Pensees: Dissidens’ Dream Job

I cannot help but wonder if it would not be instructive to ponder WHY worship of the Eternal God would be made an object of humor and derision.

A harmless joke about Dissidens is tantamount to making the worship of the Eternal God an object of humor and derision?

Sigh. I am so grateful for the opportunities that certain blogs (including this one) have afforded me for spiritual growth and fellowship. However, at times I am exceedingly frustrated by the poor communication that seems to flourish in blogdom.

If you read a verbal equal sign between “a harmless joke about Dissidens” and “making the worship of the Eternal God an object of humor and derision,” you entirely misunderstood my point. (Perhaps I communicated poorly.)

So, may I ask my questions in a different way?

1. Can you, as a pastor, help me to understand the way(s), sense(s), or circumstance(s) in which worship of the Eternal God is appropriate fodder for humor and derision? I thought that worship of God was something that should be approached with the utmost seriousness and sincerity. (Which is not at all to say that worship should not contain elements of joy, but I know you would agree that joy and joking are not at all the same things.)

2. Can you, as a pastor, help me to understand when and under what circumstances it is appropriate to make jokes at the expense of fellow believers, and what constitutes the “harmless” in “harmless joke”? Is Proverbs 26:19 applicable to such a situation? Is it okay if we like the person? if we dislike the person?

(Just to explain, I am operating under the same premises by which Brent and I raised strong objections to a picture which was plastered on the front page of a fundamentalist blog, featuring the face of a Baptist pastor you know on the body of Cindy Sheehan, sporting a broken cross.)

Pastor Bixby, I am concerned that we not beg the question here. Is “harmless joke” a proper starting point, a proper premise of the question? Is it not rather a foundational issue?

Must we not first pause and seriously consider whether the linked humor is harmless? To begin answering that question, I suggest that we begin by thinking about some excellent points that you made this week in your blog posting on Pirates/Culture in the Church. You observed that “the way of the world is to accommodate us to evil by teaching us to ignore the reality of definition” and went on to explain that this occurs as the world “replaces the word with a less convicting word” or “turns [a] word itself into a toothless, cuddly toy.” Absolutely right! But notice what is happening. Through such treatment of words and thus the concepts, our perception becomes skewed, and that which is evil begins to look less serious.

Something similar can occur here, I contend. I looked up the definition of “profane” in a couple of dictionaries. When I juxtapose the definition of profane and the linked humor, I readily see that the linked humor is, quite simply, profane: it treats the worship of God irreverently. One dangerous side effect is that it can skew our perception of the seriousness of the things being considered. In that regard, in conjunction with my devotional reading in Isaiah 28 this week, I ran across the following comment of Matthew Henry:

It is great impiety, and a high affront to God, thus to make a jest of sacred things, to speak of that vainly which should make us serious.

This impact on our perception is not the only potential affect. When our perception changes, our response is likely to follow. Consequently, how can we objectively judge this humor to be harmless?

But still there is more, for the humor was not merely observed, it was used: it was wielded as a tool. Must we not also consider whether it is “harmless” for us to take such profane humor and use it as our own tool? I will not repeat the analysis above, but I think that it applies here, too. Indeed, it seems to apply with even greater force. In such instances, the speaker is not merely observing (in passing) that he found it humorous. Instead, the speaker is using it actively and thus saying implicitly that he found it worthy of his use. But is it worthy? How can it be?