If you want to see superheroes, you need to watch it on the big screen. Regular heroes, on the other hand, are available in TV dramas. However, if we want to see ourselves on the small screen, we tune into a sitcom. Here we find ordinary folks, folks just like us, who manifest a variety of personality types and social roles with their unique anxieties and agendas engaged in the mundane activities of life. In short, sitcoms allow us to watch ourselves and those with whom we interact on a daily basis in Hi-Def.
Another feature of the sitcom is that the ensemble members are more or less stuck with each other. Since killing a fellow cast member is discouraged in a sitcom, the characters have to find ways to navigate their differences and forgive, or at least tolerate, the shortcomings of others. One final element to note is that a sitcom will not be successful if we don’t find something redemptive about the characters and, in the midst of their foolishness and foibles, find a reason to laugh along with them.
James Carey ends his Conversation Starter with the words, “Sitcom isn’t just profoundly Christian. It might be the most Christian of all.” I agree heartily and, based on the characteristics of sitcom noted above, I will develop this idea in the direction of ecclesiology. If we look at the church through the filter of the sitcom, it provides insight into who we are and can be as God’s People. I will argue that in the midst of tension and uncertainty that is unavoidable in our life together, laughter is an appropriate theological response to the comedy of our situations.
A lot of humor is formulaic, and almost everyone will immediately link the title of my response to the “walk into a bar” joke genre. The set-up for the joke immediately primes us to anticipate that something amusing will occur precisely because of the unlikelihood of a particular configuration of patrons entering a watering hole at the same time. These differences play on a key element behind most of our humor—incongruity. We have expectations about what sorts of people will associate with each other and the ways things will turn out. When those expectations are overturned, we experience surprise and, if things work out as they should, laughter.
The title of my response, then, is not accidental. It reflects my wonder that I, a philosopher, will be found in the same place each week with a retired teacher, a personal trainer, and several hundred other people with whom I have no natural affinity other than the supernatural call to follow Jesus. Of course, any Jesus-follower will acknowledge that this supernatural call should provide powerful impetus to come together, but it does not negate the fact that all of our natural differences remain in place.
The incongruities that are present in the various professional interests, age gaps, different races, income disparities, and assorted levels of educational attainment represented in any Christian body can become tension points. Moreover, these tension points are magnified by the understanding of the supernatural calling we share and the urgency inherent in such a calling. This combustible combination often threatens to turn the church into a tragedy, and all too often it does. However, there are good reasons, theological reasons, these colliding worlds should instead become the backdrop for a good sitcom, one that generates laughter and freedom for those involved.
The tensions and differences we experience in our church experience are nothing new. If anything, the collisions and incongruities experienced by the early church were seismic in comparison to the present. Not only do we find all the areas of personal friction that are inevitable when people are thrown together. Major cultural and religious obstacles made significant conflict inevitable. The earliest Jewish Christians were trying to figure out what it meant to be Jewish and Christian without any clear precedent pointing the way forward. Before they got all the bugs worked out on that challenge, these same Jewish Christians also had to discern what to do about Gentiles who also wanted to follow Jesus.
One of the central characters in the story of the church attempting to navigate these murky waters was Paul, someone who understood well God’s sense of humor. We first meet him as Saul the Super-Jew, expressing his deep dedication to God by persecuting the fledgling Christian community. Shortly thereafter, however, he becomes Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, evangelizing and discipling the very people he earlier hated. So we ought to smile when we see Paul caught up in such an unexpected reversal, since reversal is central to comedy and also one of God’s favorite methods of getting our attention.
Paul experiences the challenges confronting the infant church in their most specific and nitty-gritty forms. As just a small sample, he referees arguments about spiritual gifts, the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, and whether Gentile converts needed to be circumcised as the Judaizers insisted. As is so common within our ecclesiastical squabbles, patience is required, but it seems that Paul had reached the end of his rope with the Judaizers, who argued that circumcision was necessary for entry into the church, when he wished they would just go out and castrate themselves (Gal. 5:12).
While Paul’s frustrated comment sounds like a line we might hear in a sitcom, the situation seems anything but comedic. Yet in the incongruity that is so common to comedy, we hear a very different theme in the church as well. A crucial turning point came when Peter witnessed the Holy Spirit coming upon a group of people who had been raised on pork chops and bacon (Acts 10:45–46). When this happens, Peter has no alternative but to recognize that God has flipped the script and invited Gentile believers into his church. This was all new and unexpected, and it was clear that Peter his fellow Jewish Christians were going to have to do a bit of improv.
This improvisation didn’t always go smoothly and the bickering continues to this day. Yet in the midst of disagreement and factionalism, the early church adopted a practice intended to serve as a redemptive counterweight. Five times in the epistles, Jesus’ followers were told to greet one another with a holy kiss (Rom. 16:16; 1 Cor. 16:20; 2 Cor. 13:12; 1Thess. 5:26; 1 Pet. 5:14). Kissing as a greeting and symbol of unity was certainly common in that society. The comedic twist in all this is that people in the churches were kissing all the “wrong people.” Gentiles kissed Jews, slaves kissed their masters, and women kissed men. The script says that this should never happen, but God tears up the script and walls that separate people come down. This is what it means to be the church.
Barney on How I Met Your Mother is about as close to a moral and spiritual zero as you can get. If you envision yourself or your friends in the situations in which he manipulates, demeans, and abuses those around him, and those situations are abundant, it is a mystery why anyone would give him the time of day. Yet we often laugh at his antics because we have distance. We can step outside the immediate situation and see everything in a different light.
In our own experiences of conflict within the Body of Christ, we often find this sort of comedic distance difficult. After all, we are talking about the work of God on earth, a matter of supreme importance. Thus, disagreements and tensions experienced by the early church, as in our day, hardly seem to be comedic material. Perhaps, however, we have some often-forgotten resources as actors in God’s sitcom that give us the comedic distance that makes laughter possible. We participate in an ancient story that reminds us that, no matter how flawed or mistaken our sisters or brothers might be, God has a track record of using flawed and mistaken people. Central to the story’s premise is the fact that, though we are all fallible and subject to theological blind spots, God invites us to be cast members in his holy sitcom. We know that in spite of God’s ludicrous plan to use people who are still in the process of redemption in ministry to a world desperately in need of redemption, God is ultimately the Redeemer.
It may be, however, that we need to return frequently to the words of Peter when he witnesses the wholly unexpected plot twist in which the Gentiles are woven into God’s Story. “Surely no one can stand in the way of their being baptized with water. They have received the Holy Spirit just as we have.” (Acts 10:46) If you want to continue to disagree about the quantity of water necessary for a valid baptism or who is properly authorized to administer this rite, go to it. It’s a proper debate to engage. But let those debates be conditioned by the recognition that “They have received the Holy Spirit just as we have.”
Every sitcom has its “inside jokes,” recurring laugh inducers that the regular viewer has seen or heard frequently. These insider jokes are a critical element in making us feel like we are part of that sitcom “family.” Thus, when Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory has to ask whether someone is being sarcastic, we snicker because we know him. We are in on the joke of his cluelessness about social cues. We see it in every episode, but the regular viewer of Home Improvement can’t help but smile when the backyard fence covers Wilson’s face from his eyes down as he delivers his homespun wisdom. “They have received the Holy Spirit just as we have” should be one of the main inside jokes of Christianity. “They” may be so different from us in a broad range of ways, often ways that make us uncomfortable. However, if we have eyes to see the Holy Spirit within all who claim the name of “Christian,” we are in a position to laugh a holy form of laughter that transcends our differences and disagreements.
In most branches of the Christian church, we have lost the holy kiss as a symbol of our unity with each other, for better or worse. However, perhaps our kisses can be replaced with laughter. After all, whenever we see two people engaged in robust laughter, our natural question is, “what’s so funny?” Laughter woos us; it invites participation and brings us together. We want in on the joke. So what would it be like to envision the Body of Christ as a sitcom in which we are able to laugh at ourselves as a form of confession? What if we chuckled at our differences in a way that drew us together rather than pushing us apart and made it inconceivable that we would miss the opportunity to see what next Sunday’s episode would bring? Can we imagine what would happen if we laughed with joy at the amazing grace exhibited in God’s adoption of our motley cast as heirs of the kingdom? I suspect that we would have a much deeper realization of what it means to be part of God’s Church, and I can’t help but believe that the sincere laughter this story evokes would encourage others to tune into the show because they are curious and want to know “what’s so funny?”
If a retired teacher, a personal trainer, and a philosopher walk into a bar, you will anticipate that hilarity will ensue because they just don’t fit together. Likewise, if a retired teacher, a personal trainer, and a philosopher walk into a church, you expect to laugh because of the same sort of incongruities we find in a joke. But then, we hear a second wave of holy laughter because, despite their differences, God surprises them all by giving them the Holy Spirit and drawing them into his Story.
Steve Wilkens is professor of theology and ethics in the School of Theology at Azusa Pacific University. He is author of “What’s So Funny About God?“
If you want to see superheroes, you need to watch it on the big screen. Regular heroes, on the other hand, are available in TV dramas. However, if we want to see ourselves on the small screen, we tune into a sitcom. Here we find ordinary folks, folks just like us, who manifest a variety of personality types and social roles with their unique anxieties and agendas engaged in the mundane activities of life. In short, sitcoms allow us to watch ourselves and those with whom we interact on a daily basis in Hi-Def.
Another feature of the sitcom is that the ensemble members are more or less stuck with each other. Since killing a fellow cast member is discouraged in a sitcom, the characters have to find ways to navigate their differences and forgive, or at least tolerate, the shortcomings of others. One final element to note is that a sitcom will not be successful if we don’t find something redemptive about the characters and, in the midst of their foolishness and foibles, find a reason to laugh along with them.
James Carey ends his Conversation Starter with the words, “Sitcom isn’t just profoundly Christian. It might be the most Christian of all.” I agree heartily and, based on the characteristics of sitcom noted above, I will develop this idea in the direction of ecclesiology. If we look at the church through the filter of the sitcom, it provides insight into who we are and can be as God’s People. I will argue that in the midst of tension and uncertainty that is unavoidable in our life together, laughter is an appropriate theological response to the comedy of our situations.
A lot of humor is formulaic, and almost everyone will immediately link the title of my response to the “walk into a bar” joke genre. The set-up for the joke immediately primes us to anticipate that something amusing will occur precisely because of the unlikelihood of a particular configuration of patrons entering a watering hole at the same time. These differences play on a key element behind most of our humor—incongruity. We have expectations about what sorts of people will associate with each other and the ways things will turn out. When those expectations are overturned, we experience surprise and, if things work out as they should, laughter.
The title of my response, then, is not accidental. It reflects my wonder that I, a philosopher, will be found in the same place each week with a retired teacher, a personal trainer, and several hundred other people with whom I have no natural affinity other than the supernatural call to follow Jesus. Of course, any Jesus-follower will acknowledge that this supernatural call should provide powerful impetus to come together, but it does not negate the fact that all of our natural differences remain in place.
The incongruities that are present in the various professional interests, age gaps, different races, income disparities, and assorted levels of educational attainment represented in any Christian body can become tension points. Moreover, these tension points are magnified by the understanding of the supernatural calling we share and the urgency inherent in such a calling. This combustible combination often threatens to turn the church into a tragedy, and all too often it does. However, there are good reasons, theological reasons, these colliding worlds should instead become the backdrop for a good sitcom, one that generates laughter and freedom for those involved.
The tensions and differences we experience in our church experience are nothing new. If anything, the collisions and incongruities experienced by the early church were seismic in comparison to the present. Not only do we find all the areas of personal friction that are inevitable when people are thrown together. Major cultural and religious obstacles made significant conflict inevitable. The earliest Jewish Christians were trying to figure out what it meant to be Jewish and Christian without any clear precedent pointing the way forward. Before they got all the bugs worked out on that challenge, these same Jewish Christians also had to discern what to do about Gentiles who also wanted to follow Jesus.
One of the central characters in the story of the church attempting to navigate these murky waters was Paul, someone who understood well God’s sense of humor. We first meet him as Saul the Super-Jew, expressing his deep dedication to God by persecuting the fledgling Christian community. Shortly thereafter, however, he becomes Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, evangelizing and discipling the very people he earlier hated. So we ought to smile when we see Paul caught up in such an unexpected reversal, since reversal is central to comedy and also one of God’s favorite methods of getting our attention.
Paul experiences the challenges confronting the infant church in their most specific and nitty-gritty forms. As just a small sample, he referees arguments about spiritual gifts, the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, and whether Gentile converts needed to be circumcised as the Judaizers insisted. As is so common within our ecclesiastical squabbles, patience is required, but it seems that Paul had reached the end of his rope with the Judaizers, who argued that circumcision was necessary for entry into the church, when he wished they would just go out and castrate themselves (Gal. 5:12).
While Paul’s frustrated comment sounds like a line we might hear in a sitcom, the situation seems anything but comedic. Yet in the incongruity that is so common to comedy, we hear a very different theme in the church as well. A crucial turning point came when Peter witnessed the Holy Spirit coming upon a group of people who had been raised on pork chops and bacon (Acts 10:45–46). When this happens, Peter has no alternative but to recognize that God has flipped the script and invited Gentile believers into his church. This was all new and unexpected, and it was clear that Peter his fellow Jewish Christians were going to have to do a bit of improv.
This improvisation didn’t always go smoothly and the bickering continues to this day. Yet in the midst of disagreement and factionalism, the early church adopted a practice intended to serve as a redemptive counterweight. Five times in the epistles, Jesus’ followers were told to greet one another with a holy kiss (Rom. 16:16; 1 Cor. 16:20; 2 Cor. 13:12; 1Thess. 5:26; 1 Pet. 5:14). Kissing as a greeting and symbol of unity was certainly common in that society. The comedic twist in all this is that people in the churches were kissing all the “wrong people.” Gentiles kissed Jews, slaves kissed their masters, and women kissed men. The script says that this should never happen, but God tears up the script and walls that separate people come down. This is what it means to be the church.
Barney on How I Met Your Mother is about as close to a moral and spiritual zero as you can get. If you envision yourself or your friends in the situations in which he manipulates, demeans, and abuses those around him, and those situations are abundant, it is a mystery why anyone would give him the time of day. Yet we often laugh at his antics because we have distance. We can step outside the immediate situation and see everything in a different light.
In our own experiences of conflict within the Body of Christ, we often find this sort of comedic distance difficult. After all, we are talking about the work of God on earth, a matter of supreme importance. Thus, disagreements and tensions experienced by the early church, as in our day, hardly seem to be comedic material. Perhaps, however, we have some often-forgotten resources as actors in God’s sitcom that give us the comedic distance that makes laughter possible. We participate in an ancient story that reminds us that, no matter how flawed or mistaken our sisters or brothers might be, God has a track record of using flawed and mistaken people. Central to the story’s premise is the fact that, though we are all fallible and subject to theological blind spots, God invites us to be cast members in his holy sitcom. We know that in spite of God’s ludicrous plan to use people who are still in the process of redemption in ministry to a world desperately in need of redemption, God is ultimately the Redeemer.
It may be, however, that we need to return frequently to the words of Peter when he witnesses the wholly unexpected plot twist in which the Gentiles are woven into God’s Story. “Surely no one can stand in the way of their being baptized with water. They have received the Holy Spirit just as we have.” (Acts 10:46) If you want to continue to disagree about the quantity of water necessary for a valid baptism or who is properly authorized to administer this rite, go to it. It’s a proper debate to engage. But let those debates be conditioned by the recognition that “They have received the Holy Spirit just as we have.”
Every sitcom has its “inside jokes,” recurring laugh inducers that the regular viewer has seen or heard frequently. These insider jokes are a critical element in making us feel like we are part of that sitcom “family.” Thus, when Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory has to ask whether someone is being sarcastic, we snicker because we know him. We are in on the joke of his cluelessness about social cues. We see it in every episode, but the regular viewer of Home Improvement can’t help but smile when the backyard fence covers Wilson’s face from his eyes down as he delivers his homespun wisdom. “They have received the Holy Spirit just as we have” should be one of the main inside jokes of Christianity. “They” may be so different from us in a broad range of ways, often ways that make us uncomfortable. However, if we have eyes to see the Holy Spirit within all who claim the name of “Christian,” we are in a position to laugh a holy form of laughter that transcends our differences and disagreements.
In most branches of the Christian church, we have lost the holy kiss as a symbol of our unity with each other, for better or worse. However, perhaps our kisses can be replaced with laughter. After all, whenever we see two people engaged in robust laughter, our natural question is, “what’s so funny?” Laughter woos us; it invites participation and brings us together. We want in on the joke. So what would it be like to envision the Body of Christ as a sitcom in which we are able to laugh at ourselves as a form of confession? What if we chuckled at our differences in a way that drew us together rather than pushing us apart and made it inconceivable that we would miss the opportunity to see what next Sunday’s episode would bring? Can we imagine what would happen if we laughed with joy at the amazing grace exhibited in God’s adoption of our motley cast as heirs of the kingdom? I suspect that we would have a much deeper realization of what it means to be part of God’s Church, and I can’t help but believe that the sincere laughter this story evokes would encourage others to tune into the show because they are curious and want to know “what’s so funny?”
If a retired teacher, a personal trainer, and a philosopher walk into a bar, you will anticipate that hilarity will ensue because they just don’t fit together. Likewise, if a retired teacher, a personal trainer, and a philosopher walk into a church, you expect to laugh because of the same sort of incongruities we find in a joke. But then, we hear a second wave of holy laughter because, despite their differences, God surprises them all by giving them the Holy Spirit and drawing them into his Story.
Steve Wilkens is professor of theology and ethics in the School of Theology at Azusa Pacific University. He is author of "What’s So Funny About God?"
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