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Sermon - June 15th, 2008
Sarah's Laughter
Rev. Gwen Drake
Scripture: Genesis 18
Prayer: Thank you, O God, for the witness of holy scripture. Through it you nurture our imaginations, touch our feelings, increase our awareness, and challenge our assumptions. May the words of my mouth and meditations of all our hearts, be acceptable in your sight, O God, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
The next few Sundays we will be following the story of Abraham and Sarah in Genesis. Last Sunday, God called Abram and Sarai (same people) from the land they grew up in and grew old in to pack up everything and everyone and move to a new land. They left with a promise of a land without an accompanying deed, a promise of being a blessing to the nations without certainty of his own family’s well-being, a promise of the birthing of a nation without a child of their own. Who among us would leave all that is familiar at an inconvenient time? Who among us would plod along diligently even when they found this promised land already populated and claimed as home by others? Who among us would continue to believe that this promise was a blessing when the move brought conflict, confusion, and chaos to one’s life? Yet God asked Abram and Sarai to set one foot in front of the other on a path that led them further and further away from what they had learned to take for granted. This required great trust. The greater the promise, the greater the trust. They heard, they trusted, they walked.
Ten years after arriving in Canaan, the land of promise, they still had no child of their own. Without a son, the land had no promise. Without an heir, the promise and the land would lie fallow. Abram and Sarai got to the point of putting their trust in that promise aside in order to solve the matter on their own. Out of that decision, came the story of Hagar and Ismael, a story you will hear about next Sunday from John. However, even through that agonizing time, God continued to remember the promise, calling Abram and Sarai to back to trust, to patience, reminding them that God fulfills promises in God’s good time and in God’s good way.
Not only did God call Abram and Sarai out of the familiarity of their surroundings. God gave them new names. They had carried their names with them for almost a century. Their names were their identity, an identity that was routine and habit. For God, giving this couple new names was a reminder that their lives were still cradling new promise. The name Abram meant “the exalted ancestor.” Abram’s new name was Abraham which meant “the father of multitudes.” Sarai’s new name was Sarah which meant “princess.” The rabbis explain the change of Sarai’s name this way: Before she had been a princess to her own people, but now she was princess to all people. These new names promised new birth, both literally and figuratively.
Then God told Abraham that he was going to be a father to a child borne by Sarah. The old man rolled on the ground, doubled over with laughter, and finally blurted something like this, “Hey that’s okay, God, Ishmael can be the one, can’t he? Sarah can’t have a child. Have you forgotten how old we are?”
When Sarah heard that she was going to give birth to a son, the old woman scurried back behind the tent’s flap, so she could laugh in private, questioning how she and Abraham, both past their prime could have the pleasure of creating a child. When God asked Abraham why his wife laughed, Sarah backpedaled into a flight of denial.
In both cases of what seemed like a divine joke on Abraham and Sarah, the laughter has been questioned. Why laugh? My question is: Why not laugh? Okay, the joke was apparently no joke at all. And God told Abraham in no uncertain terms who was having the baby, his wife Sarah. God told him he would name him Isaac. Perhaps Abraham laughed because it was so ridiculous and a bit embarrassing. Why not laugh? Who wouldn’t have laughed. There is something in us that laughs when the limits of reality stretch beyond sense and reason.
So, I do not begrudge Abraham and Sarah for their laughter. The fact that they laughed makes them human. Their laughter indicated their realization that something extraordinary was on the loose. Something so incredulous was happening that laughter was the best, the most honest, and perhaps the most faithful response they could give.
God promised them the gift of a child. Abraham fell on his face and laughed. Sarah snuck away and laughed. They laughed at the thought of such an impossible gift of grace. This gift was promised in the form of something they had long given up. Can you remember when the gift of grace was so moving that you couldn’t hold a smile or resist an ironic chuckle or let loose a belly laugh? Maybe you can’t remember such a gift because we religious people often take ourselves way too seriously. Have we forgotten how to laugh with God? Have we closed ourselves to the possibility of joy?
God promised to grace them with a child; Abraham and Sarah laughed. God did not censure their reaction. Even the question “why?” asked about Sarah did not result in a reprimand. Sarah’s fear resulted in her denial that she laughed. Fear does that to us. Fear can cripple our emotions. Fear can keep us from experiencing the fullness of joy, joy that God brings us. Why not laugh? For laughter belongs in the celebration, and the gift of grace certainly deserves celebration.
It was Norman Maclean who wrote “agony and hilarity are both necessary for salvation.” He was a fly fisherman, the author of A River Runs Through It. David James Duncan is also a fly fisherman who wrote The River Why, and what he calls a collection of “churchless sermons” in a book titled God Laughs and Plays. He was born and raised a Seventh Day Adventist. He had a spiritual upbringing, but not in the church. His connection to the Creator came from creation itself, from birds and their songs, snow covered mountain, lakes, rivers, and spring resurrections. The “intimacy, intricacy and interwovenness” of creation was his spiritual instruction. In fifteen years of churchgoing, he did not feel the same sense of the Presence of God as he did in the wilderness. So he left the church and all organized religion, so he thought. “Then came a night in Medford, Oregon,” he writes. “Having given a literary reading to a warm, sometimes ruccous, not-at-all-churchlike crowd, I was walking to the car afterward when one of the most astute men I know—my good friend Sam Alvord—clapped me on the back and amiably remarked, ‘I enjoy your evangelism.’”
It was ten years after that before he even dared to look up the e-word in The Oxford English Dictionary. He wrote that the definition he found there was, well, using his word, “damning.” He had to admit that because he believes (in his words) “Jesus is the bee’s knees,” and he realized he was spreading the spiritual intent of the gospels. So he wrote, “I must confess, with ‘fear and trembling,’ that I am (gulp!) evangelical.”
He was quick to qualify his brand of evangelism. It’s the kind of evangelism I can live with. It is not about condemning the secular world. It is not about claiming our Bible as the one true book and our faith as the one true faith. It is an evangelism that compassionately rebels against the certainties of zealot fundamentalists. The fundamentalists of every faith, David writes, remain blind to the truth that “The sigh within the prayer is the same in the heart of the Christian, the Muhammadan, and the Jew.” The world’s major faiths have proven in some places and certain times to be able to live side by side in peace. David James Duncan considers it “evangelical and Christian, in the gospel-born sense of these words, to serve this fragile peace.”
So he writes, “My life as a pew-poor, river-rich itinerant storyteller, writing teacher, and churchless preacher has been conducted in mostly playful, but occasionally heartbroken, response to the conservation and cultural crises of my time. My hope is that, despite a few heartbreaks, these words will convey a hint of my ongoing delight in and immense gratitude for this life, this time, this place.”
Abraham and Sarah lived a life of agony and hilarity. They walked upon the land, the promised land, lightly, living side by side with the natives. Father Abraham we call him because he is the father of our faith. He is also the father of the faith of our Jewish and Moslem brothers and sisters.
David James Duncan has the kind of evangelism I can preach. I believe is it also the kind of evangelism we all need to live. It is the evangelism embodied by Jesus, an evangelism of all-embracing love, love for all of creation. Like Mother Teresa’s prayer, “May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.” The whole world. Agony and hilarity will be our salvation. Because if I pray the prayer that Mother Teresa prayed, then I will be praying for a heart open wide enough for not only the people I love and agree with, but the people I dislike—like hate-driven zealots, right-winged fundamentalists, white supremists, certain politicians,…well, I have a really long list of people whom I would prefer NOT to have in my heart, including, oh my gosh, a heart open wide enough for even for my ex-husband to fall in. Maybe this isn’t the kind of evangelism I can live with; but it’s the kind of evangelism I need to live and the world needs to live. It is also a much more heart-breaking kind of evangelism to live. That’s why we need laughter and joy and hilarity. We need to be able to laugh at our selves and our circumstances. Agony and hilarity is our salvation.
Father’s Day, is a day I celebrate with you with many mixed emotions as do many of you. I lost my father when I was 14, I’m profoundly disappointed in my daughters’ father, and I know that there are men who just can’t be good fathers. But today, we pray that God will break our hearts so completely that the whole world falls in. I don’t know about you, but I need this prayer Mother Teresa gave to us because I have this self-righteous knot in me that would prefer some people would burn in hell and the sooner the better. I need this prayer because I really do believe with all my heart that this life we have is a pure gift. It is as pure as the gift that God gave Abraham and Sarah. I have seen the whole world fall into a few, rare hearts, and nothing is more beautiful and no one is more filled with the Spirit.
By the way, Abraham and Sarah never did get over their laughter. At the birth of the promised child, they named him “Laughter,” which is Isaac in Hebrew. He was a child who was a gift of God’s grace. The child called laughter. Thanks be to God. Amen.