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I get my fair share of forwarded e-mail,
as I am sure you do, as well. Many are of a religious
nature, especially jokes. Now, I love a good joke. After
all, my family was a joke-telling family. In fact, when it
came to jokes, my family would say that one joke would make
us laugh three times. We laughed when we heard the joke, we
laughed when the joke was explained to us, and then we’d
laugh again when we finally understood it. So keep the jokes
coming. I love them. Here are a couple of my recent
favorites:
A little old Christian lady
comes out onto her front porch every morning and shouts,
“Praise the Lord!”
Every morning the atheist next door yells back, “There is no
God!”
This goes on for weeks. “Praise the
Lord!” yells the lady. “There is no God!” responds the
neighbor.
As time goes by, the lady runs into
financial difficulties and has trouble buying food. She
comes out onto the porch and asks God for help with
groceries, then says, “Praise the Lord!”
The next morning when she goes out
onto the porch, there are the groceries she asked for. Of
course she shouts, “Praise the Lord!”
The atheist jumps out from behind a
bush and says, “Ha! I bought those groceries. There is no
God!”
The lady looks at him, and shouts,
“Praise the Lord. Not only did you bring me groceries, you
had Satan pay for them!”
Or how
about this one?
A friend was in front of me coming out
of church one day, and the preacher was standing at the
door, as he always is, to shake hands. He grabbed my friend
by the hand and pulled him aside. The pastor said to him,
“You need to join the Army of the Lord!”
My
friend replied, “I'm already in the Army of the Lord,
Pastor.”
The
pastor questioned, “How come I don’t see you except at
Christmas and Easter?”
He
whispered back, “I’m in the secret service.”
Here is
a “St. Peter at the Pearly Gates” joke I got last week:
A pastor and a taxi driver both died
and went to heaven. St. Peter was at the Pearly Gates,
waiting for them. “Come with me,” said St. Peter to the taxi
driver.
The taxi driver did as he was told and followed St. Peter to
a mansion. It had anything you could imagine, from a bowling
alley to an Olympic-size pool. “Wow, thank you,” said the
taxi driver.
Next, St. Peter led the pastor to a rugged old shack with a
bunk bed and a little old television set.
“Wait, I think you are a little mixed up,” said the pastor.
“Shouldn’t I be the one who gets the mansion? After all I
was a priest, went to church every day, and preached God's
word.”
“Yes, that’s true. But during your sermons, people slept.
When the taxi driver drove, everyone prayed.”
Now,
maybe you’ve heard this one?
There once was this little old couple.
And when I say they were old… I mean they were old. In fact,
this couple was so old...
How old were they? They were so old
that everything hurt…and anything that didn’t hurt, didn’t
work.
One day, God visited this old couple
in their nursing home and told them they were going to have
a baby.
“A baby? At our age? You’ve got to be
kidding,” they said.
“I’m not kidding. You’re going to have
a baby.”
“But they haven’t even invented Viagra
yet.”
“It doesn’t matter, the baby is going
to come.”
And
now here’s the funny part…they believed!
That
has been our joke this summer, hasn’t it? For seven weeks
now, we’ve been telling it. God promises a child to Abraham
and Sarah. And friends, they are so old…
“How old were they?”
They were so old that when they went
to straighten out the wrinkles in their socks, they
discovered they weren’t wearing any.
It is a laughable promise. And the fact
that they believed it has got to be a joke. And so here we
are at the beginning of chapter 21 of Genesis—nine long
chapters later—and the punch line to this long joke is
finally delivered. Hear these words again:
Now the Lord was gracious to Sarah as he
had said, and the Lord did for Sarah what he had promised.
Sarah became pregnant and bore a son to Abraham in his old
age, at the very time God had promised him. Abraham named
him Isaac.
Break out the Pampers and stock up on the
Gerber’s, Isaac is here. The promised future has been
delivered. The world now knows what the last laugh really
is: God will make good on his promises, even when there is
no evidence, sign or proof. A promise is a promise, and God
fulfills his promises. At long last the baby has arrived.
Laughable indeed.
Even though he was nearly 100 years
old and his body was as good as dead and his wife was
barren, he hoped against hope and nothing made him waver in
his faith in the promises of God. (Paraphrase of Romans
4:18-21)
But before I go any further, I want to
pause and say something. I know that the stories of Abraham,
Sarah and this long-awaited child can be difficult, if not
downright painful, for those who have struggled to get
pregnant, or for those who, like Bridget and me, have lost
pregnancies, as well as for those who are worried that
because of their singleness, the opportunity to have a child
of their own is slowly slipping away.
It might be difficult to listen to these
stories of this promised child without saying to yourself,
“Where’s my promise?” I just want to say that I do
understand some of that pain, and I want to assure you that
the church, and I, are here for you. I want to remind all of
us that Isaac, this promised baby, represents something
deeper and richer than just the miraculous birth of a single
child. Isaac is God’s promised future for all of his people.
Isaac is the symbol that God will deliver a future that we
cannot plan for or predict. So if these stories evoke in you
a sense of loss or pain, I hope that tonight you will
discover a deeper promise, a promise that belongs to us
all.
After seven weeks with these stories,
we’ve yet to see a single sign anywhere that Isaac would
actually come. Twenty-five years are covered in these pages
with not one shred of evidence that God would make good on
this outrageous promise. Abe and Sarah’s journey suggests
that perhaps God does not show up as evidence. Instead God
shows up as the one who offers promises.
Every time Abraham and Sarah are about to
quit….every time everything around them says to give up,
pack it in, that this is just the way it is going to
be….every time there just seems to be no hope, no use or no
light….God shows up speaking the promise. “You will have a
future. You will have a child. I promise.” God is not
present in the world as evidence. God is present in the
world as the one who speaks promises.
Even though he was nearly 100 years
old and his body was as good as dead and his wife was
barren, he hoped against hope and nothing made him waver in
his faith in the promises of God.
Abraham and Sarah had faith that God’s
promise would come to pass in real, concrete, tangible ways.
This wasn’t some spiritualized promise, a nice idea or some
warm, fuzzy God feeling. No, the promises of God are
concrete promises that enter into the realties of our
everyday lives. Isaac was a real baby. God makes good on his
promise in real ways.
We know this as Christians. Jesus wasn’t
just some nice idea. Jesus, God incarnate, was a real, flesh
and blood reality. In Jesus, God entered into the reality of
humanity. Jesus is the reality of God made flesh. It can’t
get more real than that. In fact, God’s promise to enter
into the realities of humanity is so real that Jesus dies a
real death, and God’s promise of a new future is so real
that on that first Easter morning, Jesus’ resurrection is a
real resurrection, not just some nice idea, but a real
conquering over the power of death.
The promises of God are real and
tangible, and we should count on them to be fulfilled in the
here and now. We should resist the temptation to reduce all
of the promises of the gospel as just a recipe for the
afterlife. While it is true that the promises of the gospel
extend beyond this life, that is not the whole truth. To
believe that the promises of God are only spiritual and only
to be experienced in the life to come robs the gospel of its
power to change, transform, heal and empower our lives.
Isaac stands as the great reminder that
God’s promises are touchable and are birthed into the
realities of our lives. Isaac gives us great hope. God can
fulfill his promises right here, right now.
Forgiveness is promised to us, right
here, right now.
Healing is promised to us, right here,
right now.
Mercy is promised to us, right here,
right now.
Grace is promised to us, right here,
right now.
Meaning and purpose and direction are
promised to us, right here, right now.
Furthermore, the immediacy of God’s
promises have profound implications for us as a community,
because Isaac reminds us that God’s promises of peace,
justice and reconciliation—as well as a promised end to
hunger, poverty, homelessness, hatred, violence and
greed—should be expected to be experienced in the here and
now. Faith believes that God promises to transform our
lives, and our futures, in the here and now, not just in the
hereafter.
Even though he was nearly 100 years
old and his body was as good as dead and his wife was
barren, he hoped against hope and nothing made him waver in
his faith in the promises of God.
The faith of our First Family also
reminds us that even though we can’t prove the promises of
God in advance, if we live them, they are true, every one.
Their story makes that pretty clear. In order for Isaac to
ever see the light of day, Abe and Sarah had to do their
part, right? And we know what they had to do, right? (If you
don’t, see me after the service and I will go over a few
things you should have learned in middle school health
class.) Abe and Sarah had to act on God’s promise. They had
to act as if the promise was going to come true. They had to
do their part to make sure the promise could happen. They
lived into the truth of the old spiritual adage, “God can
move mountains, as long as the people of faith bring their
shovels.”
I like
the way Rob Bell puts it in his book, Velvet Elvis:
They hold their action and God’s action
in healthy tension. They understand that they have action to
take, but they also understand that God is at work, as well.
They don’t take a passive route which is to do nothing and
assume that God will miraculously do it all. And they don’t
take a route based on human arrogance, which leaves no room
for the leading and guiding of the spirit of God…There is an
inherent assumption that they are on a journey and God is
with them every step of the way.
The witness of Abraham and Sarah reminds
us that faith is living as if the promises of God are true,
even when everything around you suggests that you’d be crazy
to believe. God promised a baby, so our First Family did the
things to make sure there would be a baby. Likewise, if God
promises peace, then we must live in a way that brings
peace. If God promises forgiveness, then we must live in a
way that leads to forgiveness. If God promises health and
wholeness, then must we live in ways that foster health and
wholeness. We can’t prove the promises of God in advance,
but when we live them, they come true, every one.
Even though he was nearly 100 years
old and his body was as good as dead and his wife was
barren, he hoped against hope and nothing made him waver in
his faith in the promises of God.
I love the story of the church that holds
its Confirmation Sunday on Pentecost. All of the Confirmands
come to the 11:00 service to publicly profess their faith in
Jesus Christ. In addition to their public profession of
faith, they show something of what they learned in their
journey through the class. One year, each of the kids had to
memorize a passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans. They
stood in a line in front of the church, and the pastor said
to the first kid, “George, what shall separate you from the
love of God?”
And George recited Romans 8: “I am
persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor
demons, nor rulers, nor thorns, nor things present, nor
things to come, nor powers, nor heights, nor depths, nor
anything else in all creation will ever separate me from the
love of God in Jesus Christ my Lord.” George beamed. His
parents beamed.
Then the pastor went to the next
Confirmand. “Mary, what shall separate you from the love of
God?” She recited Romans 8. But as the question moved down
the line, the congregation grew anxious, because at the end
of the line was Rachael, a child of grace with an easy
smile, but a Down Syndrome child. Could she memorize Romans
8?
The pastor finally got to her. “Rachael,
what shall separate you from the love of God?” She smiled
that familiar smile and then she said just one word,
“Nothing!”
Even though he was nearly 100 years
old and his body was as good as dead and his wife was
barren, he hoped against hope and nothing made him waver in
his faith in the promises of God.
For twenty-five years they waited for the
promise to be fulfilled. For a quarter of a century they let
nothing shake their faith in the promise. For over two
decades they simply held on—held on to their unwavering
trust that God is a God who makes good on his promises.
So tonight, if you’ve been waiting a long
time for a promise to be fulfilled: have faith….God’s not
finished with us yet.
Or if you are waiting for a new direction
in your life to emerge: have faith….God’s not finished with
us yet.
Or if you are longing for the promise of
peace to descend upon this world: have faith….God’s not
finished with us yet.
Or if you are waiting for the pain of the
death or the divorce or the layoff or the abuse or the
addiction or the disappointment to finally fade away: have
faith….God’s not finished with us yet.
Even though he was nearly 100 years
old and his body was as good as dead and his wife was
barren, he hoped against hope and nothing made him waver in
his faith in the promises of God.
* * * * * * *
Notes: I picked up this great new book,
Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar…Understanding
Philosophy Through Jokes by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel
Klein. It gave me some of the jokes used at the beginning of
the sermon.
Again I am very grateful to Walter
Bruggemann’s commentary on Genesis for help in understanding
the broader themes of the text. I am equally indebted to
Thomas Long, preaching professor at the Candler School of
Theology in Atlanta, for his sermon entitled “Standing on
the Promises,” preached at the Duke Chapel in March of 2006.
I receive the sermons from Duke Chapel every week via
podcast and find them to be good food for thought in my own
sermon preparation.
For those who follow my preaching
sources, know that currently I find the writing and
preaching of Rob Bell from Mars Hill Bible Church out of
Grand Rapids to be a source of great inspiration. It was on
Sunday afternoon, just a couple of hours before the service,
when my wife Bridget, who was reading Bell’s book, Velvet
Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith, said: “Hey, this
sounds like what you are going to say to tonight.” And so,
at the last moment, the Bell quote was added to the
manuscript. Thanks to both Bridget and Bell for their
influences on my preaching. |
