What Is Holy Humor Sunday?

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The Sunday after Easter is sometimes called “Low Sunday,” due to the lower numbers of attendees and the lower spirits after the joy of the Resurrection the previous Sunday. Many churches, including the United Methodists, started celebrating Holy Humor Sunday (also known as Hilarity Sunday, [God’s] Laughter Sunday, or Holy Fools Sunday) on the second Sunday of the Easter season. 
The celebration of Holy Humor Sunday is an outgrowth of Bright Sunday, also known as Risus Paschalis (the Easter laugh) and it dates back to the early Christian church of the first millennium CE. Early church theologians such as Augustine, John Chrysostom, and Gregory of Nyssa coined the term risus paschalis to describe the “practical joke” that God played on Satan by raising Jesus from the dead. The term “Bright Sunday” comes from Bright Week, which is the Eastern Orthodox week of celebration following Easter. 
In 1988, a group known as the Fellowship of Merry Christians “began encouraging churches and prayer groups to resurrect Bright Sunday celebrations and call it ‘Holy Humor Sunday,’ with the theme: ‘Jesus is the LIFE of the party.’” 
Churches in many denominations observe Holy Humor Sunday in creative ways:
“The three congregations in the Crooked Creek Cooperative Lutheran Ministries in Ford City, Pa., had ‘a hilarious time’ at their Holy Humor Sunday service, reported Pastor April Dailey. ‘We encouraged people to wear silly clothes, and did they ever!’ she said. The organist wore a jester’s cap with bells. A choir member dressed like a hillbilly, braided his long beard, wore ribbons in it and came barefoot. Others wore tie-dyed T-shirts and Dr. Seuss hats. One man wore shorts over long johns.”
At other churches around the country, “clowns have acted as ushers and greeted people at the doors. Church sanctuaries have been decorated with streamers, smiley faces and multicolored balloons emblazoned with messages like ‘Smile! God Loves You!’ and ‘Christ is risen! Smile!' Choirs have shown up wearing outlandish clothing – bathrobes, little-kid outfits, rubberized Mickey Mouse ears – and played kazoos and handbells.”
“The Royal Oak church staged a fully costumed series of baseball sketches in a nine-inning baseball service, complete with a chicken mascot cheering on the congregation. Pastor John Miller, dressed in a baseball costume, pitched his sermon from the mound (pulpit) while two relief preachers warmed up in a makeshift bullpen on the side. In the middle of his sermon, a young coach stopped the service, said loudly, ‘John, you just don’t have it today,’ and called for a relief preacher.”
In the spirit of Holy Humor Sunday, I’m going to share the story of the funniest thing that happened to me as a kid. Back when I first transferred to Etown College to finish my undergraduate degree, I was placed in freshman composition even though I’d already been taking 200-level English classes at F&M. The first assignment was a personal essay, and I told this story in that essay. Sadly, this was in 2003, before removable storage for computers† was available, so the essay in its original form was lost when my 2001 iBook died in 2006 or 2007. 
In October 1992, my dad died of lung cancer. I was 9 years old. The funeral was on a Saturday morning, and Mom held the wake at our house immediately afterwards. My best friend Kate, who was also 9, was there, but my dad’s best friends Ray and Tom hadn’t brought their kids, and neither had my two aunts. That left Kate and me as the only kids in the house. 
When this event happened, my mom and the women were in the kitchen and dining room and the men were out on the back porch drinking beer and telling stories. Kate and I were in the living room, probably watching taped episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Most of the adults had said a few words of condolence to me when they’d arrived and then went off to gather with other adults. Kate and I had been chased off the back porch because of the beer (and, I assume, the adult language. These were my dad’s camping buddies/coworkers). 
My neighbor Rick came inside and decided to entertain Kate and me by trying to teach us yo-yo tricks. I’m autistic (but undiagnosed at that time), so I definitely didn’t have the hand-eye coordination required to do any of the tricks he was showing us. I gave up pretty quickly. But Kate made a better showing than I did. 
We’d moved to the top of the bi-level stairs, next to the coat closet, in order to keep from breaking anything in the living room. Rick showed us “around the world,” which is where you throw the body of the yo-yo to the end of the string and swing it around in a 360-degree arc before drawing the body back to your hand. 
Well, Kate took to this trick pretty enthusiastically. She threw out the body of the yo-yo, swung it upwards—
—and hit Rick right between the legs.
He reacted as any grown man would, and Kate and I, having been raised on a steady diet of America’s Funniest Home Videos, started laughing hysterically. Kate actually ended up rolling down the stairs, she was laughing so hard (she was unhurt—there were only 6 stairs). I have no idea what happened after that, other than that the yo-yo was taken away, never to return. 
“Humor can break down barriers by reminding us of our common, flawed humanity,” writes Brett McArdle. “And when we let our guards down, we open ourselves more fully to the possibility of connection with one another.” 
Well, Kate certainly made one kind of connection with that yo-yo… that ended up leading to the kind of connection that McArdle is talking about, between a grieving child and the friend who, it turned out, didn’t need to know the right words to say to be a comfort. She just needed a yo-yo. 

April 9, 2026


† I still don’t understand what a Zip disk was and I was using them in comm classes at this time.  

Holy Week Starts with Protest

There is some context that often gets overlooked when discussing Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on the donkey colt on Palm Sunday. It’s often described as a “triumphal entry” in accordance with prophecy. Jesus, the Messiah, rides into the Jewish holy city to shouts of “hosanna” (literally, “save us”) and the waving of palm branches, on top of cloaks laid on the road as was customary for kings. 
But this isn’t a parade. It’s a parody.
On the other side of the city, Pontius Pilate rides into Jerusalem at the head of an imperial procession of cavalry and soldiers. As governor of the Jewish kingdom of Judea, Pilate has political authority over Jerusalem. His imperial procession is a show of force for the 200,000 or so Jewish pilgrims coming into the city for the Passover. I’m in charge, and don’t you forget it. 
What Jesus is doing on the other side of town is a parody of that show of imperial force: “it is a prearranged ‘counterprocession,’” according to Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan’s incredible book The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus's Final Days in Jerusalem. “Jesus’s procession deliberately countered what was happening on the other side of the city. Pilate’s procession embodied the power, glory, and violence of the empire that ruled the world. Jesus’s procession embodied an alternative vision, the kingdom of God. This contrast—between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Caesar—is central not only to the gospel of Mark, but to the story of Jesus and early Christianity.”
An alternative vision of the “power, glory, and violence” of the government sounds an awful lot like the “No Kings” protests that took place all over the world on March 28, the day before Palm Sunday. In Harrisburg, at least 1,000 people took to the Capitol steps to protest the Iran War, the cutting of social safety net programs, and the unchecked greed and craven power-mongering of President Trump, his Cabinet, and his supporters in Congress. 
Pastor and Dauphin County Commissioner Justin Douglas spoke at the rally, delivering a message of hope. "Compassion for each other, courage to stand up and a commitment to democracy were the ingredients Douglas said were needed in what he described as a historic moment and America [sic].”
Compassion, courage, and commitment to democracy sure does qualify as an “alternative vision” of “power, glory, and violence.” 
Borg and Crossan place Jesus’ protest in the context of the social system of first century CE Judea. Called a “domination system,” it was the most common way of organizing preindustrial agrarian societies. Domination systems had three major common features: political oppression (rule by the wealthy and powerful), economic exploitation (taxation and debt transfer wealth from the laborers to the elites), and religious legitimation (the social order is ordained by God and the leadership has the divine right to rule). 
 
Right now, the United States is functioning more like a preindustrial domination system than a functioning social democracy. Wage stagnation and soaring price increases due to inflation and war transfer wealth from common laborers to corporations and their billionaire owners, who are the only people with the political influence to effect change. Christian nationalists insist that President Trump is “ordained by God” to wage a holy war in the Middle East in order to bring Jesus back to earth. The government terrorizes ethnic and racial minorities, queer and trans people, and the disabled, stripping them of healthcare, food assistance, freedom, employment, and even the right to keep breathing.† 
Jesus came to break the chains of the domination system for his followers and his fellow Jews. He came to bring his people into the Kingdom of God, where they will no longer be exploited and oppressed by greedy, unjust human rulers. So we must understand both the Palm Sunday procession and the Monday “temple tantrum” in the context of political insurrection. 
On Monday, Jesus entered the temple to “drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. He was teaching and saying, ‘Is it not written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations”? But you have made it a den of robbers’ (Mark 11:15-17). 
Christians tend to interpret Jesus’ actions in the temple as a repudiation of animal blood sacrifice, the priesthood, or the temple itself. But in order to put this event in the proper context, we have to look at the ‘den of robbers’ accusation from Jeremiah chapter 7:
“For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave to your ancestors forever and ever. … Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, “We are safe!”—only to go on doing all these abominations? Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your sight?” (vv. 5-7, 9-11)
Borg and Crossan explain that, “in that context the meaning of the phrase ‘den of robbers’ is very clear. The people’s everyday injustice makes them robbers, and they think the temple is their safe house, den, hideaway, or place of security. The temple is not the place where the robbery occurs, but the place the robbers go for refuge.” 
Thus, Jesus is not protesting against the idea of sacrifice or commerce taking place inside the temple. Jesus symbolically “shuts down” the temple to show that God is rejecting the temple and those who worship there because “worship [is substituting] for justice.” And one of the major forms of injustice that is taking place is the priesthood collaborating with the Roman government to oppress the Jews. The reason the “chief priests and elders” end up calling for Jesus’ execution is that he is calling them out for using religion as a tool of oppression and exploitation by colluding with the Empire. 
The beginning of Holy Week lays the groundwork for Jesus’ execution as a political agitator and insurrectionist. Jesus spends Palm Sunday and Holy Monday calling out the Empire and the Jewish religious leaders who are colluding with it. He parodies the Roman governor’s military procession by riding into Jerusalem on a donkey colt, and he shuts down the temple because the temple is using religion to justify oppressing and exploiting the Jewish people in concert with the imperial government. So the No Kings protesters who took to the streets on the day before Palm Sunday were following in Jesus’ footsteps and making “good trouble” just as he did in Jerusalem. 



April 2, 2026




† I originally meant “keep breathing” to mean “remain alive,” but it also can refer to Medicare’s moratorium on durable medical goods, including oxygen. As if either of those things on their own weren’t bad enough.

Did John Wesley Predict the End Times?

While I was doing research for last week’s blog post on the history of Second Coming predictions based on military action in the Middle East, one of the first articles I came across opens with this paragraph:
“What do Harold Camping, Hal Lindsay, John Wesley, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Saint Augustine have in common?  They all made failed predictions regarding the nature and timing of Christ’s return.”
I was very surprised to see John Wesley on that list. Let’s just say that’s not a fact I came across on the official UMC website. So I started to dig into the matter.
Those of us in Craig’s Bible studies have heard admonitions against date-setting. “The Bible teaches that Christ can come at any moment [Matthew 24:40-44; Mark 13:35-37]. (This is called the doctrine of imminence),” writes Chuck Missler of Koinonia House. “Any valid date setting would tend to destroy the doctrine of imminence, and would also have a deleterious effect on our Christian walk. We are to live in the expectation of His any-moment appearance for us.”
That’s why I was so surprised that John Wesley once asserted that Christ would return in 1836. This date can be found in John Wesley’s Explanatory Notes on the New Testament, in the commentary on Revelation chapter 12. So where did he get that date, and why did one of the most pious Christians of the eighteenth century engage in date-setting if the Bible prohibits it?
To answer the first question, we need to first look at the great Evangelical Revival in England in the mid-eighteenth century. Also known as the Great Awakening, it was a movement led by John and Charles Wesley and their colleague Charles Whitefield. According to the Revival Library, 
“The Evangelical Revival was characterized by a renewed emphasis on commitment to God’s Word, to Christ’s Lordship and a personal devotion to Him. It was a reaction against the dry rationalism and formalism that had come to dominate the Church of England. The revivalists stressed the importance of a personal experience of conversion and the need for a heartfelt relationship with God.” 
It goes on to credit the Wesley brothers’ founding of the “Holy Club” at Oxford University in the late 1720s with starting both the Evangelical Revival and the denomination of Methodism. John Wesley befriended a Moravian minister named Peter Boehler and joined a Moravian study group called the Fetter Lane Society. Wesley experienced his Christian conversion at a Fetter Lane meeting in London:
“While listening to a reading of Martin Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans, Wesley felt his ‘heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.’ He described it as a moment of assurance of his salvation through faith in Christ. Others consider it his moment of conversion. This experience would transform Wesley’s life and ministry, leading him to embrace a new understanding of faith and igniting a passion for evangelism that would shape the course of the Evangelical Revival.”
Wesley and fellow Fetter Lane member George Whitefield began to preach outdoors throughout England in 1739. Wesley began forming Methodist societies, which were small groups where people could engage in prayer, Bible study, and mutual encouragement. In 1743, Wesley published the “Rules for the Methodist societies” to guide the many groups that had formed. He also began appointing lay preachers to spread the message of the revival. The revival spread not only throughout England, Wales, and Scotland, but also to the North American colonies, where New England minister Jonathan Edwards became the most influential revival leader in colonial America. 
But how does eschatology play into all of this? Mark K. Olson of wesleyscholar.com wrote a fantastic series of posts on John Wesley’s eschatology. In his second article, “The Revival and Methodist Self-Understanding,” he connects the Evangelical Revival to Methodism’s eschatological identity. “When Wesley declared those now famous words—‘the world is my parish’—he was announcing more than a personal mission; he was defining the mission of the Methodist movement that would emerge under his leadership.” John Wesley “saw Methodism as an eschatological movement to usher in that glorious day [of Christ’s return].” The success of the Evangelical Revival “convinced Wesley that not only a new day had begun in God’s redemptive plan, but a new understanding of this plan now opened up to him. … Early Methodists, including Wesley, believed they were living on the edge of human history.” 
In other words, Wesley believed that the Evangelical Revival constituted “a new Pentecost, a prelude to Christ’s millennial reign, and God’s final antidote to religious nominalism.” This combined with a number of natural events that Wesley and others interpreted as “signs of the coming apocalypse” (war between England and France, powerful earthquakes in England and Portugal, crop failures, unusual weather patterns, a cattle plague, and a possible collision with Halley’s Comet) led Wesley to fall under the influence of postmillennialist Biblical scholar Johann Albrecht Bengel, who claimed that the Second Coming would occur by 1836.
Bengel was a Pietist and New Testament scholar who published a commentary on the New Testament as well as a book on Scriptural chronology in which he explained his mathematical calculations for the time periods mentioned in the Book of Revelation. Wesley cited Bengel’s assertions in his own commentary on Revelation: “1 The non-chronos extends from about 800 to 1836 2 The 1260 days of the woman from 847 - 1524 3 The little time 947 - 1836 4 The time, time, and half 1058 - 1836.”†
In the Failed Predictions article, the author notes that “Wesley found Bengel’s eschatology compelling. At Wesley’s time, 1836 was a ways out. It would be comparable to us predicting that Christ will return in 2100.” And Olson writes:
“Wesley did maintain a high regard for Bengel’s work. Though he entertained doubts about some of the particulars… [he] did not question the core principles of Bengel’s eschatology: historicism, the papal Antichrist, the national conversion of the Jews, and Christ’s postmillennial reign on earth. … As he worked with the text and its message, utilizing Bengel’s insightful exegesis that linked text to present historical realities and beyond, Wesley saw with greater clarity that the Revival and its message of real Christianity was ordained by God to usher in the end-times.”
Wesley’s Notes were published in 1755. Wesley seems to have omitted the date-setting when he preached his Great Assize sermon on the End Times in 1758. As far as I can tell, the only time Wesley engaged in definitive date-setting was in the Notes on Revelation chapter 12. In his other writings and sermons, he does not appear to mention the 1836 date as the date of the Second Coming. It is unclear whether he stopped believing in the validity of the 1836 date or he simply recognized that engaging in public date-setting was unwise. 
In the annals of failed End Times predictions, John Wesley stands out as one of the more innocent perpetrators. He simply received and believed bad intel. He didn’t seek to gain followers or funds by predicting the End Times as so many religious figures have done in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In fact, he believed that the End Times were coming because the Evangelical Revival had ushered in an age of Christian perfection. 

March 26, 2026


† If you want to see how the math was done, the Olson article has an overview and Wesley’s Revelation chapter 12 Notes contains nearly verbatim versions of Bengel’s calculations. Don’t feel bad if you can’t make sense of them. I couldn’t either.

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