Providing opportunity for people to express their emotions while teaching from the Bible should be seen in stark contrast from using rhetoric to evoke a superficial reaction.
This is as true for those whose scolding brings a conditioned response of sadness or guilt, as it is for those whose use of glibness provokes laughter.
The experiences of emotion should allow for personal insight, not to demonstrate that the preacher has capacity in producing them.
…humour is something very different from frivolity. People sometimes ask me whether it is right to make people laugh in church by something you say in the pulpit – as if if laughter were always one invariable thing; as if there were not a smile which swept across a great congregation like the breath of a May morning, making I fruitful for whatever good thing might be sowed in it, and another laughter that was like the crackling of thorns under a pot. The smile that is stirred by humour and the smile that comes from the mere tickling of the fancy are a different from one another as the tears that sorrow forces from the soul are from the tears that you compel a man to shed by pinching him.
Phillips Brooks, The Joy Of Preaching, Kregel Classics, 1989, pgs. 58-59.
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