Laughter us a great gift for celebration, not a weapon of denigration.
It is the natural spill-over of the joy that wells up inside of us and in response to surprise, absurdity, and silly wonder.
It can be an offering of praise or a response to relief.
It is something to be cherished and employed wisely.
It is an activity in which our Father participates, with us and which we can enjoy together.
Here are some reflections on laughter from The Message.
Genesis 17:19
19 But God said, "That's not what I mean. Your wife, Sarah, will have a baby, a son. Name him Isaac (Laughter). I'll establish my covenant with him and his descendants, a covenant that lasts forever.''
Genesis 21:5
5-6 Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born.
Sarah said,
God has blessed me with laughter and all who get the news will laugh with me!
1 Samuel 2
1 Hannah prayed: I'm bursting with God-news! I'm walking on air. I'm laughing at my rivals. I'm dancing my salvation.
Esther 8:15
15-17 Mordecai walked out of the king's presence wearing a royal robe of violet and white, a huge gold crown, and a purple cape of fine linen. The city of Susa exploded with joy. For Jews it was all sunshine and laughter: they celebrated, they were honored. It was that way all over the country, in every province, every city when the king's bulletin was posted: the Jews took to the streets in celebration, cheering, and feasting. Not only that, but many non-Jews became Jews—now it was dangerous not to be a Jew!
Psalm 100
1-2 On your feet now—applaud God! Bring a gift of laughter, sing yourselves into his presence.
Psalm 85:4
4-7 Help us again, God of our help;
don't hold a grudge against us forever. You aren't going to keep this up, are you? scowling and angry, year after year? Why not help us make a fresh start—a resurrection life? Then your people will laugh and sing! Show us how much you love us, God! Give us the salvation we need!
Proverbs 24:17
17-18 Don't laugh when your enemy falls; don't crow over his collapse. God might see, and become very provoked, and then take pity on his plight.
“I personally believe that each of us was put here for a purpose -- to build not to destroy. If I can make people smile, then I have served my purpose for God.” - Red Skelton
So let's take a few moments for a smile and a belly laugh. We are never poor if we have laughter in our lives. That is especially true if we can learn to laugh at ourselves.
The longer I live, the more, not less, I make the same request to the Master, "Teach me to pray," sometimes realizing that such a request is also a prayer. If I can pray no other in the moment, for ignorance or willfulness, it is a place of meeting and if a place of meeting, a place of instruction, and if a place of instruction, a time of listening and increasing.
This year, as I intentionally pray this prayer, the Master is teaching me the prayer He gave His disciples in response.
He is teaching me daily.
I am the guy who squeezed 4 years of college into 6 and 3 years of seminary into 5 and a half. I need a lot of schooling and am like Andrew Murray, "With Christ in the School of Prayer."
No need to graduate until I stand in His unfiltered presence.
Peter Brietbart, of Brighton, in England, is a writer for the Freethinker Magazine and a self described, skeptic, atheist, humanist, secularist and President of Sussex University Secular Society."
That is fine.
He is also a budding film make on a shoestring budget.I complement him for his entrepreneurship.
He has zeroed in on a quote from C.S.Lewis in his soon-to-be-released film, "Madman or Something Else."
Here is the quote (and I have used it often to call people to faith):
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell."
"You must make your choice"
"Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
As much as I respect C.S. Lewis, to allow this quote of his to define the entire debate over the ethics of the Kingdom of God that Jesus summarized in the Sermon on the Mount is faulty (even though I may have used the argument myself a time or two). Peter Brietbart does.
Even if I were not a Jesus follower, I believe I would be attracted to what I intrinsically perceive as true in principles of fidelity, non-violence, heart-origin of violence, forgiveness, and the other issues addressed there.
Brietbart says, "Jesus of Nazareth was an awful moral philosopher. He compares badly to such modern greats such as Mill, Rawls or Ross and also to historical thinkers such as Aristotle, Diogenes or Plato."
I never got the same sense of intrinsic truth and balance from these other great thinkers. Why I perceive tJesus' teachings as intrinsically true and truth is another discussion. Why did Ghandi? I sense that it has something to do with an implanted seed of response-capacity within us .... but there I go getting all spiritual.
All that aside, Peter Brietbart, producer of the film, in the trailer (which, in all fairness, is all I can evaluate at this point), zeroes in on the issue of mortality and immortality while proposing to criticize Jesus' ethics. That seems a tad incongruous to me. Jesus' teachings on immortality were quite clearly not a denial of death, but a defiance of death while confronting it, validating its reality, and experiencing its pain fully. He never minimized its impact or taught His followers to devalue the reality that we must live with a sense of the finite nature of time.
The teachings on eternal life, namely that one aspect of eternal life that speaks to life beyond death, is an encouragement to live and love morally, but not the only reason He gave for doing so.
Perhaps I have played into the usual strategy of film-makers to get free publicity by creating controversy before the release of their films. I am neither encouraging nor discouraging viewing of this one. I am merely pointing to what I see as flaws on the front end.
To quote from the web site, "God is little more than a pleasant fable for adults, a pacifier for the mind that quells the nervous forebodings of death. "
I find that simplistic and uninformed. Jesus wept and agonized over death. He was not pacified.
Nothing in the God-message of the Bible has ever pacified me within my soul. To the contrary, divine comfort has tended to stir me, move me, and motivate me to disturb the status quo and keep questioning myself.
"His moral contributions are not original, and his original contributions are not moral. "
I am curious to see which teachings the producers are referring to here:
Love your neighbor?
Forgive and keep forgiving?
Your sins are forgiven; go and sin no more?
Love one another?
Perhaps he is speaking of the call to give, be peacemakers, live non-violently, welcome children or Jesus' example of treating women with dignity and respect. I am not sure.
Had no one ever hinted at these things before? Maybe. Certainly some of the prophets did. Had anyone embodied or clearly presented them as a whole with such impact? Who? When? Where?
In an out--take frame on the web site, a character is viewing a book with a chapter title, "The Law of Reciprocity," which we have come to know as "the Golden Rule."
Was it original to Jesus' teaching? No. We do not claim it to be so. If is in the Hebrew scriptures. It has its versions in other religious traditions. It is a universal truth, not a hidden mystery.
I applaud Peter Brietbart for getting down and dirty with the debate. At least he is honestly disclosing his position and his influences. I have read some of his Twitter and blog posts. He is not a light-weight thinker, but he frames the arguments selectively and, I believe, erroneously. Perhaps this is the next and last arena of debate and maybe Lewis is keeping us all honest.
Yet, I think it is still possible for those who struggle with the claims of Jesus with regard to immortality and the nature of God, to stick their feet in the cooling waters of His moral teachings and find something refreshing that rings true. That is what Brietbart is questioning here and I believe he is on shaky philosophical ground in doing so.
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