What Is It that Makes God Laugh? The Answer Might Shock You.

It gets to me sometimes.   I try to stay positive, to not get discouraged.  But I gotta admit.  This world gets to me sometimes.   I’m not talking so much about the wars and suffering around the world or even the mass shootings that happen every week now.   That gets to me, sure.  But do you know what gets to me more?   It’s how people seem to be getting meaner and uglier with each other.   It’s how social media seems the furthest thing from social.   And that doesn’t even touch the personal stressors of trying to make ends meet, of all life’s chores and tasks, and of course, the losses of people I love.   Does the world get to you sometimes like that?

If it does, how do you move past it?  How do you live with hope and positivity, even on the days when your life and that of the world seems darkest?  How do you discover joy and fulfillment when instead inside you feel fear and sadness?   In these surprising, even shocking words on what makes God laugh, God shows you the way.   So, let’s listen and hear what God has to say.

Psalm 37:1-17        

This world can wear you down, all the daily drama, the fears, the stressors.   And in the midst of the wearing down, hope can be hard to hold on to.  Discouragement can come all too easily.  So, how do you find confidence and joy even on your darkest days.   How do you live with optimism and hope in a world where so much seems to be going wrong?   Here, God tells you.  God says.  Just look at makes me laugh.

Again and again the writer of this psalm tells you.  When wrong seems to win, don’t worry or fret.  Don’t lose your temper. Why?  Don’t you see it?  Don’t you see what makes God laugh?   Bad people make God laugh.  When wicked people plot against good people, that stuff just cracks God up.   Only three times does the Bible talk about God laughing.  And every time, what tickles God’s funny bone is this, the evil doings of evil folks.

God doesn’t laugh because God likes what these folks are doing or planning.  No, God hates that.  What God finds so funny is that they think they’re going to get away with it, that somehow, they’re going to win.   Strangely enough, this sort of laughing at evil carries some real power. 

That’s why they use it so often in the movies.   Haven’t you seen that sort of scene?  The hero gets captured by the bad guys.  It looks as if death and disaster are at hand. But does the hero get angry?  Nope.  Does she get scared?  Of course not.  No, the hero starts cracking jokes.  That’s how you know how totally awesome those type of heroes are.  They have such confidence in their abilities they can be funny even under threat of death.

Yet, that’s the movies.  Does this sort of thing work in real life?   It does.  A children’s book back in the kids’ area in our church lobby even tells the story.  It’s called White Flour. 

That book tells the tale of what happened when a group of white supremacists marched in Knoxville about ten years ago.  As often happens when groups like that march, the counter-protesters way outnumbered the marchers.  But these protesters did something quite different.  They didn’t yell at the white supremacists or try to out-chant them.  No, these protesters started cheering.   And at first, the marchers thought they had a receptive audience.   But then they realized.  All these folks were dressed up as clowns.   And when the marchers started yelling White Power, these folks joined in, but instead chanted White Flour. They even had white flour and began throwing it around.   And as the marchers got louder with the chant, it seemed that the clowns realized that they had it wrong.  And that’s when they started chanting instead white flowers.    And with that they pulled out white flowers and began throwing them up in the air.    And in their final move, the clowns made one last try to get it right.   This time, when the racists started chanting white power, the clowns started chanting wife power.   Some of them even got on wedding dresses to make the point.   And what did the white supremacist marchers do?  They ended their march 90 minutes early.   Faced with the power of humor, their hatred had no place to go. 

Why do you think dictators hate people making jokes about them?  Why do oppressive governments shut down those who poke fun at them?  They know.  That humor has power.   Those jokes can do more to undermine their power than any act of violence ever could.  

And in the same way, this way of seeing things doesn’t just undermine evil movements, it can provide you protection against simply awful people.   Several years ago, a Stanford University psychology professor, Robert Sutton, wrote a now famous business book on awful people.  He called it TheNo Awful People Rule.   Actually, he called the Awful People something else, but I don’t want to say that word here.  Let’s just say the word he used also started with A and ended with the word hole.  And since that book came out, Sutton has become the go to expert on dealing with awful people.

But strangely enough, even as much as he has written on such folks, in an interview, he shared how he still has difficulty dealing with them.   But then one of his colleagues, who always seemed so calm in the face of someone being a complete jerk gave him a crucial insight.   As Sutton tells it. “I never could figure out why he was so serene in the face of certain awful people, especially in particular a petty tyrant we have in our midst. But what he does is he pretends when people are nasty that he’s a doctor who specializes in studying awful people. And he says to himself, ‘Oh, what a fascinating subject or specimen. I can’t believe how lucky I am to see this close up.’ Where anger didn’t work, his colleague had discovered, humor did.  

Yet, still, you can wonder.   When the plots and acts of wickedness cause such awful suffering, how can God laugh?   God can laugh because God has lived and suffered and died through the joke himself.    Do you not see how Jesus dying on the cross was God playing the ultimate joke?   On that dark and devastating day, evil thought it had won, that it had defeated in Jesus, God himself.  But even as God died on that cross, he was thinking.  Just you wait.  In three days, a punch line is coming evil that will disarm you forever.   And when I rise up out of that tomb, I’ll be laughing in your face.   For then you will know, that nothing, no evil, not even death will defeat me and my love. 

That is why in many Christian communities, the first Sunday after Easter, they call Holy HumorSunday.  They realize that Easter is God’s ultimate joke on all that is wrong on the world.  And when you know that laughter, the laughter of a love that even defeats death, it gives you confidence no matter what you face.   Right now, cancer is killing my mother.  Every time I see her, she is more diminished.  Even as I will grieve my mom as cancer takes her life, I can also laugh in cancer’s face.   I know that it will never have the last word.  God’s love has that.  And when you know this love of Jesus, a love of such power that it laughs in death’s face, you can face anything.   After all, whatever you face, Jesus has already faced it and more.   And whatever you face, Jesus will face it with you.  And he will say that I will never leave you nor forsake you.  I will be so faithful, that even in the face of any hardship, of death itself, in my love, you can laugh in its face.