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This is not how we usually think of
worship (image of newspaper ad): “The
splitting of the gut, the slapping of the thigh, and the
peeing of the pants.” But if the topic is Sarah and
Abraham, it makes perfect sense. I can’t do better than to
share Frederick Buechner’s description of the scene:
The place to start is with a woman
laughing. She is an old woman, and after a lifetime in the
desert, her face is cracked and rutted like a six-month
drought. She hunches her shoulders around her ears and
starts to shake. She squinnies her eyes shut, and her
laughter is all China teeth and wheeze and tears running
down as she rocks back and forth in her kitchen chair. She
is laughing because she is pushing 91 hard and has just been
told she is going to have a baby. Even though it was an
angel who told her, she can’t control herself, and her
husband can’t control himself, either. He keeps a straight
face a few seconds longer than she does, but he ends up
cracking up, too.
Even the angel is not unaffected. He
hides his mouth behind his golden scapular, but you can
still see his eyes. They are larkspur blue and brimming with
something of which the laughter of the old woman and her
husband is at best only a rough translation.
The old woman’s name is Sarah, of course,
and the old man’s name is Abraham, and they are laughing at
the idea of a baby being born in the geriatric ward and
Medicare picking up the tab. They are laughing because the
angel not only seems to believe it, but seems to expect them
to believe it, too. They are laughing because with part of
themselves they do believe it. They are laughing because
with another part of themselves they know it would take a
fool to believe it. They are laughing because laughing is
better than crying, and maybe not even all that different.
They are laughing because if by some
crazy chance it should just happen to come true, then they
would really have something to laugh about. They are
laughing at God and with God, and they are laughing at
themselves too, because laughter has that in common with
weeping. No matter what the immediate occasion is of either
your laughter or your tears, the object of both ends up
being yourself and your own life.
(Frederick Buechner, Telling Truth,
page 49)
It’s preposterous, impossible, silly,
foolish, outrageous, laughable. And, of course, so was the
original invitation. Abraham is minding his own business
somewhere in the land of Ur. Along comes God and says,
“Go.”
“Go
where?”
“Go to
a land I will show you.”
So Abe
goes into Miss Sarah’s kitchen and says, “Start packing,
we’re going.”
“Where to?” says Miss Sarah.
“Well, I don’t rightly know…but we will
know it when we see it.”
And the Hebrew writer says:
By faith, Abraham obeyed when he was
called…and he went out, not knowing where he was to go. By
faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a foreign
land.
By faith, Sarah herself received the
power to conceive, even when she was past the age, since she
considered God faithful who had promised.
(Hebrews 11:8-11)
Faith always contains within it an
element of the unknown, the unexpected, the unpredictable,
the impossible, the outrageous, the laughable.
Otherwise it wouldn’t be faith.
So they obeyed and they went, and my
guess is the promise of a land was easier to believe than
the promise of children. After all, there was plenty of open
land around, but children? Well, that was another matter.
All the evidence said it would never happen—they were too
old, too late, not now.
You have already heard about the concept
of “barrenness” in the Bible. By the standards of that day,
there was nothing worse than the lack of children. No
children meant no future, no hope. With no clear concept of
heaven or eternal life, the only way one’s life was extended
beyond the moment was through their progeny, their heirs,
their children. Without children, when you died you were
just dead—zip, gone, kaput, over and done with. So the lack
of children meant the lack of a future, the lack of a hope,
and the end of the promise.
I
would suggest that today in Michigan, there is a lot of
barrenness going around.
We have anxiety about our economic future,
lack of hope for our communities, and are unsure about what
will happen tomorrow. And you know what? That is all true.
But there is another truth that stands alongside the
economic truths, another word which speaks above the world
of business and the economy, the culture and the issues
which confront us.
It is the word of an eternal God who
promises to be with his people, to journey with his people,
to lead his people through the wilderness and to give them a
hope and a future. It is the word of the Risen Christ who
comes to be with us in the midst of doubt and defeat,
through the darkness, and even through death to offer the
promise of resurrection and new birth.
Peter writes: You have been born anew
to a living hope. (I Peter 1:3)
Paul writes to the Colossians: The
secret is simply this: Christ is in you, bringing with him
the hope of glorious things to come. (Col. 1:27)
And to the Romans, Paul writes:
Rejoice in hope; be patient in tribulation. (Rom. 12:12)
A time like this is not the time for the
church to muffle its message or weaken its voice. It is a
time to say with boldness: “We have a hope which is rooted
in more than the economy. We have a Savior who walks with us
through every dark valley. We have a Lord who, in the words
of the Psalmist, can turn our mourning into dancing and our
tears into shouts of joy.”
Maybe Abraham and Sarah got it right.
Maybe faith really is a laughing matter. Maybe faith carries
in its bones the echo of joy that rings through the dark
places and the barrenness of life, bringing hope and new
life.
And
maybe the church really is the place for
the splitting of the gut,
the slapping of the thigh,
and the peeing of the pants.
So back to Abraham and Sarah…
They pack up their beat-up pots and pans
and unused pabulum and perambulator and start off for the
land that God will show them. The years roll by—almost a
decade of years. The pots and pans get rusty and the pram
gets dusty, and nothing seems to happen. Abraham is 100 and
Sarah is 90 when an angel arrives to remind them of God’s
thigh-slapping, giggle-worthy, gut-splitting word. He says
that when God makes a promise, He keeps it. Sarah is going
to get pregnant. Abraham will have a son.
During
all of this, Sarah is hiding behind a door when the angel
comes and she begins to snicker under her breath,
tries her best to contain it,
tries to turn it into a cough like kids
in church when they get the giggles.
It begins to bubble up, uncontrollably,
like Mary Tyler Moore at the funeral for Chuckles the clown:
(Film clip of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the
Funeral of Chuckles the Clown.)
1. Sarah’s laughter is, first of all, the laughter of
disbelief.
It’s the laughter of “No way! You’ve
gotta be kidding! We’re gonna have a what?” It’s clear from
the text that she laughed and he laughed because they simply
didn’t believe it. And it is not always easy to believe
God’s promises. It’s easy to doubt, to disbelieve. I mean,
who would have ever believed that a common carpenter’s son
would become the world’s savior? Who would have ever
believed that Jesus, let alone Peter, could walk on water?
Who would have ever believed that you could feed five
thousand people with five loaves and three fishes?
Who would have ever believed that South
African apartheid would come to an end, or that Irish
Catholics and Protestants would sit down together, or people
would hold hands from one end of Woodward to the other, or
that our measly little pennies could amount to health and
wholeness in Ghana?
It’s impossible. It’s ridiculous. It’s
laughable. It’s the laughter of disbelief, and we have all
laughed it from time to time, haven’t we?
2. But the laughter of disbelief
soon turns to the laughter of faith assured and promises
fulfilled.
Now Sarah and Abraham realize that the
angel believes, and they begin to believe….and sure enough,
God intends to keep his promises, a child is to be born.
Frederick Buechner says:
It starts with a catch of the breath
because the last thing either of them expected to do was to
laugh, and it takes them by surprise as much as it takes us
by surprise. It wells up in their throats like sorrow, only
it’s not sorrow, and it contorts their faces like tears,
only it’s a different kind of tears. Their shoulders shake.
Their faces go red. Their China teeth slip a notch. Sarah
stuffs her apron in her mouth and Abraham gasps for air.
(Telling Truth, page 52)
And they laugh the laughter of eternity,
the laughter of disbelief turned to faith, the laughter of
death overcome by resurrection and new life, the laughter of
a promised future and of hope.
Oh, sure enough, the darkness still
exists, but it is shot through with light. Sure enough, pain
still exists, but in the midst of pain, there is healing.
Sure enough, fear still assaults us, but we confront it with
the calm assurance of God’s final victory. Sure enough,
death still confronts us—the final battle, the last enemy,
and by all accounts, unless Christ returns, none of us are
going to get out of this life alive—but on the other side
there is the promise of resurrection and the eternal
laughter of eternal life through Jesus Christ.
Tears of barrenness are turned to the
tears of joyful song. Tears of uncertainty are turned into
the laughter of the ages. The Psalmist says: “Weeping may
endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning.”
Well, the story ends with Sarah’s final
word of witness: “God has brought me joy and laughter.
Everyone who hears about it will laugh with me.” And as a
fitting final touch, the Genesis writer says they named
their son Isaac, meaning “God laughs” —which is at least to
say that God giggles, God smiles, God slaps his thigh, God
shares the joy, and God himself laughed all the way to the
delivery room.
Listen. Can you hear it?
Listen for the laughter that can be heard
from the very moment of creation—from the first movement of
the Spirit over the waters of the deep, the first burst of
light, the first baby’s cry and God’s word that it is all
good.
Listen for the sounds of joy which
overcome the shouts of fear. Listen for the echoes of hope
which can be heard even in the face of discouragement and
doubt and despair. Listen for the laughter of the Savior
ringing from an empty tomb who says: “My joy will be in
you and your joy will be full.”
Listen—faith really is a laughing matter, after all—and
laugh.
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