08-27-23

ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS
August 27, 2023
I was sad to read about the death of Bob Barker. Like some of you, I grew up with Bob and The Price Is Right. Of course, it was a daytime game show, so I only watched it when I was home sick from school. Bob was a friend on those sick days as I rested and watched… as that was the time before Cable, and there was really nothing else to watch. In later years, Bob Barker made a cameo appearance in the Adam Sandler movie "Happy Gilmore." It made me like Bob even more as it showed a great sense of humor, including a capacity to laugh at himself. When I first saw the movie, I said that I hoped to be able to be like Bob Barker at that age. It is so important and healthy to have the capacity to laugh at ourselves, to participate in some self-deprecating humor, or to spin someone’s teasing in such a way that it sort of disempowers the teasing. In scripture, we meet so many characters who appear to have great maturity and a marvelous capacity to not make it about themselves. I think about Esther, and though we have no example of her laughing in her story, I sort of feel she was one of those people who would have been so comfortable with herself that she would have easily laughed at her own mistakes and blunders.

​May the love you show me, Good and Gracious God, provide me with strength of spirit and mind. Above all things, I want to live with joy and delight, never taking myself too seriously so as to miss that joy and delight. Amen.