Exhortation, September 11

Laughter is a gift of God, a sign that we are made in God’s image. The Lord enjoys slapstick humor and pratfalls, laughing at the folly of the raging nations that conspire against Christ (Ps 2) because He knows that the wicked will fall, like Wile E. Coyote, into the trap they set for the righteous (Ps 37:13; 59:8). The Lord invites the righteous to join in: “The righteous will see and fear, and will laugh at him, saying, ‘Behold, the man who would not make God his refuge, but trusted in the abundance of his riches and was strong in his evil desire’” (Ps 52:6-7).

Laughter is a gift of God, but as sinners we twist and pervert laughter as much as we pervert and twist everything else. We twist it by laughing at the wrong things, and we twist it by the way we speak. In our sermon text, Paul mentions two perversions of humor,

and says they should not exist among believers. The first is vulgarity. A vulgar man lacks the imagination to put together a sentence without obscenities. Everything he says has a double meaning. He doesn’t care if what he says is appropriate or not. He thrives on shock value, and thinks that his rebellion against decency is cool.

The other perversion is silliness. Paul is talking about the class clown who never says anything serious, who fishes for laughs, who mocks everyone and everything. The silly man is what the Proverbs call a scoffer, and he is destined for punishment and dishonor.

Instead of vulgarity and silliness, our speech should be filled with thanksgiving and praise. That too can take the form of laughter – the surprised laughter of Abraham when he heard the promise that Sarah would bear a son in old age (Gen 17:17), Sarah’s infectious gladness at the birth of a child named “Laughter” (Gen 21:6), the exuberant shouts of the redeemed people of God, who say among the nations “The Lord has done great things for us” (Ps 126:2).