Shayla: What is the Adonaic view of humor? Should we be a serious and sober-minded people?

Meforshim:

Doing theology is serious and demanding business. However, as David said (at great length!) in Psalm 119, theology should not primarily be a heavy burden but a joyful activity. Isn't that what Hashem also said in Deuteronomy?

· Deuteronomy 28:45-47 HCSB (45) "All these curses will come, pursue, and overtake you until you are destroyed, since you did not obey the LORD your God and keep the commands and statutes He gave you. (46) These curses will be a sign and a wonder against you and your descendants forever. (47) Because you didn't serve the LORD your God with joy and a cheerful heart, even though you had an abundance of everything,

Isn’t a wry, sarcastic tone apparent in Elijah’s tone?

· 1 Kings 18:27 HCSB At noon Elijah mocked them. He said, "Shout loudly, for he's a god! Maybe he's thinking it over; maybe he has wandered away; or maybe he's on the road. Perhaps he's sleeping and will wake up!"

To compare one’s self to Adonai is to become very humble. To be very humble is to not take one’s self too seriously. It is to realize that anything uncomfortable that comes our way is well deserved or can be viewed as a high honor because Yahweh Shaphat has deemed us capable of handling it. We recognize the usefulness of the phrase “this too shall pass.” All of life is ephemeral. All circumstances (whether comfortable or uncomfortable) change. So, Adonaic Christians don’t take things TOO seriously.

Knowing that we are saved from the perils of the Lake of Fire and that through the Spirit we are invulnerable to anything that the world or its temporary master can throw at us grants us the right to remarkable freedom and playfulness. Laughter is a fundamental trait of Adonaic believers.

Humor stems from the discrepancy between reality as expected and reality as it is actually experienced. It grows in the space between what we pretend we are and what others know us to be. It flourishes in the gap between what others imagine us to be and what we know of ourselves. Good humor thrives on incongruity, disproportion, the sometimes bizarre disparity between assumptions and facts, protocol and performance, the imagined and the real. If that is the case, if disproportion and incongruity are the stuff of humor, the life of faith and the work of theology are certainly fields ripe for the harvest!

Note to Shole and needs to be included: As an elder and a teacher I would not personally send it to those I lead, not because I think it's wrong but because many of them think that it is unseemly for an elder of the church and I don't want to cause weak brothers or sisters to stumble.