No laughing matter
January 1, 1998
We expected the words.
After hearing speakers at the first ReImagining conference deny God’s transcendence and disparage Jesus’ death on the cross, we were prepared at the 1998 ReImagining Revival to hear Rita Nakashima Brock identify a lesbian activist as “the light of the world,” Beverly Harrison characterize evangelicals as those who hold a “Jurassic Park theology,” Mary Ann Lundy state that “to be ecumenical is to move beyond the boundaries of Christianity,” Delores Williams applaud a pastor’s removing the cross from his sanctuary, and Carter Heyward declare that “Jesus in reality was not God.” Consistently aberrant, their words were no surprise.
But we didn’t expect the laughter.
Loud and shrill, punctuated by drumbeats and cat calls, what did these laughs mean? They did not appear to express the levity one normally associates with people at play. Several speakers were witty, skilled in the use of irony and word games. But rhetorical jest cannot account for the laughter that we heard. There was no joy. Instead, we sensed a misanthropic, derisive dimension, and an uneasy one as well.
More than one ReImaginer evoked a raucous reaction by telling the audience that her mother had taught her “to be nice.” Several chortled as they imagined home church responses to their rebellion. Delores Williams expressed relief that her elderly mother was too deaf to hear news reports of what she had said on the conference platform.
As we listened, memories of our adolescence came to mind, when some of us sneaked behind the garage to share forbidden smokes and four-letter words. The nastier the utterance, the louder our laughs as each of us attempted to outpuff the others. We laughed, not in mirth, but in an urge to prove our prowess. We thumbed our noses at authority, distancing ourselves from parents, and tradition, and the sacred. In those stolen moments, we defied all that was holy … with a laugh.
The laughter that convulsed ReImagining’s revival sounded like that, an expression of arrested adolescence, a defiance by those who find themselves unable – or unwilling – to mature.
Scripture describes a very different kind of laughter, that joyful effervescence befitting the people of God. There is a lightness to this laughter, revealing the happiness of those who, in submission to the One who is holy, have been set free. Free from bondage to old resentments. Free from guilt. Free from having to take one’s self so seriously. Free to share the love of a heaven-sent savior.
“These things I have spoken to you,” Jesus said to his disciples, “that my joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11).
ReImagining’s laughter had a very different sound, and a different source as well.