TAMPA, Fla. (ABP) — Humor is both Susan Sparks’ heart and her arms to embrace strangers and implode barriers that would keep them from Jesus.
Susan Sparks
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The stand-up comic who is also a pastor and former lawyer embodies a unique combination of skills that welcomes strangers and threatens to break stoic faces into smiles.
“If you can laugh at yourself you can forgive yourself,” she told a gathering of Baptist Women in Ministry during their annual meeting in Tampa, Fla. “If you can forgive yourself, you can forgive others.”
Her background is Baptist – a group that hates sex, she said, because “it might lead to dancing.”
“The second you laugh with someone your worlds overlap and you see commonalities,” she said.
A “scary” childhood religious experience exiled Sparks, pastor of Madison Avenue Baptist Church in mid-town Manhattan, to the wilderness. She found her way back to faith on the strength of core values that were banked like glowing embers even during her exile and a loving Christian community committed to social justice, who demonstrated a Christian faith that welcomes searchers.
She traveled a lot of ground between her exile as an intuitive 6-year-old and her emergence onto the stage as a stand-up comic, the courthouse as a trial lawyer and the pulpit as pastor of an American Baptist church.
But every step took her further from the Baptist church where she checked her vacation Bible school card “No” where it asked if Jesus was her savior.
“I didn’t know what that meant,” she said. Because she said no, she was “marched into the pastor’s office” with her parents, told how asking Jesus into her heart would immediately change her life and she would feel whole and happy and was led to repeat a sinner’s prayer for salvation.
But nothing happened. She felt no flash of joy or relief or euphoria. Suddenly, this 6-year-old child thought of herself as, “I’m not good enough or I did it wrong.”
She didn’t go back to church for 25 years.
In those years she earned a law degree from Wake Forest University, started a practice in Atlanta and endured the harsh glares and blank stares of stage lights and tough crowds when she added “stand-up comic” to her resume in a move to New York.
“Juries respond to humor,” Sparks said. “If you could take a complicated message and reduce it to something short, pithy and funny you would win the day. That’s how Jesus preached.”
She kept her nocturnal adventures separate from her buttoned up law practice life until one night a partner from her firm showed up at the club where she was performing and asked her after, “Where’s that woman on stage, because she’d be a great trial lawyer.”
She incorporated humor and transparency into her courtroom presentations and found new levels of success.
But emotional upheaval from a divorce took its toll. She looked in vain for solace “because I’d left the church.”
One of the public events Madison Avenue Baptist holds to raise its profile is the "blessing of the motorcycles."
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When she “circled back to see how I could reconnect” she found only a judgmental attitude about divorce, she said. She retreated to her childhood delight of fishing in the streams of western North Carolina and hiking in the Rocky Mountains.
She “found reconnection to the holy through nature.” It came “slamming back on me” that “God wasn’t the problem,” she said.
Although living in exile from the church, a seed of redemption planted early had wormed its way into her soul and she actually wrestled with a call to church leadership.
A lucky investment enabled her to spend two years traveling the globe, including a stint in Calcutta working with Mother Teresa and a year isolated in Alaska.
Holding a child blind and deaf since birth that loved to laugh she realized “there is a connection between humor and the sacred made manifest in this little girl.” It was then she knew she had to go home and “bring laughter into the church – kicking and screaming if I have to.”
She gained admittance to Union Theological Seminary in New York and was happy to give up law, but still couldn’t imagine how comedy could be a brick in whatever she was building because “I just didn’t fit the mold.”
She eventually fell in love with an Episcopal church that exuded love, “engaging to anyone who walked in the door.” That made her realize her early bad experience could be an anomaly and that church can be different.
Gaining seminary education was part of her preparation to be able “to put a different face on the church — a face of joy and hope, not judgment and shame,” she said.
Sparks, 48, came to Madison Avenue Baptist as a student intern from Union, was called as associate pastor and became senior pastor when Mike Easterling retired in 2007.
Having been away from the church so long before her return in leadership, Sparks said she sees a lot of people who “want to come back, but are scared” to walk in the door, and “that’s where the humor comes in.”
“I stand in the pulpit with a smile,” said Sparks, seldom seen without a smile. “I always open with something light. It puts people at ease, makes them feel comfortable that this is a safe place. You can just see them relax.”
She still does stand-up comedy to stay challenged and sharp. Sparks has gained a national following working with Bob Alper, a rabbi comic, and Azhar Usman, a Muslim, on a comedy circuit that includes college campuses, mosques and synagogues. Alper and Usman hooked up right after 9/11 and the conciliatory theme between representatives of supposed “enemies” has struck a chord.
When Sparks can join them she is the first face the audience sees. “Most have never sat by someone of another religion,” she said. “Hopefully within the first 30 seconds the whole room is laughing together about a commonality we all share … and preconceived notions just drop by the wayside.”
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Norman Jameson is reporting and coordinating special projects for ABP on an interim basis. He is former editor of the North Carolina Biblical Recorder.
Buy Susan Sparks' book, Laugh Your Way to Grace: Reclaiming the Spiritual Power of Humor.
Read the Christian Century's Q-&-A with Susan Sparks