We are going to spend the next six weeks or so digging into the Abraham/Sarah/Isaac stories. This sermon focuses on the two stories depicting God's announcement to Abraham and Sarah that she would bear a son and then the birth of her son Isaac. I wanted to focus on Sarah laughing, but I struggled all week to try and develop a sermon from that perspective. As I heard the first Scripture lesson, which was read very well by the liturgist who had just the right emphasis on the interplay between Sarah laughing, God calling her on it, and her denying laughing, I realized that's the part of the story I really wanted to preach!. But, it was too late, so I preached the sermon below. I'll have to come back another time and preach on this interchange between Sarah and God.
As I have begun work on this preaching series, I am reminded of what a great commentary Walter Brueggemann has written on Genesis.
“Laughing As You Go" SAPC, Denton; June 18, 2017 Genesis 18: 1-15; 21: 1-7
Genesis: 21: 1-7 The Lord dealt with Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah as he had promised. 2 Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the time of which God had spoken to him. 3 Abraham gave the name Isaac to his son whom Sarah bore him. 4 And Abraham circumcised his son Isaac when he was eight days old, as God had commanded him. 5 Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him. 6 Now Sarah said, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.” 7 And she said, “Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.”
Introduction: there has been lot of discussion about God’s covenant with Abraham and Abraham’s descendants in the previous chapters (feel free to go back this afternoon when you are done with your Father’s Day celebrations and read through those chapters!).
Promises made by God.
Serious stuff about being God’s chosen people.
If you want to read the official version of how God and Abraham committed to one another, go back to Chapter 16 and 17 of Genesis.
If you want the mysterious, hard to figure out, behind the scenes look at the making of a covenant between God and Abraham and Sarah, look no further than the passages we read this morning.
the first story begins with three mysterious strangers who show up
Abraham extending hospitality to these three, who he will soon discover are the Lord and two angelic persons traveling with him.
The promise of a pregnancy for Sarah at her old age.
and a laugh.
Move 1: a laugh
a. Imagine you are Sarah.
1. You have long given up any thought of bearing a child.
2. You have been uprooted to follow God to new places.
3. you are probably trying to find some solid rock on which to stand as you contemplate your life of faith.
4. Now, God says you are going to have a child.
5. You are an old woman who has given up hope of ever bearing a child.
6. Now God promises one.
5. You cannot help yourself - you laugh.
b. I had a friend who told me that he generally did not trust people who laughed a lot, particularly if they had a big, loud laugh.
1. Since I had just laughed, I decided I needed to follow up on that thought?
2. “You don’t trust people who laugh a lot?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“I think they are hiding something. They laugh to draw attention away from what they’re really thinking.”
3. he might have been right about Sarah.
4. I think her laughter was nervous laughter.
5. Not a belly laugh. a little, nervous titter.
b. Nervous laughter as a spontaneous response to what God has told her.
1. How can she respond to God’s announcement that she will bear a child?
2. What is she to do with this God who keeps pushing her to consider new possibilities?
3. Laughter slips out as she ponders what it means to be connected with the God who makes this kind of outrageous promise.
4. And if she’s nervous now, wait until she discovers what we already know — God will true to that hope and promise.
b. that is the reality with which Sarah has to come to grips.
1. that is the reality with which we must grapple as followers of Christ.
2. God makes outrageous claims and demands, and then is true to them.
2. the the first Scripture lesson we read today, the question is asked: 18: 14 - “Is anything too powerful for the Lord?”
3. not a question from Abraham or Sarah.
4. God asks the question.
5. God asks the question of Sarah, Abraham, and of us: “Do you think there is anything I cannot do?”
6. A question we all might want to keep asking, “do you think there is anything God cannot do?”
7. How we live our lives of faith reveals our answer to God’s question.
8. and as we consider the question, a little nervous laughter might leak out!
Move 2: Laughter is real and organic
a. In the story, Sarah’s laughter shows the human side of things, which is met by the God who appears in the present of the three strangers.
1. A reminder that God is discovered in real and intimate ways.
3. That God desires a real and intimate relationship with us.
b. Sarah laughs and we also are reminded of the human side of faithfulness.
1. Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann notes that “the powerful promise of God outdistances the ability of Sarah and Abraham to receive it (Brueggemann, Genesis, 158-9)
2. these stories in Genesis remind us how challenging being faithful to God is.
c. interestingly, these two stories about the birth of Isaac are sandwiched around the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.
1. Sodom and Gomorrah’s story is surely worthy of its own sermon, so i will merely note that these stories reveal the God of beginnings and endings
1. Abraham and Sarah discover a new opportunity, a new level of responsibility as they make covenant with God.
2. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah reveal the failure of people to live into that responsibility.
3. Abraham and Sarah are overwhelmed at the arrival of the the Lord and the angelic presence in the three strangers and extend gracious hospitality.
4. The people of Sodom and Gomorrah refuse to extend hospitality to the strangers in their midst.
4. Abraham and Sarah move forward into the promise God sets before them; Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed.
5. The God of beginnings and endings we are called to follow.
4. I don’t think there is a set of rules or facts we can learn or accept that make complete sense out of the God we meet in these stories.
5. But the stories hold forth the invitation to be engaged by the God we cannot fully understand; the God of beginnings and endings; to live into the mystery of the eternal.
6. you are invited into relationship with the God we cannot fully understand, but the God who chooses to be present among us.
7. Maybe you are now feeling the need to laugh too!
Move 3: Perhaps God laughs a little, too.
a. Maybe laughs at us.
1. An old Yiddish saying that goes something like, “we make plans, God laughs.”
2. Not nervous laughter, I’m guessing, but maybe a chuckle.
3. Chuckling at our attempts to control.
4. Chuckling at our belief that we can make our own way.
5. Chuckling at our reliance on scientific discovery, as if one day we will have all knowledge.
6 . Chuckling at how how easily we trust in our own abilities.
b. Perhaps God also laughs with joy when we get it right.
1. Meister Eckhart, 3rd-4th century German mystic: Rejoice, O heavens and earth. Truly! Truly! By God! By God! Be as sure of it as you are that God lives: at the least good deed, the least bit of good will, or the least of good desires ,all the saints in heaven and on earth rejoice, and together with the angels, their joy is such that all the joy in this world cannot be compared to it. The more exalted a saint is, the greater his joy; but the joy of them all put together amounts to as little as a bean when compared to the joy of God over good deeds. For truly, God plays and laughs in good deeds, (http://www.unknowncountry.com/insight/god-laughs-and-plays#ixzz4kM5oonhx)
2. When we step out in faithfulness like Abraham and Sarah, when we trust in the hope and promise God offers us, God laughs with joy.
b. Laughs for us
1. God laughs for us in the face of the world and all its challenges.
2. God laughs for us because God knows that God has the final answer.
4. Laughing because the God of resurrection cannot be thwarted.
5. Laughing because God knows in ways we cannot that the hope and promise given to Abraham and Sarah, the hope and promise given to us, is true, this day and everyday. Amen.
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