Laughter, like tears, is full of mystery. We don’t always know if someone is crying because they’re sad or hurt or overjoyed or think something is hilarious. Tears emerge from a variety of emotional states. Similarly, laughter could be the mockery of another person’s mistake or laughter at something truly funny or giddy laughter of goofiness or an utterly joyful happiness or the complex laughter at the tragically comedic.
A few years ago, at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, I was meeting with a group on Zoom. It was the earliest days of the intensified use of virtual meetings, and everyone seemed to be fascinated with other people’s Zoom locations. Conversation partners would ask each other about a picture hanging in the background, because virtual meetings only afforded a narrow view of one’s setting. In this particular meeting, one of the participants had what appeared to be an Episcopal Church welcome sign leaning against a wall in the background. I’m sure you’ve seen the signs all over the country. There’s one hanging right outside this church on Lancaster Avenue. “The Episcopal Church welcomes you,” these signs say, and each sign lists the name of a specific parish.
But the sign leaning against the wall in the background of this Zoom meeting was difficult to decipher. From my vantage point, the sign looked a bit old, rusted even, and the fact that this person had possession of the sign intimated that there must be a story behind it. At some point, another person in the meeting inquired about the sign, and so, the owner of the sign got up and grabbed the sign to bring it closer to the computer screen. And the name of the parish on the sign was. . . wait for it. . . Good Shepherd, Rosemont. And everybody laughed.
Everybody that is except me. At that point, and to no one’s knowledge in that Zoom meeting, I had been called to come to Good Shepherd as the next rector. Although my first reaction was to be offended in a protective way, upon further reflection, I realized that those who laughed weren’t really laughing at this parish. They certainly weren’t laughing at me, because no one knew I would be the next rector here. They were laughing, if implicitly and unconsciously, at what seemed to be the preposterous prospect that Good Shepherd, Rosemont, could survive. Someone, in fact, made a comment to that effect. And the rusted welcome sign, that had either fallen down or been absconded and then ended up in a yard sale was a visible symbol of a parish that was hanging on by a thread.
Laughter isn’t always the best medicine, as some like to say. Laughter is complex. It can wound. And of course, it can cheer people up. But in its most chilling form it can reveal a profound lack of hope. And this is the form of laughter that escapes from the crowds in the house of Jairus’s daughter when Jesus arrives to attend to his dying daughter. The crowds laugh because Jesus has said something that’s rather ridiculous on the surface. He’s been told that Jairus’s daughter is dead, but when he gets to the house and encounters the group of mourners, weeping and wailing, he asks them why they’re upset. The girl is not dead but sleeping, he says. And of course, they laugh. Wouldn’t you?
They laugh because Jesus seems like a silly, naïve person. They laugh because for all intents and purposes the girl has really died, and indeed, we have no reason to doubt that. They laugh because they have no clue about just who this man Jesus is, despite his previous miracles. But we, of course, know that Jesus can raise the dead and give life to what seems to have died. We know that he will be the one to defeat death by his own death. But the crowd in Jairus’s house laughs because, above all, they’ve given up on divine possibilities. They’ve lost hope, if they ever had it to begin with.
If you ask me, this is the most disquieting form of laughter imaginable. Laughter that arises from a loss of hope has a duplicitous air to it, for it outwardly purports to be funny but is twisted on the inside with cynicism, apathy, and an utter unwillingness to embrace mystery and the unknown. The crowds laugh because they’re accustomed to seeking human solutions to human problems. The problem with Jairus’s daughter is that she’s sick—deathly sick—and no one can do anything for her. There’s no human solution to the problem. It’s rather like the case of the hemorrhaging woman who interrupts Jesus’s journey to Jairus’s house. She approaches him in the crowd with the laughable prospect of touching his garments so that she may be healed.
No one laughs at her, but the disciples all but laugh at Jesus. They’re rather cynical with him when he stops and asks who touched him. Can’t you see that there’s a large crowd around you? Why in the world would you ask such a foolish question? They simply don’t get it, just as the crowds in Jairus’s house don’t get it. And because they don’t get it, they laugh.
All the scoffers in these Gospel stories are used to seeking human solutions to human problems. Even the hemorrhaging woman tried it for a while. For twelve years, she sought the wisdom of human doctors, and in her case, it seemed like she went to a fair number of charlatans who took her money but couldn’t deliver and then laughed all the way to the bank. And finally, she decides to go a different route. In Jesus, fully human but also fully divine, she seeks a divine solution to her human problems. In this God-man, who is the perfect image of God, she will find the divine solution to her problem.
And despite thousands of years of Christian witness to the one who brings us divine solutions to human problems, we still live in an age when we’re constantly looking for human solutions to human problems. Searching for divine solutions doesn’t deny our human agency, but it should prompt us to acknowledge that we too frequently lose hope in the One who can do what seems utterly laughable.
In some ways, the Church has forgotten the laughable good news of the Gospel. After all, we supposedly worship a God who gave Sarah and Abraham the gift of children in their old age, who parted the Red Sea to deliver the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, who fed them in the wilderness as they journeyed to the Promised Land, and who sent his beloved Son into the world not to condemn it—despite its profound stubbornness—but to save it and make it whole. We worship this God who did the most laughable thing of all when he raised Jesus from the dead, offering the eternal laugh to the wily lies of the evil one, who had made a living out of giving sin and death more power than they really had.
It should be no surprise that we will be, and probably are, laughed at by others. They laugh that we would take time out of our busy schedules to be here in the middle of summer to worship God. They laugh that we believe that forgiveness should be routinely offered to the worst offenders because sin doesn’t have the power it wants us to think it has. They laugh because we sacrificially give our money and time to ministry that we believe is life-changing, while those who laugh think we’re throwing money at a sinking ship. In short, they’re laughing because we’re putting our faith, trust, and hope in a God who offers divine solutions to human problems.
Those who laughed at the rusted Good Shepherd, Rosemont, welcome sign a few years back were unconsciously subscribing to the popular despair of our age. They couldn’t imagine that a parish that was then close to death could be brought back to life. It’s the same with all in the Church who can only put their hope in the largest churches with the biggest endowments. It's the same in our society, where the decline in churchgoing is automatically equated with the Church’s demise. It’s the same in an overly rational culture that equates lack of physical healing with the absence of God. It’s the same whenever we assume that the impossible is always the impossible. When we’re looking for human solutions to divine problems, a parish like Good Shepherd, Rosemont, seems laughable. But we who are here know better. We know that our story is a vivid example of a divine solution to a human problem from a God who can raise the dead and give the laugh to sin and death.
For those of us who choose not to fear but to believe and to hope, we have the last laugh. But this laugh is not at anyone’s expense. It’s not cynical or nervous. It’s not an expression of despair. It’s a laugh of profound joy that’s rooted in the hope that, no matter the odds, God will turn all our human expectations upside down.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
June 30, 2024