A Methodist, an Agnostic Communist and a Toddler Walk Into a Church...

As you may know, Joe and I don't necessarily share all of the same religious beliefs, and to be honest, we're always still trying to figure our own out in the first place. But Joe's been a very good sport about church attendance in the past 6+ months. (At least in part because it's a good weekend excursion for the Bobinx - a change of scenery that helps us burn off some toddler energy). I am coming to a point with all of this....

So anyway, we go to church this past Sunday, and the topic of the sermon is humor in the church. The preacher, a stand in for the regular guy, is talking about her past career as a stand up comic, and the gospel, yada yada yada, and through no fault of hers, we're catching about a third of this, because we're simultaneously stacking blocks and reading books and feeding crackers to Georgia.

Somewhere in the middle of this, the preacher drives home a line about looking into the empty grave being the punchline. And then all I hear is an exasperated, "Jesus!" being exclaimed by Joe in hushed tones into my ear. Now I'm stifling laughter, telling him that, ironically, I don't think you're supposed to yell "Jesus!" in the middle of a church. I'm also giving him a puzzled look, because I don't understand what the big deal of her "punchline" idea was to him. It kind of made sense to me in the context of (what I caught) of the sermon.

Now we're driving home, re-hashing the whole service as usual, seeing if between the two of us and our poor attention we can piece together the gist of the intended message. And this is when I discover that, while I took the point of the empty grave line to mean Jesus's empty grave, Joe thought she had been talking about each of us looking into our own empty graves. You know, in the morbid, "ha ha - joke's on you - you're all going to DIE" sense of the metaphor.

Jesus H. Christ! No wonder he found this all a bit disturbing. This explains a lot...

[I have no idea if this is coming across in written form as funny as it was to us in real life, but trust me, it was hilarious at the time. Tip of the iceberg in the category of "religious misunderstandings we have known". Remind me to tell you the "I love Jesus/cheeses" story if I haven't before.]

P.S. I was just joking with that post title, but now Joe can neither confirm nor deny whether he is an agnostic communist.