We are too serious.

Okay, so maybe some of us laugh sometimes. And some of us laugh all the time. And some of us frown most of the time. But most of the time most people have some amount of laughter.

Until we pick up the Bible, that is.

Then, we get serious. Too serious. We look at words and sentences and paragraphs as we do everything we can to find all the meaning we can. We want to get it right.

And in the process of serious analysis, we miss the fun stuff.

And there is fun stuff.

For example, Jesus wants to help an audience understand the problem in judging. (Matthew 7) He wants to help them make no mistake about how silly it is to try to be God, to try to be the one who decides who is right and who is wrong.

So he creates a picture, one that he would know well (Being a carpenter and all).

Imagine a guy in the shop. He’s working along and ends up with a piece of sawdust in his eye. It hurts. It’s a hassle. He asks his buddy for help.

Up to this point, the buddy has been bent over, as if he’s looking for something. And now he turns and we clearly see the baseball bat in his eye. Now, it’s not a bat, it’s a branch. No wait, it’s a log. There is a log in the other guy’s eye.

And as the 2nd guy approaches the 1st guy (in their mind’s eye), people start laughing. It’s more like the Three Stooges than a sermon. This is completely ridiculous. Everyone is laughing at the image of a man trying to look  around a bat.

And then Jesus says “hypcocrites.”

And suddenly, we all get it.