Serious Joy in Preaching
“Have I ever told you about my friend who only eats vegetables?”
“No.”
“Oh, so you’ve never heard of herbivore?!”
I love a good dad joke. And most other kinds of jokes, too. I believe that humor is a gift given to man by God as an expression of our Maker’s innate creativity. Jokes are what we create when we play with words and ideas until they make us laugh and fill our hearts with the medicine of joy (Prov. 17:22).
Anyone who knows me knows that I like to cut up (sometimes too much). But you would never know that I’m such a jokester from my Sunday morning preaching. Why? Because I turn my natural (and sometimes sinful) humor knob way down every Sunday morning before stepping into the pulpit. I don’t do this because I think that jokes are unholy or sinful, but because they seem out of place when you think about what we are striving for in corporate worship.
The author of Hebrews notes the tone we should be striking in our corporate gatherings. Read this verse carefully: “Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:28–29).
Acceptable worship consists of reverence and awe, at least in part. Some may read these words and mistakenly assume that there is no place for joy in worship, but nothing could be further from the truth. Reverence and awe produce a kind of serious joy that we only experience in the presence of our “consuming fire” God. Reverence and awe aren’t at odds with joy, but prerequisites for it.
C. S. Lewis says that “there is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.” I think he’s right. The kind of joy God wants our people to experience as they hear from his Word every Sunday is deeper than our sense of humor can go. This joy is like the Mariana Trench, and quips, puns, and sarcasm won’t get us there.
We’ve all probably heard a sermon where the preacher powerfully convicts his people with the Word in one breath, only to deflate the room of that power with a joke in the next breath. The same thing can happen when the preacher moves from deep and serious joy in one moment of preaching, to lighthearted and casual joking in the next.
If a preacher is leading his hearers into the deep waters of gospel joy, he should keep them there as long as possible. Don’t lighten the mood with a clever quip or a silly pun. Don’t take the congregation back to the shallow end of flippancy. Rather, let the congregation swim around in the deep and serious joy of Jesus.
The world is full of light pleasures and superficial joy, but God’s people are hungry for something deeper than the wit of man. Even the funniest of men. So, on Sunday mornings I do my best to crank the gravity and kill the humor. Pastor, I pray that you will do the same.
