Risus Paschalis Sermons

Risus Paschalis

Risus Paschalis Sermons

RISUS PASCHALIS
Preached by Dr. John M. McCoy at Highland Park Presbyterian Church on 04/23/2000.

Scripture Reference(s): Psalm 126:1-6; Mark 16:1-8

Long ago in southern Germany, in Bavaria, during the late middle ages there was a custom in many of the Catholic churches of that region that was quite unusual. At the end of the Easter church service, the Easter Mass, the priest would leave the altar and come down among the people and lead the congregation in what was called the "Risus Paschalis" which means "the Easter laughter." The priest would tell funny
stories and sing comical songs, and the church would ring with laughter. Of course the point was obvious, the laughter echoing through the church was a tangible testimony to the merriment born out of the tidings of this great day, Jesus Christ alive and loose among us. All the forces that conspired to lay him in his tomb, the fury, the lovelessness, the violence, the vaunted powers of kings and empires, they are made
a laughing stock.

Do you get it? It's a thing to ponder. The laughter of God, the laughter of his people rolling out into the spring time world from doors and windows of churches where the story is told on an Easter day.

Laughter is a wonderful gift of God, and those ancient mediaeval Catholics in Bavaria were right to give a space for mirth and laughter in the Easter worship of the church.

But on this greatest day of the church year I want to be sure that none of us miss that utterly unique thing that is the Risus Paschalis, the Easter laughter.

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A KITE FLYING OVER A CEMETERY

Mark 16:1-8, l:12-13 April 7, 1985

One of the quainter customs associated with Easter in the past was called "risus Paschalis," which, translated out of Latin, means the "Easter laugh." On Easter Sunday evening, parishioners returned to the church for a solemn celebration and evening prayer. In the course of this evening's service, the clergy would regale the parishioners with jokes and funny stories. The purpose of this unusual practice was to contrast Easter joy with the solemnness of the Lenten season just completed. This tradition began in the thirteenth century, I suspect around the time that clowning was also popular in the medieval churches. But church authorities gradually
suppressed it as improper and an abuse during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In some ways that's too bad.

Mark Quinn says that the last aspect in "Adventures in Spirituality" is play, a very appropriate subject for Easter. One of his images of play that caught my fancy is a kite flying over a cemetery. This is a wonderful image, a grand metaphor for Easter.

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Holy Humor!!!!

CHRISTIAN TESTAMENT: “Fools for Christ” ~ Corinthians 1:18-27

All along people thought that Christians were a little bit strange. They believed odd things. They lived their lives in a
different way. They didn’t worry about tomorrow. They didn’t worry about where money was going to come from. They
shared all their things in common. Those who were not believers said, “You’re nuts.” “You’re crazy.” When Paul arrives he says, “Don’t worry about it. Be fools for Christ because the foolishness of God is much greater than the wisdom of humans.”

Now, after two thousand years have gone by, we need to hear the words in different ways, because we have been willing to stand up and declare our faith in Jesus. We have been willing to take risks and pay the price of being a Christian. But in doing so we have lost the joy of what it means to be Christian. Can you imagine, if you were an early Christian, what it meant to celebrate Jesus’ resurrection from the dead? That wasn’t a serious time. That wasn’t a somber time. That was a joy filled time. A time to dance. A time to laugh. A time to sing out at the top of your lungs. It was a time for joy. In fact, through many years of the church the Sunday after Easter was known as Bright Sunday. It wasn’t a time to withdraw, ”We’re done with Lent and we’re done with Easter, and now we can take a vacation.” Instead it was a time to celebrate the joy of the resurrection.

But we have those Puritan ancestors, those folks who say you are supposed to be religious with your head and not with your
heart, not with your smile, not with your body. We come here and we want to sit, and listen, and think, but we don’t want to move and we don’t want laugh, and we don’t want to sing out loud with our voices. Somewhere along the line people began to whisper, “You know, being a Christian shouldn’t be such serious business.”

Thirteen years ago, on April Fools’ Day , 1986, a group came together and declared themselves to be the Fellowship of Merry Christians. Jerry Rutherford ran across one of their newsletters and subscribed to it. Every month she receives the Joyful Noiseletter, filled with cartoons and clean jokes, to help people find the joy in life. And so Paul’s words, instead of encouraging us to pay the price now say to us “Don’t be so darn serious all the time. Enjoy yourself a little bit. Take a delight in life. Smile and laugh. It shouldn’t be so hard.” And so this day came about.

Now I didn’t prepare a stand-up routine today, but we’re going to start out with some holy light bulb jokes, and then after that I’ll depend on the guidance of the Holy Spirit to find a few other pieces to read to you. Are you all set now? OK!

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FIRST IMPRESSIONS;
2ND. SUNDAY OF EASTER (B); APRIL 30, 2000
Author: Jude Siciliano, O.P.

Acts 4: 32-35; I John 5: 1-6; John 20: 19-31

I am reminded of the "Risus Paschalis". Apparently it was a medieval custom (and one in the Eastern Church now) that the preaching for Easter Sunday consisted of jokes. The message being that on this day we enjoy the cosmic laugh, we celebrate that God has outwitted the devil and overcome
death. God has the final laugh. So, we look to see what there is in today's readings to cause us to laugh, for death has been overcome.

Jesus' promises to his disciples have been fulfilled and today's Gospel reading has the fulfillment spelled out: his presence will stay with them, forgiveness is granted, peace and eternal life are given. We hear Jesus blessing believers, people who look at their lives and the world with new eyes, the eyes of faith. These are people who can do what Thomas did, see wounds and suffering and look at them with believer's eyes. In the suffering places new life is possible. What in our lives needs to be looked
at again? And what needs to be acted on, believing that the Risen Lord will work through us? We may even need to defy the "logical" to see the new possibilities. Can we "see" new opportunities in what we once counted as failure?

Can we believe in ourselves and that we can make the difference? Remember that in today's passage, the believers are being sent, the experience they are having is not to be kept to themselves. Thus, Easter is more than a moment in the past. It is a new direction for us to get us out of our stuckness into action. This is the Sunday after Easter. Last week we had all the excitement, this week things are back to "normal". But don't we
always need to see with Easter eyes? Don't we need to see that Resurrection permeates everything we look at, and calls us to reappraise what we may have declared "dead and buried", "hopeless", and " useless"? These stories tell us of a community sent to see things anew.

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A God who laughs
By Craig Bird

Jesus wept.
We know that because the Bible tells us so. But did he laugh?
God thunders, often.
We know that. But does God have a sense of humor?
God celebrated creation with a booming "That’s good!" But did the creation God called “good” include belly laughs and puns? Satire and irony?
What about giggles and smiles?
Or were those very human behaviors part of the legacy of that fruit-peddling serpent in the Garden?
You might be surprised at what a low opinion of humor Christians have had over the years. Or maybe not.
As early as the 11th century, the influential church leader John of
Chrysostom insisted Jesus never laughed. Through the centuries, artists overwhelmingly have followed the saint’s argument. How many paintings have you seen where the Son of God grins from ear to ear?
Can those who would be Christlike laugh and sin not?
The Second Council of Constance in 1418 had a definite opinion:
literally "Hell, no!"
That medieval Christian council assigned to hell any minister
or monk who spoke "jocular words such as provoke laughter." Well, actually, the council said, "Let him be anathema," which is a firmly non-jocular way of saying the same thing.
No doubt, the stereotype of Christians as uptight and humorless is well earned. . . .

Jesus obviously got the joke. He used humor frequently in his teaching. Jesus used "the weapon of wit and the saber of satire" in his running verbal battles with the religious power structure, according to Randall O’Brien of Baylor University, author of I Feel Better All Over Than I Do Any Place Else.
"Humor was often the howitzer he used to shell the veneer of piety surrounding ‘Fortress Pharisee,’" he notes. "Who couldn’t help but laugh when Jesus exposed the arrogance of blindness of the religious leaders, calling them ‘blind guides,’ straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel…cleaning the outside of the cup but leaving the inside filthy…and like tombs, whitewashed on the outside but rotting on the inside?"
Even the eminent theologian Garrision Keillor of “Prairie Home
Companion” fame insists, "Christ gives his followers a satiric sense of the world." The upended values of the parables -- with the last becoming first -- are proof, Keillor says.

But that’s not the picture of Jesus that most often comes to mind. As Elton Trueblood reminded Christians so forcefully in his 1964 classic work The Humor of Christ, we resist acknowledging that Jesus did such things.
Trueblood’s own journey to a laughing Jesus began years before.
During family devotions, the famed Quaker theologian was "reading from the seventh chapter of Matthew, feeling very serious," when his four-year-old son began to laugh. "He saw how preposterous it would be for a man to be so deeply concerned about a speck in another person’s eye that he was unconscious of the fact his own eye had a beam in it."
His son’s laughter, Trueblood admits, "was a rebuke to his parents for their failure to respond to humor in an unexpected place."
"Christians have been stereotyped as anti-fun, anti-laughter types who think it’s spiritual to look like you’ve been sucking a dill pickle all day," says Gary Dyer, pastor of First Baptist Church of Midland, Texas. "And we probably brought it on ourselves. Laugh and the world laughs with you. Scowl and someone will ask, ‘Are you a Baptist?’”
Comedian and gospel singer Mark Lowry celebrates the belief that God loves it when we laugh. "What healthy father doesn’t love to hear his children laugh?" he asks.

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The Third Act in the Drama of Redemption: Easter Is a Joke!
The Sermon for Sunday, April 15, 2001
The Rev. Dr. C. Eric Funston, Rector, Homilist
Isaiah 65:17-25; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; 1 Corinthians 15:19-26; St. John 20:1-18

Easter is a joke. Amen.

(Pause)

OK ... I guess I should explain that. What is a "joke"? Princeton University's WordNet Dictionary says, in one of its definitions,
that a joke is an "activity characterized by good humor." (WordNet, Princeton University, 1997.) Can you think of a better way to characterize the resurrection of Jesus than as an "activity characterized by good humor"? The resurrection was God's activity of the highest and best humor! . . . .

G.K. Chesterton once wrote:
Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. Never forget that the devil fell by force of gravity . . . A good joke is the closest thing to divine revelation . . . They who have the faith have the fun. (Quoted in The Joyful Noiseletter.)

Easter is a good joke! Easter reveals God as no other celebration has ever done. Only God can draw the greatest good out of the greatest evil. Of evil, Saint Thomas More once wrote, "The devil ... the proud spirit ... cannot endure to be mocked." The people of the Middle Ages understood this and decided to have the last laugh on evil. In the Middle Ages some communities would throw a laughter party on Easter Sunday. Its purpose was simple: to celebrate God's triumph over evil. People would come back to church on Easter Sunday afternoon, which is the end of the Triduum, for Vespers and Benediction services. As a reward to the faithful after many serious Lenten homilies, the priest would insert funny stories, poems, and even off-color jokes into his sermon and would draw moral conclusions from them.

The ancient Russian Orthodox tradition was to sit around the Easter dinner table telling jokes. Like those 13th-Century Germans, they even told them in church. Why? Because they felt that way. After all, they were imitating the cosmic joke that God pulled on Satan in the resurrection. Satan thought he had won, but then God raised up Jesus from the dead and had the last word. And the world laughs at Satan's chagrin. Laughing at the Devil even has a name in theological tradition; it is called the risus paschalis, "Easter laughter".

This was the way people rejoiced in the triumph over Death that Easter embodies. Death had been a disturbing thing. For much of human history people have had an attitude toward it somewhat like Woody Allen's: "It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens," he once said. Jesus's resurrection turned the tables on Death. It was a cosmic joke! Where death had once been something to shudder at, the resurrection shows, as one Sunday School student put: "When you die, God takes care of you like your parents did when you were alive ... only God doesn't yell at you all the time."

German Protestant theologian Jurgen Moltmann, who wrote the book The Theology of Joy, writes, "The Easter laughter is
rooted in the wholly unexpected and totally surprising 'reversal of all things.' God had brought this reversal about by raising
Christ.... The expectation was for cosmic death, but what comes is eternal life."

We North Americans, especially folks here in the middle of the country, are too darned serious. Praying and laughing seem to be far apart in our culture, but at Easter they come together, as they do throughout scripture. In Psalm 126, the Hebrews praised
God with mirth: "Then our mouth was filled with laughter and our tongue with shouts of joy" (Ps. 126:2). Jesus promised laughter to those who are favored by God: "Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh." (Luke 6:21) It seems the ancients were much more aware of the relationship between prayer and laughter than are we. Our word joke derives from the ancient Umbrian word iuka, which means "prayers"!

So, Easter is a joke, a great big cosmic joke, in which God turns the tables on Satan, turns the tables on evil, turns the tables on
death! A Unitarian pastor of my acquaintance speaks of "Eastering moments" in which the tables are turned in various situations and the outcome is other than the world would expect, other than what Satan might want. Here a few examples of Eastering moments:

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Laughing Your Way Through Life
Holy Humor Sunday, 2001 with Pastor Dave Weidlich, Cooper Mountain Presbyterian Fellowship in Aloha, Oregon, USA
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Divine Folly: Being Religious and the Exercise of Humor
By Doris Donnelly

CURIOUS custom in the Greek Orthodox tradition gathers believers on Easter Monday for the purpose of trading jokes.2 Since the most extravagant "joke" of all took place on Easter Sunday-the victory, against all odds, of Jesus over death-the community of the faithful enters into the spirit of the season by sharing stories with unexpected endings, surprise flourishes, and a sense of humor. A similar practice occurs among the Slavs, who recognize in the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth a joy that it is Jesus who has the last laugh.
The response of the Greeks and the Slavs seems to be most appropriate, and it is disappointing that these practices strike our contemporary mindsets as a little odd. Most mainline Christian congregations, after all, do not celebrate Easter quite this way The long and the short of it is that a sense of humor may well be a sign of God's presence in the life of a believer, but it is a gift always in jeopardy of being lost. Perhaps that is why many have prayed for it, prizing it above all other gifts. Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (of all people!) was one who claimed he could not live without humor. On one occasion, he wrote of a dream he had when he was young:

Something marvelous has happened to me. I was caught up into the seventh heaven. There sat all the gods in assembly. As a special grace, there was accorded to me the privilege of making a wish. "Wilt thou," said Mercury, "wilt thou have youth, or beauty, or power, or long life, or the most beautiful maiden, or any other glorious thing among the many we have here in the treasure chest? Then choose but one thing."

For an instant, I was irresolute, then I addressed the gods as follows: "Highly esteemed contemporaries, I choose one thing, that I may always have the laugh on my side." There was not a god that answered a word, but they all burst out laughing. Thereupon, I concluded that my wish was granted, and I found that the gods knew how to express themselves with good taste. 20

Read this excellent article from Theology Today, Vol 48, No. 4 - January 1992.