When the great American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson gave his famous “Divinity School Address” at the graduation ceremony of Harvard Divinity School in July of 1838, he was already quite disillusioned with any form of traditional Christianity. As a Unitarian, he had long departed from orthodox beliefs about the authority of the Bible, the divinity of Christ and the Trinity. And six years earlier, Emerson had resigned from the ministry because he could not in good conscience continue to celebrate the Lord’s Supper.

So when Emerson rose to speak at the Harvard graduation, his hearers knew they would not be getting any kind of traditional words of spiritual encouragement. But Emerson managed to offend his audience anyway, because he went straight for a sensitive issue in a gathering made up mostly of divinity students, theology professors, and local clergy. He explained at some length why he found it boring to go to church.

Central to his critique of worship services was his disillusionment with the sermons he heard preached in the Boston area churches. Emerson was very graphic in this regard. He talked about hearing a sermon recently that was so lifeless that the preacher “sorely tempted me to say I would go to church no more.” Looking out of one of the church windows as he sat in the congregation watching the snow falling, he had the profound sense that the snow was real, while the preacher was merely an apparition.

Here is how Emerson described the preacher:
“He had lived in vain. He had no one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it… It seemed strange that the people should come to church. It seemed as if their houses were very unentertaining, that they should prefer this thoughtless clamor.”

Many of us know what Emerson was talking about. Our theology may be, unlike Emerson’s, faithful to the Bible, but we also know what it is like to attend a church service and not be fed spiritually. We have gone to worship on occasion, longing for something that speaks to us about what we are really experiencing in our lives, and we have come away disappointed. The sermon we heard had no connection to the concerns that we brought with us when we entered the church building. And we probably even asked ourselves whether the preacher who delivered that sermon has any idea what it means to be people like us, with the joys and sorrows that are so much a part of our lives.

Emerson said that it was impossible to know from the sermon he heard whether that preacher had ever laughed about anything. Some assurance that the preacher has a sense of humor would have helped in some of the too-somber and abstract sermons that many of us have also heard. Just the encouragement to smile a bit at what we were hearing would have helped us to connect with what the preacher was trying to get across.

Of course, often these days, the problem with preaching is of a very different sort. We hear it regularly from folks who are dissatisfied with contemporary worship: “too much like entertainment!” And they do not just mean that criticism to apply to the music, skits, and other elements that surround the preaching. The sermons themselves, they complain, are more like comedy monologies than genuine instruction from God’s Word.

All of which raises an important question: How much should a preacher’s own life enter into a sermon? More specifically, what is the proper role of humor in preaching?

Let us be clear about the basics: In the most important sense, a worship service is not about us, or about the folks leading worship. It is about God. We go to church to connect with God in a special way – to join His people in praising Him, and to listen to what God has to teach us through His Word.

A preacher, then, has to be careful about his or her motives in using humor. Humor should not be used in a sermon simply to entertain. Nor should it be designed to show how clever the preacher is. Most important, not only should it not detract from the real point of the message, but it should actually enhance or reinforce that point.

Again, to the basics: Worship is about God, and preaching a sermon is transmitting a message that comes from God. But all of that takes place in a very human context. The preacher is a real person speaking to real persons – we all laugh and cry; we have daily routines; we are immersed in a multiplicity of relationships, some of them very intimate. Worship also always has a cultural context. When we come to church we are coming from the world in which we have been hearing other messages all week: from our peers, from films and TV shows, from advertising, from things we encounter on the internet.

Those who preach sermons must be aware of all of this. We come to church to hear the message, the truly Good News about God’s love for us. The connections between God’s Word and the world we live in on a daily basis have to be made clear. The preacher must engage people’s attention and the hearers will want to be able to trust the authenticity of the one who preaches. Because preaching is also pastoral, the preacher must be seen as someone who understands our emotional lives. And evoking laughter is an important way of demonstrating this understanding.

I preached a sermon recently about the need to see other persons – especially people we do not like very much – as works of divine art. God created them, and God wants us to appreciate His artistic handiwork. Seeing others as God sees them, I said, is something like the activity of art appreciation. And art appreciation, I observed, takes work – for some of us more than for others.

At that point I got personal. I told the congregation that my wife is trained in art history – and then I added that our son says that this means his father has sat on the steps of some of the great art museums of the world!

The congregation laughed when I said that. And I think my little humorous aside helped me reinforce the teaching I was trying to get across. My self-reference revealed a little bit about our family dynamics. All married people, as well as close friends, know what it is like to have to tolerate our differences. And it gave a further glimpse into my own family dynamics, that I have a son who feels free to make a joke about his father – and that I as a father can take some delight in that.

Since that sermon, folks who heard it have mentioned two things about it that they remember. One is that they now know that I am not much of an expert on art, but my wife is. The other – and this is really the important thing – is that my telling that story helped them to see how learning to get along with difficult people takes some spiritual work, not unlike learning how to appreciate a painting that does not initially make much sense to us.

Preaching is often described as “prophetic” – the prophet in the Old Testament brought God’s Word to the people. But it is also, rightly understood, “priestly” – the priest carried the concerns of the people, on their behalf, into the presence of God. Both dimensions are important to preaching. We cannot speak to people unless we also speak for them, in solidarity with them. This includes an emotional solidarity – sharing their joys and sorrows, their laughings and weepings.

Preaching is one form of leadership. Leaders cannot lead effectively unless people are willing to follow them. And preachers cannot preach effectively unless people are willing to listen to them. Well-placed humor in sermons is one way for preachers to demonstrate that they are human beings who know what it is like to bring the eternal Word of God to the challenging but also to the light-hearted(!) dimensions of our daily lives.

Dr Richard J. Mouw is President and Professor of Christian Philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary, USA. He has been an editor of the Reformed Journal and has served on many editorial boards, including currently Books and Culture. He is the author of 17 books, including Consulting the Faithful; The Smell of Sawdust: What Evangelicals Can Learn from Their Fundamentalist Heritage; He Shines in All That’s Fair: Culture and Common Grace; Wonderful Words of Life; Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport, and, with co-editor Eric Jacobsen, Traditions in Leadership. Check out his musings at www.netbloghost.com/mouw/.