Holy Humor Week 2024
At the time of this post, it is the day after Easter, a Monday, which also happens to be April Fools Day. We woke up this morning to this in our upstairs bathroom:
Growing up, April Fools Day was a huge deal in my house. My mom, sister, and I were a team against my dad, who never retaliated, to his credit. We put honey in his shampoo bottle, black pepper on his toothbrush, soy sauce in his coffee. We taped down the sink sprayer, vaselined toilet seats, fibbed about flat tires and pinned underwear together in long strings, so he’d pull one and get a whole drawerful. It’s one of my favorite childhood memories, a chance to make mischief with my co-conspirators.
Apparently, the early church was also into merry-making, especially this week, the days following Easter. I hear Immanuel used to celebrate Holy Humor Sunday years ago, taking part in that honored tradition with great gusto.
Holy Humor Week “Stem[s] from traditions in the early Greek church when the week after Easter Sunday saw Christians getting together for picnics and parties and practical jokes leading up to “Bright” Sunday (the Sunday after Easter) to celebrate their joy that Jesus lived, that death had no power over life. Early Christian writers mused that God had played a joke on Satan, while ordinary folk would say, “The joke is on the devil, Jesus lives!” (Keith Simmonds, “Holy Humour Sunday: a reminder that laughter is a good teacher”).
In that spirit, here is a round up of my favorite faith-based invitations to laugh and not take ourselves too seriously:
Spoken Gospel’s Top 40 Jokes Bible Jokes is a longer one, but good for groaners.
By the church that brought us the amazing Christmas Story According to Kids, here’s The Easter Story According to Kids.
This is an oldie that we watched as a team in Costa Rica over and over. It’s a silly way to challenge our ideas of a serious, stuffy Jesus. Jesus nonchalantly flipping over tables saying, “And there’s that. And there’s that.” lives in my head rent-free.
I’d love to know your favorite Holy Humor this week.
“In the season of Easter, Christians do well to remember that God teaches us through laughter, takes great joy in our learning, loves us into wholeness and never, ever, lets us go. For all who think there is such a thing as ending, such a time as ‘over’, such a state of being as dead and done, let us take a lesson from our earliest Christian forebears. Let us laugh out loud as we remember Christ’s teaching: Nothing can ever separate us from the Love of God. Nothing.” (Simmonds, same as above).
