Thursday, February 9, 2017

Redeeming Laughter

Psalm 126
Redeeming Laughter
Christmas Eve 2016

I have a friend who, every Advent, posts really, really bad Christmas jokes on her Facebook page, jokes so punny and bad they would make Bob Lague proud.  Here are a few examples, and tell me if you don’t agree:
How much did Santa pay for his sleigh?  (Nothing – it was on the house.)
What do you call a singing elf?  (A wrapper.)
What kind of hat does a snowman wear?  (An ice cap.)
What did the Gingerbread man pull over his bed?  (A cookie sheet.)
When are old Christmas trees like clumsy knitters?  (When they drop their needles.)
See what I mean?  Some of them are so bad they actually make you laugh.
Psalm 126 is a psalm about holy laughter.  “When God restored the fortunes of the people, we were like those who dream.  Our mouths were filled with laughter, and our tongues with shouts of joy.  Then it was said throughout the world, ‘The Lord has done great things for them!’  The Lord has done great things for us, and we rejoiced.”  The Lord has done great things for us:  “Behold, I bring you good news of great joy for all the people – to you is born this day in the city of David a savior, who is Christ the Lord.”  This is a time filled with joy, with good news, and with holy laughter.
Tonight of course, we are also mindful of those things that work against gladness and laughter and joy.  We are mindful of the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey; we are mindful of the terrorist attack in Berlin; we are mindful that our LGBT brothers and sisters still face obstacles to full equality and inclusion; we are mindful of the friends and neighbors we have lost to the epidemic of addiction; we are mindful that for many people, these are stressful days and uncertain times.  And none of this is easily wished away, not even on this holy night.  But because of this night, we are confident that the One who is born to bring joy and peace, justice and redemption, compassion and healing, not just to us but to all creation, makes us better people and our world a better place.
Through this season of Advent here at Second Church we have been reading through and talking about Charles Dickens’ classic novel, A Christmas Carol.  I’m guessing nearly everyone here has either read it or seen one of the many movie or television versions of the story.  Tonight we come to the very last chapter:   after Ebenezer Scrooge has been visited by the ghost of Jacob Marley and the spirits of Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Yet-to-Come, he awakens Christmas morning with a new sense of himself:  “I am as light as a feather,” said Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath.  “I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy, I am as giddy as a drunken man.  A merry Christmas to everybody!  A happy New Year to all the world.”  In the fifth and final stave, or stanza, Ebenezer Scrooge is a changed man.  And the most palpable sign of the change in him is laughter.  As Dickens puts it, Scrooge let out a laugh that, “for a man who had been out of practice for so many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh, the father of a long, long line of brilliant laughs.”  And he literally laughs his way through to the end of the book.  He laughs as he sends the poulterer’s prize turkey to the Cratchit family.  He laughs as he goes to Christmas dinner at his nephew Fred’s house, accepting an invitation he had earlier spurned with a trademark “Humbug!”  He even laughed at the laughter of others who had never seen Scrooge act quite this way before.  And the following day, he laughed when, in response to Bob Cratchit’s being late for work the day after Christmas, he doubled his salary.  “His own heart laughed,” Dickens writes, “and that was quite enough for him.”
There are many lessons to be drawn from Dickens’ classic story, and the one we take away from this last chapter is that Scrooge’s laughter is a signal of his redemption.  Scrooge is a changed man, and we see it and we hear it in his laugh.
Actor Peter Ustinov once said that “Laughter is the most civilized music in the world.”  There is a lot of music associated with Jesus’ birth, and I don’t just mean the Christmas carols you and I sing every year.  There are also four different Christmas carols in Luke’s gospel, and it is important that each song includes the message of salvation and redemption.  When Mary learned she had conceived and would be having a baby, she sang, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior.”  When her cousin Elizabeth’s husband Zechariah named his son John, who would grow to be John the Baptist, Zechariah sang “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for God has looked favorably on us and redeemed us.”  When Simeon saw the infant Jesus brought to the temple for his dedication, he sang, “Lord, now let your servant depart in peace, for my eyes have seen your salvation.”  And of course, on that first Christmas night the angelic chorus sang to the shepherds, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace and good will.”  There was a lot of singing and music surrounding the events at the manger.  And if laughter is the most civilized music in the world, what could be more musical than the laughter of a little baby.  We’ve all heard babies giggle and coo and laugh – and it’s magical, it is like no other laughter in the world.  Among all the other sounds that first Christmas night, the sounds of livestock and of a woman in labor, I imagine that both the cries and the laughter of an infant were among them.  And in that moment, in that laughter, was the promise of the redemption of the world.
We all know what it means to call someone a Scrooge.  The name is synonymous with parsimony, penny-pinching and skinflintery.  As Bob Cratchits’ wife puts it, to be a Scrooge is to be “odious, stingy, hard and unfeeling.”  But this is not how the story ends.  The story ends with a Scrooge who is generous, lavish, charitable, and most of all, filled with the kind of great-hearted laughter that signifies his own redemption.  This is the Ebenezer Scrooge who remains standing at the end of the tale.  While there is scarcely a trace of religion to Dickens’ story, this is how it concludes:  “[I]t was always said of [Scrooge], that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if anyone alive possessed the knowledge.  May that be truly said of us, and all of us!  And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, Every One!”

Let us pray.

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