God-Man is inherently comic, for reasons I go into in my forthcoming book. To present Jesus as a comedian would be going too far, but he certainly used humour.

So then what’s the problem with starting sermons with jokes? After all, if you want to reach your audience, you have to show you have a sense of humour, right? We Brits think it’s important not to take ourselves too seriously. Comedy is now a common currency on television, radio and even the realm of politics. Boris Johnson, for example, has side-stepped numerous political storms thanks to well-timed comic turns of phrase.

Comedy is also regularly used in teaching, to make information more fun and memorable. My children know an awful lot about history because it’s presented in comic form by Horrible Histories. Comedy is the lingua franca.

Besides, the sermon is a culturally very odd phenomenon. When does one listen to one person speaking uninterrupted for 15-30 minutes? For most people, the only time they would choose to do that outside of a class would be watching a stand-up comedy set, either live or on TV. Isn’t it helpful to nod towards that in sermon, making it more palatable for the average Joe in the pew?

Getting a laugh

The desire to start a sermon with a joke and get a laugh, then, is entirely understandable. But a congregation who have spent their whole week dealing with the world are hungry for God’s word. Surely every second of the sermon should be trying to give them just that? And many preachers long to speak for more than their allotted time, bemoaning the attention span of the average Christian. What preacher doesn’t yearn to share the riches of the Scriptures with the assembled faithful for longer? So why do these same people cheerfully give away a couple of minutes of their limited time for a laugh? Is this time well-spent?

In a few cases, it might be. A joke at the start may be entirely pertinent to the sermon, and line up exactly with the main point being made. But. Any preacher knows that is rarely the case. They might find themselves telling a joke about a disastrous wedding, and then say, “Well, the wedding in our passage in John 2 went wrong, but in a very different way”. There is a gulf between the anecdote and the passage of Scripture, and it wasn’t even necessary.

The desire to use comedy in a sermon is not a bad one. All techniques and forms of rhetoric should be employed in the preaching of the Word, as the text or the topic demands. The preacher should use humour as well as changes of pace and pitch, dramatic pauses, emotional appeals and stark warnings. Some of these techniques fit better with certain personality types. A naturally serious preacher probably will not tell jokes well, but used sparingly and carefully jokes can be very surprising and effective. Likewise, a naturally comic speaker can make good use of silence and seriousness as a counterpoint.

This is why you should never preach like your heroes.

Preachers are to preach using the gifts and abilities they have been given, not to ape the gifts of others. Moreover, every preacher has been placed in a specific pastoral situation. There’s no point trying to preach like Manhattan church planter Tim Keller in the Highlands of Scotland. In fact, it would be wrong to do so. This would be either misusing your gifts or disrespecting your congregation by speaking in a language that’s broadly alien to them—for your own satisfaction.

Telling jokes is a little bit like importing someone else’s rhetorical style. A joke works for the comedian who wrote it, and for his or her audience in a secular setting on a Saturday night, but it is likely to be inappropriate when copied, pasted and then retold in church on a Sunday morning. It’s not that it’s not funny. Lots of jokes are funny in many contexts. It’s that it’s inauthentic. It’s fake. The preacher is not giving of themselves and their gifts in pointing their congregation in their care towards Jesus Christ.

Maybe the occasional joke is fine, but if one consistently imports comedy you will eventually persuade the congregation that God’s word is not surprising, vibrant and comic, when it is all of those things. The Bible is not a dull book that needs to be jazzed up with some jokes.

The public reading of Scripture

Why be tempted to tell a passable wedding joke found on the internet when the story in John 2 is already inherently comic? Because John 2 probably won’t seem so in your Sunday service. This is for a variety of reasons. One is that your congregation might be very familiar with the story, and therefore any kind of comic surprise evaporated years ago.

The bizarre events of that wedding could be re-presented much more humorously if the passage is read aloud with feeling and empathy. The chances are, however, that it was mechanically read by someone with no training or encouragement to do the task well. Reading from the lectern is often seen as a way of ‘involving people in the service’. You wouldn’t let anyone lead the music on this basis; it seems odd to allow God’s word to be treated this way.

Bear in mind that Scripture is a script. For most people in history, Scripture was not something absorbed in private study but was read aloud, even on one’s own. The Bible doesn’t need rewriting to be dramatized. It is already dramatic, as well as inspired by God. Beat that. Scripture just needs reading properly. This takes time, preparation and effort. But reading Scripture aloud well will often surprise a congregation. What always strikes people when this happens is how funny the Bible is.

Meanwhile, in Cana

Read the wedding story in John Chapter 2 with fresh eyes. Jesus’s mother drags him into this embarrassing situation. He says that his time has not yet come. Mary completely ignores this and tells the servants to do whatever he says. Thanks, mum. They fill the jars with water as instructed, even though they must have thought Jesus was mad. Only in recent times has water been fit for human consumption. And since when did water just become wine? That’s not how it works. And to make matters worse, some poor fellow has to take some of this water to the master of the banquet. In a cup. To drink. He would be cringing as it is tasted. At best, he will have the water spat into his face. Why is Jesus asking him to do this? It’s insane, surely? Imagine the sigh of relief and euphoria when it is revealed that the water has become wine.

Why not talk about this in a sermon, rather than scrabbling around for jokes written by someone else about weddings that look nothing like the one in John 2? Even stories about your own wedding, or weddings you’ve attended, are of limited value. Why not marvel at the true events of the wedding in Cana, which point to the great wedding feast of Christ and his bride, the church?

If we take the text of the Bible seriously, we will find all kinds of humourous, incongruous and bizarre moments. Expectations are confounded. Down is up. Black is white. The blind are given their sight and forced to explain themselves to the spiritually blind religious people. Jesus proves his power over death by calling Lazarus from the tomb, and the priests and scribes decide it would be best to kill him. Why replace all this with a joke about a life-long golfer at the pearly gates, or what happens when three men walk into bar? The Bible contains stories about the Supreme Being walking into a world. Why not start with that one?