The happy father no one talks about
Holy laughter as a response to the joy found in Christ.
Bruce Marchiano changed the way I saw God.
The year he starred in The Gospel According to Matthew was the year I nearly died.
I was 13 years old and blue with hypothermia. Nurses said I was a miracle. I’d been starving myself for four years, and was 60 pounds.
I starved because I was sad. I didn’t know how to make the sadness go away, so I stopped eating.
I was also a pastor’s daughter. Church for me was a place with long skirts and longer liturgies.
It was not a happy place. It felt more like a perpetual funeral. Like Christ never really rose.
I remember when my pastor-dad went on vacation. That’s when the jokes came out. We all looked forward to Vacation Dad.
All I wanted was to hear God laugh.
When I watched The Gospel According to Matthew, I finally heard him. God laughed through the bearded face of Marchiano. This was a Jesus whose eyes twinkled, a Jesus who joked and played with kids. He wasn’t even on vacation, but he was happy.
In John 15:11 Jesus says, “I have told you this so that My joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.”
Christians should be the happiest people on earth.
Yet as Abraham Lincoln’s favorite humorist Artemus Ward said, “To see some people you would think that the essential of orthodox Christianity is to have a face so long you could eat oatmeal out of the end of a gas pipe.”
Marchiano got it.
Holy Laughter
My friend Kevin gets it too.
Kevin battles drugs. He grew up abused by a stepfather who was also a pastor.
The other day Kevin told me of a time at Bible camp when he heard God laugh.
“I just entered the camp, and all of a sudden, behind me, I heard someone laughing,” he said, “and then I began to laugh, and I couldn’t stop. I laughed all night.”
It’s what some call “holy laughter.”
“I just want to laugh again,” Kevin said to me. So I prayed for him, asking my Father to help Kevin laugh again like he’d laughed at camp.
One week later, Kevin opened his Bible and began reading the book of John. As he was reading, he began to laugh. He laughed for three hours straight.
The Spirit of God is so full of goodness and power and light and beauty and love, one can’t help but laugh when one encounters him. There’s just no other response, because he’s so wonderful.
And this is the Spirit we carry around in us. As Sherwood Wirt says in Jesus, Man of Joy,
“Oh the joy that comes when people realize that they don’t have to be religious with God . . . ! All the blessing of the Father, the love of Jesus, and the joy of the Holy Spirit are theirs for the taking. Of such indeed is the kingdom of heaven.”
