Levity as Leaven in Today’s Church

Picture the children of old being taught by their elders the stories of their ancestors and the history of their faith. Imagine them with wide eyes as they absorbed and digested into their consciousness the beliefs of their forefathers. See them attentively listening to their living forbears passing down the priceless heirlooms they themselves had received as children. Hear the reverent tones hushed almost to a whisper on points of greatest magnitude, a manner that conveyed the significance and mystery of what was being shared and drew each child’s attention to the fact that they were being let in on the greatest secrets of the universe. Useless would be any boring lectures about virtues stripped of the relevance that a simple story brings to them: not many children would sit still if they realized that these stories were actually “education” – the molding of their core values.

Now flash forward a few thousand years and observe how their children’s children’s children are teaching their children today.

Today there looms a threat to the church’s own appreciation of the Truth of God, an outgrowth of which is the abandonment of the ancient form of transmission of truth to posterity, the spurning of the way of instruction illustrated in my first paragraph, an institution that more primitive cultures throughout time have relied on to keep a continuity of values and beliefs. Traditions such as passing on stories of cultural significance act as societal cement; yet we throw all the gravel in there with a few blocks of chocolate, and wonder to see our kids with sweet teeth and souring health, and an eroding society. We have descended into the perilous practice of educating (or not educating) our children in ways that communicate the profundity and significance of our beliefs. We have fired the tutor of generations past and hired singing vegetables.

No, this isn’t a polemic solely or even chiefly against that show per se. I indict the whole juvenile “Sunday School should be fun” movement that emaciates the stories of the Bible into entertaining, fantastic, and, most importantly, cute stories for children. Is it any wonder that kids grow up and recall the David and Goliath and Moses-in-a-basket stories as kids’ stuff on par with the fairy tales der Brüder Grimm?

This, a quite recent development, has proven sufferable to a point, because as long as parents believe the stories are divine in origin, their children stand a good chance to absorb some of the respect for these stories. What happens, however, when you have kids growing up laughing at the stories? Worse yet, ignoring the meaning of the stories because they are busy laughing at the jokes and gags (most which produce laughter without real understanding, because they are intended by the creators as inside jokes with the parents), not to mention the demotion of the forefathers of our faith that comes from being depicted as various flora, fauna, or silly humans. This may seem innocuous and good-natured fun, and is obviously formulated to convey the truth of the Bible in a form palatable for young children with short attention spans. See, we have so many non-biblical stories that are humorous and entertaining, yet conspicuously devoid of meaning, that we assume any normal kid would choose to listen to them rather than to dull and (heaven forbid!) serious lectures.

Is this assumption correct? Has our culture made such an effort to avoid inconvenient meaning that the Bible must take on the guise of irrelevance in order to become relevant?

I recognize the need for faith-based media, including media that entertains. I also believe that Christians such as Phil Vischer are involved in their productions as their way of lighting a candle instead of cursing the darkness. No doubt it is infinitely better to set your kids down in front of VeggieTales than letting them watch 90% of secular kids’ media, because the worldviews of the latter are usually toxic and antithetical to our faith. But eating large quantities of cholesterol-laden fried chicken is similarly less harmful than even small doses of plutonium; although the pitfalls are vastly different in terms of how soon they manifest themselves, nonetheless both are potentially life-threatening. Bob, Larry, and the like can be less harmful if accompanied by an otherwise healthy diet of parents living the life and communicating the importance of the Bible. But woe be unto those unchurched kids who went to see Jonah in the theaters; they probably went away thinking, “Gee, that was a funny story! The Bible must have some great whoppers in it!” To say nothing of unbelieving parents and older kids who look at such tom-foolery as a representative specimen of the whole Judeo-Christian faith system.

I think a lot of this stems from the fact that when we grow older and gain a firmer grasp on the things we hold important, we tend to approach those things with a familiarity that is not in itself harmful. With adults who take the faith seriously, there is probably room for a little levity here and there even on theological matters (although one wouldn’t know it by reading the New Testament!). However, our children equate silliness with…well, silliness, and not with matters of colossal importance. I realize that the simplicity of some of the stories make them ideal for telling to children, and we should of course tell them to children. But we must make the conscious effort not to downgrade the stories into something so cartoony that the children grow up wondering why their parents took them so seriously. We cannot produce entertainment masquerading as theology masquerading as entertainment as an expression of our faith absent any of the requisite sobriety, in the blind hope that there will always be parents there who can remove the resultant cloak over the importance of our faith.

I suppose that in a broader sense, my question is, “Where’s the reverence?” Is humor the fourth person of the modern Godhead? I get sick of seeing people trying to read levity into Jesus’ sermons: could it just be that the Truth of God is not a laughing matter? that there is a reason we are explicitly shown in the Gospels the Son of God as angry, weeping, and overall just drop-dead serious about His mission, but never once depicted as laughing or even smiling? This is not to say that He never did those things, but I think it is our cultural conditioning that causes us to look for those things even while He is talking about the most momentous subjects imaginable. The apostles, likewise, treated the faith as a matter of life and death. You’d be hard-pressed to point out even one funny analogy, insightful wisecrack, or hardly a wry observation in any of the epistles. Are we to conclude that people in the first century were not fond of humor? Probably they were less so than we, but I doubt that is why we do not see moments of light-heartedness in the New Testament.

No, the real reason is that they took these things more seriously than we do. We in today’s Church are amusing ourselves to death in classic Postman fashion. Indeed, it’s hard to laugh about silly ol’ Jonah and his pal the “whale” if we recognize that 21st-century Christians play into the type of a prophet of God going AWOL to avoid the path God intended. Granted, Jonah didn’t head for Tarshish in order to have a good time. But nevertheless, we, like Jonah, are self-centered enough to be unaware of or unconcerned about the gravity of our mission and are unmindful of the importance God puts upon it. If reverence and relative solemnity when dealing with the Truth of God are not culturally relevant, it is not the Truth but the “amuse me first” culture that will perish. I hope we begin to make sure our children understand the importance of our faith, and not tie it to that sinking ship.

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