A Commentary on Comedy | Part Four

Collective has kicked off its sermon series titled, Prophets of Comedy. It delves into the idea that comedians are modern day prophets. My job is to give my take on each sermon and featured comedic video. I promise to strive to avoid offense, ask good questions, articulate and explain my responses. I also promise to link the sermon video to the picture above... but we'll see how that goes. ​​​

Ricky Gervais is a funny man who proved what a funny thing the bible can be. This stand up in particular made me laugh. He makes comments on how believable the gospel is from the mind boggling idea that an all powerful being created the heaven and the earth without any previous ideas of what they would be to talking serpents. But it's the gospel right? It's Genesis, the story of the creation of everything! It must be true, right?

I have always had trouble with the bible. I find it incredibly far fetched that the game of telephone that became the bible holds complete accuracy, but further from accuracy I realize that's sacred text holds truth and reference to the good behaviors and the bad. But Gervais's comments on idolatry are not all that far from those that cling to such absurdity and can often be the ones that use the absurdities against people. Erin uses Psalm 23 to discuss literalism and its danger, because if God was literally our Shepard we would literally be sheep. When we use literalism to prove the flaws in others we are only revealing the flaws in ourselves. 

Idolatry is a symptom of something else. People do it in order to better understand things, rendering the essence of God accessible. It's an attempt at understanding, nailing God down in order to understand him better. The Bible brings us closer to God but it is also not a tool for shooting others down. Brian McLaren says that the Bible is a community library. It's a library of questions and answers about God and Christianity. Full of internal debate, it holds the internal debate that all people of Christianity face and our posture towards it declares it an idol, not the actual book itself. The Bible should therefore be treated as something still open to interpretation and growth, rather than literal words that are set in stone. 

We deceive ourselves every time we try to nail down view of God that is presented from a direct reading in the Bible. We also compromise our selves in the process of attempting to change others with words that belong to the sacred text. And we are better than this. The Bible is beyond a singular, right reading of the text. It is a book of all types of literature, a book of wisdom and question. It is words on a page and it is up to us to use it wisely because after all, it is not the guns that kill, it is the people.