Celebrating Holy Humor Sunday
By Rev. Shannon Rodenberg
“If we try this thing I’ve been wanting to do since I moved here, will you all support me?” was the question I posed at the staff meeting when I introduced Holy Humor Sunday and how much I missed celebrating it since I moved to Oologah.
“What’s that?” they asked, followed shortly by, “Oh, absolutely!” The choir immediately jumped on board, and when you have the support of the choir, you’ve essentially got it made.
Holy Humor Sunday is not a tradition that I grew up celebrating. I first learned about it when I became a pastor from one of the online clergy support groups of which I am part. The more I read, the more I knew that the church I was serving then, Fairland UMC, would be up to the challenge of learning this new way of continuing the Easter celebration with me.
The first year was pretty mild. We wore our brightest clothing, and I purchased brightly colored balloons for the sanctuary. Over the years, the celebrations grew until Easter 2020 when the most joy we could muster were yellow balloons drawn to look like emojis since everything was suddenly online.
I was reappointed to Oologah right before Easter 2021. In that season of change and getting to know each other, Holy Humor Sunday came and went. I was still trying to earn trust in a new church, but finally, last year, the time was right again. It quickly became one of our favorite traditions as a family of faith. On Easter, people were only a little less enthusiastic about Holy Humor Sunday than they were about Easter!
If you are at a church large enough to have an associate pastor, the joke has been that the Sunday after Easter is “Associate Pastor Sunday.” Others refer to it as “Low Sunday,” since the high attendance of Easter is generally not replicated the following week. The air feels electric on Easter, and there are more people there than any other Sunday, but then the next week, things don’t feel as full of celebration.
According to The Joyful Noiseletter, the origin of Holy Humor Sunday, also known as Bright Sunday, is rooted in the early traditions of the Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant churches who spent the Sunday after Easter as “days of joy and laughter” in which “churchgoers and pastors played practical jokes on each other, drenched each other with water, told jokes, sang, and danced.”
The writings of John Chrysostom, Augustine, and Gregory of Nyssa influenced the celebrations in that they discussed the concept of the Easter laugh (Risus paschalis) or God playing the ultimate joke on the evil of the world by Jesus’ resurrection triumphing “life over death and good over evil.” These earlier celebrations were revived in 1988 by the Fellowship of Merry Christians who renamed the day “Holy Humor Sunday.”
Some ways we have celebrated Holy Humor Sunday in the congregations I serve with:
• Dressing in our brightest, loudest clothing. This year, we had new tie-dye church shirts made that will be perfect for such a celebration. We also have sparkly paper glasses for the kids to wear and will have a tie-dye party with the children and youth in advance of Holy Humor Sunday.
• Buying cheap helium balloons and taping them to the pews. Painter’s tape works well.
• Serving fun snacks. Everyone loves snacks!
• Blowing bubbles. We bought a bubble machine for a dance party during our contemporary worship praise time and gave everyone bubbles to take home with them to remind them that the joy of the resurrection bubbles forth within us, spilling out into the world.
• Telling jokes. We have the confirmands tell church-appropriate jokes throughout the service “What song should you never play before the offering? ‘Jesus Paid it All.’”
• Out of place singing. We’ve sung Easter words to Christmas tunes and this year will sing Easter words to the “Limbo” song.
• Rearranging furniture. Like many good UM churches, the back row is the most popular row in my church. In our second service, which is set up with chairs, I moved the chairs into a hexagon shape, so that for one Sunday, everyone was on the front row.
• Letting creativity shine. I gave the staff new titles (because “Queen of Clean” sounds more fun than “Custodian” and “Baby Whisperer” is accurate for a nursery attendant). These went into the bulletin, which was printed upside down for the occasion.
• Group planning. The choir is cooking up some holy mischief for this Sunday, and I cannot wait to see what that is. Rumor has it that the praise band also has something planned as well.
From reading the descriptions, some people might think this seems like a sacrilegious service; however, over the past few years, my congregation has begun to view things like this: We take our faith seriously, but we don’t always take ourselves so seriously.
Christ is risen! Nothing can change that!
Laughter is one of the greatest gifts we share together as a family of faith, and what better cause for a celebration of uncontrollable joy than Christ’s resurrection?