Northwoods Seelsorger: A Place for Humor in Church and Pulpit?
On Easter at breakfast I had a discussion with our vicar of the Easter Vigil he attended the night previous. It was at St. Vincent's Catholic parish. He had little positive to say. He liked the "Veni, Sancte Spiritus" (isn't that for Pentecost?) they sung in the middle. Unfortunately, wedged within the Latin mass were "cantors" who took the altar with enthusiastic renditions of hymnody, complete with "Kenny G"-esque saxophone. Vicar found the "songs" and the liturgy to be discordant. I wonder if humor in the pulpit is much different? Does humor cater to the "me" or can it be a servant of the word? Is it discordant like the wailing saxophone? The pulpit is not about entertainment but it is about delighting the hearer. Without any stimulation, the once living Word is rendered lifeless. Subtlety, double entendre, and even sarcasm has its place in good rhetorical speech. Does cheap one-liners? I'm not so sure... What think ye? Read this post for more discussion:
Northwoods Seelsorger: A Place for Humor in Church and Pulpit?: Is there a place for humor in church, especially in the pulpit? Such is the question that guest essayist Peter M. Berg wrestles with in a recent article in the Passiontide/Easter issue of Gottesdienst under the title "Ha! Ha! Among the Congregants." He observes that "cute, self-effacing humor" seems to be increasing with pastors in our time, in part, he would observe, to please the people and project themselves as "a regular guy." Even confessional pastors have fallen prey, as such humor was all too common even at chapel at the recent Symposia in Ft. Wayne this January, according to Berg. The heart of the issue for Pastor Berg, though, is the nature of God's House as a "holy place" deserving of proper reverence. "Finally," he writes, "isn't that the root of the problem: a loss of the sense of the holy? So convinced that grace is ours and beyond our losing, we trifle with grace." I can understand and sympathize with Pastor Berg's concerns. In my current pastorate I have endeavored in my own movement on the altar to project a sense of deliberate reverence befitting a place where holy things are received and given. But admittedly it is not easy in our current culture to maintain such reverence in all areas. Since I entered the ministry twenty years ago there seems always to have been a desire on the part of congregants for a friendlier atmosphere at the expense of reverence, if that need be. And it's not that people want to be irreverent or openly disrespectful to God. They don't see it that way. It's just that there has been a modern reaction to what others have seen as coldness and indifference in traditional churches, and of course, a driving need to make people happy enough to return the next Sunday. Pastors, unfortunately, are tied closely to these sentiments, and thus their own actions reflect what the people desire.
