The Grace Of Humour

As Christians, we are people of the resurrection, therefore we are people who love to laugh, who believe that laughter is a wonderfully life-giving, defiant act full of the grace of God. Easter is that which enables us to keep going, even in our moral failures, even when being a servant of the Word is difficult. Those who have kept at the Christian ministry longer than I will confirm the essential virtue of humour... The ability to laugh at life's incongruities, to take God seriously but not ourselves, to embrace the strangeness of [other] people instead of strangling them to death with our bare hands - this is great grace... Humour is the grace to put our problems in perspective,... to be reminded that Jesus really did need to save us, seeing as we have so little means to save ourselves. Humour is just a glimpse, on a human scale, of the way God looks upon us from God's unfathomable grace. By the resurrection, the gospel is enabled to be comedy and not tragedy.

- U. M. Bishop William Willimon