Written by C.R. Wiley |
Sunday, July 3, 2022
To produce a feeling of security in those under your care, you truly must know how to keep them secure. A scornful laugh is based not on self-help platitudes but on genuine strength (at least if you want people to laugh with you and not at you behind your back). And naturally, the secret source of a father’s strength, even in the most capable men, is God himself.

One of the best things that a father can do for his wife and children is laugh at what God laughs at.
Now, some things are not laughing matters; for instance, God’s promises should never be laughed at. He’s someone you should laugh with, but never at. Consider Abraham and Sarah — first they laughed at what God said to them, but in the end, they came to see that the joke was on them. And it was a good joke too, good in every way.
He promised them a son in their old age. It was a long-hoped-for blessing, finally given after the realm of possibility had been left far behind. But upon hearing the news, they laughed, and not for joy. And if it wasn’t scornful laughing, it was close to it. Here’s what I mean:
God said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and moreover, I will give you a son by her.” . . . Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed and said to himself, “Shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old?” (Genesis 17:15–17)
We’re not told if Abraham laughed out loud, or just to himself. But his laughter isn’t gladness for news that he’s long wanted to hear. He’s laughing because common sense tells him it’s ridiculous for a man of his age to sire a son.
Sarah’s Snicker
When Sarah hears the news, she laughs too, and in her case there’s no question that she laughs out loud.
The Lord said, “I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife shall have a son.” And Sarah was listening from the tent door behind him. . . . So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, “After I am worn out, and my lord is old, shall I have pleasure?” And the Lord said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh?” (Genesis 18:10, 12–13)
The Lord asks rhetorically, “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” (Genesis 18:14). Embarrassed by her gaffe, Sarah denies laughing, but the Lord won’t let it pass. In fact, he mocks her laughter — and Abraham’s too — by telling them to name their child Isaac, which means “laughter” (Genesis 17:19). As the saying goes, “He who laughs last, laughs best.”
But the Lord isn’t the only one laughing in the end. We see Sarah join in — now laughing for joy at the absurdity of her blessedness. “And Sarah said, ‘God has made laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh over me’” (Genesis 21:6). She goes on to say, “Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age” (Genesis 21:7).
When Contempt Chuckles
We’ve toned down the scornful character of laughter in our time. I suppose it has something to do with egalitarianism — no one should feel bad, or be laughed at, ever. But I think that God knows more about laughter than we do. Can you hear the self-deprecation in Sarah’s final laughter? She’s been humbled and she’s glad. Perhaps there’s a lesson in this for us: those who laugh along with God at themselves laugh best.
I’ve had a hard time finding a reference to God’s laughter in the Bible without detecting a little scorn in it. Take this, for instance: “He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision” (Psalm 2:4). The Lord laughs at kings who are foolish enough to plot against him. The verticality of the picture can’t be separated from its meaning. Without the downward glance, there’d be nothing to laugh at.
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The author is the source of meaning, and the text is the means of meaning. Because the text is public, readers are able to attend to the author’s intention embedded in his words. And good readers attend both to the explicit and implicit dimensions of an author’s meaning.

Picture yourself in a group Bible study. Your small group is studying the book of Ephesians, and you’ve made it to chapter 5. Someone reads aloud verse 18: “Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit.” Then Steve, the new guy, says, “Well, Paul clearly forbids getting drunk on wine. I’m just thankful that he said nothing about getting drunk on whiskey. That’s my favorite way to become intoxicated.”
We all intuitively recognize that Steve is mistaken. We might even think him absurd. But how do we explain his error? My guess is that we would say something like, “Steve, that’s not what the Bible means. Paul intended to prohibit all drunkenness, not just drunkenness from wine.” To which Steve might reply, “But that’s not what the Bible says. Paul mentioned wine only. I’m sticking to the text.” Or he might say, “That’s just your interpretation. I’m talking about what the Bible means to me.”
Learn the Habit of Reading Well
When people ask what I do for a living, I often say, “My job is to teach college students how to read.” This is only half a joke, because the reality is that our educational system and society has left many people incapable of reading well. That’s why, at Bethlehem College & Seminary, our approach to education centers on imparting to our students certain habits of heart and mind.
In all of our programs, we aim to enable and motivate students

to observe their subject matter accurately and thoroughly,
to understand clearly what they have observed,
to evaluate fairly what they have understood by deciding what is true and valuable,
to feel intensely according to the value of what they have evaluated,
to apply wisely and helpfully in life what they understand and feel, and
to express in speech and writing and deeds what they have seen, understood, felt, and applied in such a way that its accuracy, clarity, truth, value, and helpfulness can be known and enjoyed by others.

There is a certain order to these habits. Before you can feel appropriately, you must evaluate rightly. And before you can evaluate rightly, you must first observe accurately and understand clearly. Note this: evaluation depends upon understanding. Without clear understanding of what someone has said or written, evaluation is impossible, because you have nothing to evaluate. You can’t say whether something is true or false, good or bad, until you first know what the something is.
Meaning and Significance Are Not the Same
My own experience as a teacher suggests that there are many confusions and pitfalls around the question of “meaning” when we read a text. Consider this a crash course on the meaning of meaning.
Let’s begin with the Golden Rule: “Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them” (Matthew 7:12). When it comes to reading, we ought to practice Golden Rule Interpretation. That is, we ought to treat authors the way we want to be treated. No one wants his own words treated like a wax nose that a reader can bend according to his will. No one likes to have his words twisted into something he didn’t intend. When we speak or write, we mean something, and we want that meaning to stand—to be understood and respected as ours (even if others disagree with us). And so, given that’s how we want to be treated, we ought to treat authors the same.
To do this, we must distinguish between what the author meant by his words and the effects of his words on subsequent people and events. For clarity, let’s refer to the first as meaning. Texts mean what authors mean by them. The second we may call significance. The author’s meaning can be related to different texts, contexts, concepts, situations, people, places—anything you can think of, really.
Meaning and significance are distinct. Meaning is stable through time; significance may and does change. Meaning is about what authors do in public by means of words (as one theologian puts it). Significance is about the effects of those words on everything else. Meaning is fixed and bounded; significance is, in principle, limitless. When an author writes something, he means this and not that. But significance has to do with the relation between the author’s meaning and this, that, and the other.
With this basic distinction in hand, let’s consider four puzzles in relation to meaning: the source of meaning, the means of meaning, the levels of intent, and the boundaries of meaning. To aid in solving these puzzles, we’ll use Steve’s surprising interpretation of what the Bible says in Ephesians 5:18 as a test case.
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How can churches become more welcoming to blue-collar Americans? The first step involves seeing them as “our people.” Nothing about the decline of America’s working class is irreversible. The middle-brow contempt for the working class must be replaced with a spirit of brotherhood and a sense that we are in the same boat. They are worried about the fate of the country, every bit as much as we are. They have an almost instinctive form of patriotism, just as many Christians do. All of us have souls, struggles with sin and hopes for salvation–these must be boldly expressed through the Christian lens. As the recent trucker rallies in Canada show, if there is hope for our civilization generally, hope lies, as Orwell has Winston Smith narrate in 1984, with the proles. So it is for a Christianity that has always found believers among the lower classes. 

Kvetching about the rise of the religious “nones” distracts from the other challenges of the world increasingly hostile to Christianity. One challenge is that working-class Americans are increasingly unchurched.
It was not always thus. No gap between working class church attendance and attendance in other classes existed before the 1980s. Working class Americans were long faithful Christians. Working class Catholics were the backbone of many urban perishes. During the 1990s, my wife and I lived across the street from a faithful Catholic family with 21 kids and no twins. Fundamentalists in the country were devoted church goers and were much more culturally conservative than well-educated WASPs.
This is no longer the case. Poll after poll and book after book show that a yawning church attendance gap has opened in America. Just under 50% of the college educated attended church, while about 23% of those without college attended according to a study in the early 2010s. That gap has, if anything, widened in the past decade. My Lutheran parish has flipped in much this way: it has gone from a mostly blue-collar parish in the 1990s to a solidly, but not exclusively white-collar parish now. Evangelical churches in my area reflect the same thing.
The church attendance gap reflects America’s ongoing class division. Marriage rates among the lower classes are significantly lower, while cohabitation rates and divorce rates are significantly higher. Suicide rates among those without college education have soared, as has drug and alcohol abuse. Children of the lower classes do worse on standardized tests than the children of the upper class. Working class Americans have a much more difficult time finding and keeping steady work as well.
These are interlocking problems. The old American synthesis of conservative faith and family life combined with economic opportunity seems to be dying or dead. Faithful churches are fewer in number than fifty years ago. Family life and economic opportunity seem increasingly to be privileges of the wealthy.
Churches cannot solve the whole of the issue, but they can do their part. The first step is understanding. Imagine most American churches through the eyes of a working-class or blue-collar American man. He is a powerline worker, a plumber, an HVAC technician, or a roofer. Whom does he see when he enters modern churches? He sees many bookish men—men who read some theology or who are serious students of their professions. He also sees many emotional men, filled with their love of God and their connection to their wives. Christ fills an emotional need for such men—and churches arise to provide a psychological defense of the need for faith. Neither the bookish nor the emotional parishioners are copasetic with our working-class, would-be Christian. Just as he is a fish out of water when people begin to talk about the demands of their desk jobs, our working-class man cannot find a place in the modern church where there seems to be little to no place for the working man.
Seeing him as a “misfit” may be a charitable way of viewing the problem. Churchgoers may, in fact, actively contemn America’s working class. “Those people” may have liked Donald Trump’s “mean tweets.” They do not affect urbanity. They get their hands dirty without the typical middle-class politesse or anxiety.
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