Here’s the beginning of that list I promised earlier, just for starters- 8 reasons for why I’m convinced God has a sense of humor, in no explainable order:

1. God plays with dirt to make human beings and even heal them (like in the healing of the blind man, when Jesus essentially puts a mud pie on the man’s face and tells the man he’s better).

2. Jesus tells a fumbling Peter who denies he even knows Jesus that Peter will be “the Rock” on which God will build God’s church. We know what happens some time after that: an absolutely ridiculous project bound for brilliant failure: the church, as a rag-tag collection of broken human beings trying their best to live into God’s promises of resurrection for themselves and the world.

3. Jesus turns water into wine and then saves the best wine for last. That’s one of the best practical jokes I can think of- and can you imagine how many people were already laughing by the time the best wine came out? What a riot!

4. In the book of Job, God lets Satan “test” Job’s faith. (Usually, when Satan “tests” you, you can expect things won’t be pretty, and sure enough, Job loses all his possessions, his ten children and his complexion, when he incurs a bad case of boils.) I call that a pretty sick sense of humor.

5. There’s that line in Scripture where “Enoch walked with God; and then he was no more” (Genesis 5:24). That’s some slapstick imagery if I ever saw any.

6. God lets a book like Revelation become canonized Scripture, resulting in centuries of entertainment- all those wild interpretations of number sequences and predictions of the Second Coming and the end of the world that make Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” seem tame by contrast.

7. God tends to show up in the least expected places. You might call this tendency a game of divine peekaboo. The “boo” part tends to elicit at least a smile.

8. There is that verse in Scripture that actually says that “the One whose throne is in heaven sits laughing” (Psalms 2:4).

Got other reasons to add to this list? Send them along!