A few years ago, Neil Postman wrote a book entitled Amusing Ourselves to Death. We are a culture obsessed with being entertained. We want to be, we NEED to be entertained to feel alive. There is certainly nothing wrong with enjoying the good gifts that God gives. But our need for entertainment borders on an addiction, not a simple enjoyment. We seek it out, we spend billions of dollars annually as a culture…for the purpose of entertainment. WE have forgotten how to take a quiet walk, or how to spend an evening at home with the TV off. When we have no plans for the weekend, we PANIC thinking that something entertaining may escape our attention. And not only are we addicted to being entertained, but we now laugh at the wrong things! Jeremiah lamented a culture of people who had forgotten how to blush. How true is that of us! Our entertainment addiction has torn down walls of decency that now allow profanity and crude imagery to flood into our homes like backed up sewage. And still we laugh. It makes me wonder at which point something will be said or done or portrayed in a movie, TV sitcom, or come from the lips of a standup comic and we will no longer laugh. I believe that what we laugh at…or refuse to laugh at…defines us as a people. How unlike the Nazarene Jesus Who said from Divine lips, “Blessed are the mourners….for they shall be comforted.” May the emptiness we are seeking to fill with the vanity of the world’s offerings of entertainment find fullness in the Presence of our Lord and King. Only then shall we know what true laughter is!
Jesus has a great sense of humor. At each dealing with the Pharisees, especially as I read Mark’s Gospel, He is sticking it to ‘em like the best of the insult comics. At age 12 in the Temple, he had to have made is frantic mother and father smile by saying, “where the heck did you’d expect I’d be”? (from the original Hebrew, I’m sure!)
If proof positive that G_d must laugh, he made giraffes, didn’t He?
What we laugh at today versus what should shock and disturb us is no joke. I commented to my companion today, do you think Lucy or Mary Tyler More would have used the word “penis” in any way, matter or form to get laughs on television? But there it was today, on a popular television program.
We turned the channel, but there’s not much better.
When sin is a cause of laughter, that’s no laughing matter. Sin is sin. Jesus could laugh with the best of ‘em but not at anything that would disappoint the Father. Laugh at the Holy Spirit? That’s an HOV lane ticket to hell.
Like my father said when he saw me in my youth heading in the wrong direction, “Laugh all you want; enjoy it while it lasts.” Dad had a funny way of inspiring introspection. Thanks, Dad.
Thanks, Father.
By: Andrew Ocean on October 27, 2011
at 1:58 am