I invite my fellow Anglicans as well as my learned Orthodox friend
@The Liturgist to share their experiences, knowledge, and or reactions to the subject of this thread.
As you may recall, a couple of years ago I relocated resulting in a change from attending an Anglo-Catholic Episcopal parish with high churchmanship which was my entry point into Anglicanism. Now things are quite different. My new parish has lower churchmanship probably best defined as broad church and is decidedly not Anglo-Catholic. There has been much for me to adjust to, but especially now I'm curious about a local practice of celebrating the second Sunday of Easter as "Holy Humor Sunday." This is totally new to me, so I ask is this a thing, a local anomaly, a practice elsewhere in the church, a re-emerging trend, a historical practice lost in antiquity? I am trying to learn about it and sort out my own reactions to it as an admittedly rather stuffy high church Anglo-Catholic.
This explanation from Sunday's bulletin:
For centuries in Easter Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant countries, the week following Easter Sunday, including "Bright Sunday" (the second Sunday after Easter), was observed by the faithful as 'days of joy and laughter" with parties and picnics to celebrate Jesus' resurrection. Priests would deliberately include amusing stories and jokes in their sermon in an attempt to make the faithful laugh. Churchgoers and pastors played practical jokes on each other, drenched each other with water, told jokes, sang and danced. It was their way of celebrating the resurrection of Christ - the supreme joke God played on Satan by raising Jesus from the dead. Early church theologians (like Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, and John Chrysostom) mused that God played a practical joke on the devil by raising Jesus from the dead. "Risus Paschalis - The Easter Laugh," the early theologians called it. The observance of Risus Paschalis was officially outlawed by Pope Clement X in the 17th century. While it's unclear why the tradition faded in Orthodox & Protestant traditions, it has experienced a bit of a revival. In 1988, the Fellowship of Merry Christians began encouraging churches to resurrect this tradition to celebrate the grace and mercy of God through the gift of laughter and joy.
What is your experience, knowledge, and/or reaction? It is all new to me.
Thank you for bringing this up, my dearly beloved brother, for you have struck a nerve as this particular service, which I was aware of,
really ticks me off. Allow me to explain:
I saw this at a UMC parish once, and I didn’t find it very humorous. The whole point of St. Thomas Sunday, also known as Low Sunday in the West or as Antipascha in the Orthodox Church, is the very solemn reading of the text proving that Jesus Christ is indeed risen in the flesh and not an apparition as the Docetists and Gnostics blasphemously asserted.
Holy Humor Sunday displaces that and instead substiutes a carnival-like atmosphere which in my opinion contradicts the instruction of St. Paul the Apostle that all things be done “Decently and in order.” The Methodist elder, who I otherwise liked, made a remark in his sermon about not needing to be “so deathly serious” all the time, but this kind of view represents a misinterpretation of Lent (which is supposed to be a joyous fast) and also of Pascha, Bright Week and Antipascha, which are again, supposed to be exceedingly joyful, but not comical or whimsical. Indeed, even on Great and Holy Friday, there is an Orthodox liturgy, which consists of Vespers and Matins for Holy Saturday, that is joyful, insofar as it celebrates the triumph of Christ on the cross in the spirit of the choral section of Handel’s Messiah following the crucifixion section “Who is the king of Glory?” Only the Tenebrae service, and its Eastern equivalent the Twelve Gospels service (which is very similar in that twelve candles get extinguished like those on the Tenebrae hearse*, which is Vespers for Good Friday (remember, the church day starts at Vespers), and certain Good Friday services such as parts of the Roman liturgy, and in the Eastern Orthodox church the Matins and Royal Hours, are a bit of a tear -jerker. But even then the rest of Holy Week has joyful aspects, for instance, the Bridegroom Matins of the Eastern Orthodox and Syriac Orthodox liturgies (technically the Syriac Orthodox service is a Vespers, and there is only one of them, but it is celebrated at the same time of day as the Bridegroom Matins and has similar wording in its introductory hymn).
So when we start messing with the service of antipascha, the problem is that we undermine the serious joy of the passage that proves that Christ rose from the grave
in the flesh and instead substitute frivolous nonsense.
Now, I should add, lest anyone think that I’m some grumpy, humorless curmudgeon, that I do have a sense of humor which is whimsical, and love a good laugh. I have a number of ecclesiastical jokes; I also particularly enjoy droll British humor, and the satirical Slavic humor and biting Jewish humor (along with humorous terms, for example, an Ashkenazi term for a silly man which I don’t know how to spell). I think I have told a few jokes on CF.com; I’m not particularly disposed to in this thread, because as I said earlier, Holy Humor Sunday really ticks me off. I would suggest to anyone whose church celebrates this to ask their minister what it is about the idea of Docetism they find so amusing as to risk people falling victim to it by taking St. Thomas Sunday and turning it into what amounts to a parody of a worship service evocative of the Festival of Fools in the Parisian culture, at the worst possible time in the liturgical calendar in terms of the signifgiance of the lection on Antipascha. Also, ask them what they think will be the reaction of those who may have been ill on Easter Sunday and unable to attend when they attend that service. Ask them who they think they are to throw out a tradition more than sixteen centuries in age, shared by very nearly the entire Church, in favor of a 20th century innovation which many Christians feel is in bad taste.
I would note that a lovely British lady who attended the UMC church I visited that day apologized to me after the service assuring me that was not how they normally worshipped. And indeed I visited them on several other occasions and normally enjoyed the worship at that church. Their music wasn’t great, but neither was the local Episcopal parish particularly stellar in terms of its musical direction, but it was passable, and the architecture of the parish was lovely, the parish having been constructed by the parishioners themselves. Alas the presbyter, who I liked, retired, and was replaced by a husband and wife team who I heard good things about, but most of the more traditional local clergy were fired by the local district superintendent, including a Hispanic presbyter who was solidly evangelical and had revitalized the church in which I was born, who the DS recently replaced with a very controversial caucasian person who scared everyone away that he had brought in from the local community (which has become predominantly Hispanic), “in the interests of diversity.”
* These services like most of the Paschal liturgies have a common ancestor in the liturgies of the Church in Jerusalem that date back to the fourth century and St. Cyril of Jerusalem, author of the Mystagogical Catecheses, since, because of pilgrimages for Pascha, the Hagiopolitan church exerted enormous liturgical influence over the entire church, as bishops making the pilgrimage would be inclined to introduce rites based on those of Jerusalem back in their own churches
