Did you know a hearty chuckle is good for your health? Apparently a study by an American University has found that humour and laughter can lower blood pressure, protect the heart, burn calories, increase attentiveness, as well as bring much joy to our lives.
So I want to start this sermon a bit differently today.
I want to take a leaf out of Rowan’s book. Now that’s not Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, I am referring to; but Rowan Atkinson. In the movie Keeping Mum he plays the part of an uninspiring country vicar. But then his mother-in-law arrives and the church begins to hum. She suggests he adds some spice to his sermons. And it certainly works. The normally stuffy and sleep-inducing morning service becomes a place where people want to be.
So here’s a joke… for your health!
A little boy opened the big and old family Bible with fascination, and looked at the old pages as he turned them. Suddenly something fell out of the Bible, and he picked it up and looked at it closely. It was an old leaf from a tree that had been pressed in between the pages.
‘Mum, look what I’ve found,’ the boy called out.
‘What have you got there, dear?’ his mother asked.
With astonishment in the young boy’s voice, he answered: ‘I think it is Adam’s suit!’
Well, it is not often we hear laughter in the church. We tend to put on our serious faces each time we sit down in a pew (they have that effect!); and perhaps for good reason, too. For church is a place which evokes all sorts of emotions: sadness and joy, anger and guilt. And it is a place where we bring before God the sincere concerns we have for those we love and for our world.
The message we speak is also serious stuff.
It is about life and love, and what it means to be human.
But for this very reason I suggest we should expect to hear the sound of laughter in our services. For to be human is not only to live and to love, it is also to laugh.
As one person has said, ‘angels can fly because they take things lightly’.
But what’s more, I want to suggest a hearty chuckle is not only good for your heart, it is also good for your soul. If you don’t believe me I urge you to take a closer look at the Bible.
The Bible, surprise, surprise, is full of humour!
Let me give you a few examples.
In the book of Genesis we find the first chase scene in the annals of comedic history. A fallen Adam and Eve are depicted there as running from an all-seeing God. And a few chapters later, an angel of the Lord tells the straight faced Abraham ‘you are going to have a son’; and listening from behind the curtains, Sarah, who has recently celebrated her ninetieth birthday, laughs.  But the baby is born and they call him Isaac, which means ‘God laughs!’ And Sarah says ‘God has given me good reason to laugh and everybody who hears will laugh with me!’ 
It is hard not to laugh with Sarah. The ancient Jews certainly would have!
But it is not only in the Old Testament we find evidence of humour. Jesus often speaks with a twinkle in his eye. He calls Peter ‘the Rock’ despite him having a less than stable character. He tells stories of judges who give justice only when pestered persistently, businessmen who amass riches only to die the next day, and of priests too precious to help a man beaten up and left on the side of the road. Jesus uses humour to capture a crowd and to challenge the comfortable.
So you see humour does pervade the scriptures, both old and new, and we miss so much when we treat it as a dry piece of outdated literature. It communicates truth with a smile.
And no more is this clear than in the book of Jonah, the first reading for today. This book is bizarrely included with the prophetic texts, for it includes only one prophecy: the denouncement of Nineveh, the great city of Assyria. You would think it better suited to a collection of jokes, for it is chocker full of humour and just gets funnier as the story unfolds.
God says to Jonah, ‘Go east’. And what does Jonah do? He goes west!
God sends a storm to stir up the sea. And while the pagan sailors pray to their gods for help, what does Jonah do? He remains fast asleep, unfazed like a five-year-old child.
Then, when the sailors do cotton on to the fact that Jonah’s act of defiance is cause of the storm, and reluctantly throw him overboard, what saves him from certain death? Is it an angel or a submarine? No, what saves him is a large fish which swallows him whole.
And the farcical nature of this story, like a Marx Brothers movie, just goes on. Jonah spends three days and three nights in that fish’s belly; and when he is finally vomited out on to the dry land, disheveled and disgruntled, looking like someone having a bad hair day, he trudges into the city of Nineveh, muttering his message of doom to a people who get it straight away.
So the Bible is full of humour, and to miss the joke is to misunderstand what is being said. Just like a good story teller, the writers of the Bible use humour to connect with their audiences and to make an important point. Humour is used by them to get across a message.
First, it tells us about God.
In the case of Jonah, humour is used to speak of a generous God; a God who upsets our ordered world and reaches out to those we least expect; a God who sends sun and rain on the just and the unjust; a God who is merciful, more willing to forgive than to condemn.
And second, humour is used to get us to look at ourselves, to consider the inconsistencies in our lives, and to encourage us to grasp hold of the bigness of God’s grace. No-one is excluded.
At the end of our story, Jonah sits under a gourd, a climbing plant like a pumpkin, with a grim look on his face. He is angry and irritable, and just wants to die. But God has the last word. With a smile on God’s face, God says, ‘Jonah, I’d save the city for the sake of it camels and its cats, its rabbits and its rats, its cockroaches and its bats, let alone its people.’ 
So let us add some humour to our lives. Laughter is good for the body and for the soul. And the Bible reminds us that God is not some surly faced spectator, a killjoy always ruining our fun, but is full of surprises, and wants to laugh and love with us, bringing joy and wholeness to our world.
As Bill Cosby says, ‘there is hope for the future because God has a sense of humor and we are funny to God’. So may we laugh with God and learn to fly with the angels! Amen.

A sermon preached in St Alban’s Anglican Church, Eastbourne, on Sunday 21 September 2008, by the Ven Damon Plimmer.