Years ago, when I was a fledgling pastor, I remember an older, more seasoned clergyman telling a group of us, “It’s sin to bore a congregation.” I wanted to say “Amen” to that, for I myself had sat through many a boring service. Perhaps the sermon was too long (my father used to comment that a particular preacher “missed a few good stopping points”), or the language was too obscure, or the clergy too sleepy, or the liturgy too opaque. But no matter what the reason, too many services were boring because there was no joy. At least, if there was joy, it was awfully hard to find!
Sometimes we religious folks think that the world and its crying needs are such that to express joy is to treat its desperation too lightly. Alexander Schmemann, an Orthodox priest, has written that our world is often suspicious of joy.
How can one be joyful when so many people suffer? When so many things are to be done? How can one indulge in festivals and celebrations when people expect from us “serious” answers to their problems? Consciously or unconsciously Christians have accepted the whole ethos of our joyless and business-minded culture. They believe that the only way to be taken “seriously” by the “serious” – that is, by a modern man – is to be serious, and, therefore, to reduce to a symbolic “minimum” what is the past was so tremendously central in the life of the church – the joy of a feast.
Schmemann goes on to say that there is no true religion without joy – that “where there is no joy, Christianity becomes … torture.”
When I read that, lights of recognition came on for me. That is why it’s a sin to bore a congregation. A bored congregation is a “tortured” congregation, because there is no joy. In fact, I question how helpful to a troubled world are people who lack the capacity for joy.
In Eugene O’Neill’s play, “Lazarus Laughed,” after Lazarus is raised from the dead, his primary response is unfettered laughter. He just cannot stop laughing! The interesting thing is that the laughter of Lazarus becomes a threat to Caesar, because people with that kind of joy cannot be controlled or oppressed. His laughter, in a strange and wonderful way, undermines the collective power of Rome.
There is a profound truth in that. Joy has power. Delight can bring down empires. And who knows what God can do with families of faith who take the time to laugh?
