Meandering with the Interim: Laughter and Evil

From Late Night with Stephen Colbert, February 4, 2022:

Robert Hayden said, “We must not be frightened or cajoled into accepting evil as our deliverance from evil, we must keep struggling to maintain our humanity through monsters of abstraction that threaten and police us.” Stephen Colbert’s response; “So if there’s some relationship between my faith and my comedy, it’s that no matter what happens you are never defeated, you must understand and see this in the light of eternity and find some way to love and laugh with each other.”

What is your relationship between faith and comedy? I believe there is a definite connection while many believe faith is “no laughing matter.” Those same people believe that faith is a time of soberness, introspection and being somber.

I see it differently, I can see the humor, the absurdity and even the laughable. The late Fredrick Buechner wrote a wonderful book, The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairytale. (Read the stories of Noah, Jonah, Mary, Jesus and tell me there isn’t any humor.)

We have to ask ourselves, at times, how much stock do we put in stuff we can’t see or touch? Yet, for us as followers of Jesus, we believe, but we can’t explain why! We know evil exists, we see it daily and it envelops us and drags us down.

But, if we see with our eyes and listen with our ears as people of faith in Jesus there is the call and reality of hope. Faith is the thing hoped for and we can’t see.

So I call you to feel the tug of hope, hear the whimper of uncertainty, laugh at God’s actions in our lives, evil cannot defeat us! We live by faith, and it gives us something to laugh about. Chris+