Swift Humor.
It's funny how, after four years of education at a Christian institute of higher learning, you’ll still get evangelized. It happened to me my last semester at Calvin. I was studying, and some girls came up to me asking if I had prayer requests. I, like an idiot, said sure. If they could pray for my mentor’s mother who was very ill, that would be great.
End of conversation, right? Wrong.
Somehow the jump was made that I was somehow not a Christian (which I am). Then, we’re in this little prayer circle at 11 p.m., them thinking they’ve gained a new soul for heaven.
This particular old soul on the other hand (a.k.a. me), was too chicken to say something about the mix up. With my disheveled hair, coffee breath, and bloodshot eyes, did I really look so terrible to seem a heretic squatting on a Christian campus? Or was it a good thing, fully in the world but not of the world (to use some Calvinist-flavored lingo)?
This instance reminded me of how, as a child, I had grown up Catholic and had the traditional First Communion in a cherubic white dress, four rows behind my second grade crush. Then, our family became Lutheran, and I had a second First Communion. I hope that God is as mildly amused by the odd circumstances as I was.
It’s instances like that that undeniably point to God’s sense of humor, even around otherwise serious subjects (remember the European wars of religion as an outcome of the Protestant Reformation that broke the Catholic church into different traditions of Christianity). A serious, omnipotent, powerful being; yet even God — I think, I hope — can loosen his white robe and take a joke.
And so must we. In fact, humor and Christianity is nothing new in the church. Ever heard of Jonathan Swift? He was the Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin and wrote works such as Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal. In the latter, Swift proposes the satirical argument of fattening up children to eat in order to resolve the poverty and hunger problem in Ireland. The essay uses satire, the harshest form of humor, in order to convince his audience to take action. He’s convincing the wealthy British elite, Ireland’s oppressors, to take action and implement both institutional change and some damn Christian empathy.
God begets the Word, and, through interpretation of the Word, people established the Church. But people are imperfect, always learning, and, while the Church tries to follow God’s perfect example, it’s easy to fall short of perfectly instructing a flock on how to be the perfect Christian.
So be like Swift, take a chance and speak some truth, even if it stings. Which means for me, next time, I’ve got to be honest about where I stand with my faith with strangers, no matter how awkward.
words by Morgan Anderson and photo by Sara Beth Pritchard