Encounters of the Holy: Abraham, Sarah and a Divine Sense of Humor
Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
March 8, 2009 Lent II
Genesis 17: 1-7; 15-16
Really, how strange it is that we’re here today. How strange that we, educated people of the 21st century, come to submit ourselves to this ancient text. Today, for example, as we listen to the story of God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah, we find ourselves with one foot in the 21st century and one foot in a time hundreds of years before Christ. How can a word from that ancient, ancient world possibly have anything to say to us about our world and our lives? I suspect you all have friends, I know I do, who just can’t believe that you don’t have something better to do with your time than to get up and come here on a Sunday morning. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m real glad you choose to come. I would be real lonely without you. But, there are times when even I’m amazed that anyone is here, open to the possibility that this old, old story might actually be able to shape us, to have an impact on our lives.
But, of course, now that I’ve said that, I need to add that it really isn’t about us – our motivation, our feelings, our need to self-actualization. It’s about God – about what God has done and is doing in our world and our lives, and how we are going to respond to this God. Because, you see, this ancient Word isn’t really interested in being relevant to our world – making sense to our world – in this century or any century. Because no matter what world we might find ourselves in, this Word wants to take that world and turn it upside down, inside out, and open us to something new and unexpected. Folks, it’s after us. It wants to get us – to claim us as its own. In the words of Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, this ancient word is nothing less than, “an invitation to believe and trust and risk and relinquish…to imagine well beyond our reluctant presuppositions.” Again, it isn’t about us. It is about a God who wants to work a new and genuine possibility among us, a new thing way beyond our expectations and our resistance.
So welcome to the world, the brave new world, of Abraham and Sarah, a world where, as all the elderly ladies at the Tuesday morning bridge club are sipping tea and talking about knee and hip replacements, old Sarah walks in pushing a stroller. And you know what? The Biblical word is not the least bit embarrassed by this. It is true, as Brueggemann reminds us, that the Bible regularly confesses more than it understands, and claims more that can ever be explained. And this Biblical exuberance, this unrestrained overstatement, can be an embarrassment to sophisticated, educated, modern people, - and yes preachers – like you and me.
Consider our text, Kristen is right, it’s an absolutely insane story. Abraham was a very old man. When we first meet him he’s seventy-five. God calls him to leave his homeland, pack up his family, and go off to some new land with no roadmaps. And he does it. So much for those retirement dreams of long afternoons spent fly fishing. He is eighty-six when his heir apparent, Ishmael, is born. You recall that story – Sarah is unable to bear a child, Abraham goes to her servant who bears him a son, I mean, you had to have a male heir. Well, when we meet him today, he’s ninety-nine and what do he and Sarah hear – for now, at age ninety, she is made part of the promise. They hear a renewal of God’s Covenant, they are given new names to symbolize that renewal, and then there is that incredible, impossible promise of a child named laughter. And the promise comes true. What are we to make of that? And if you think you are perplexed by this story, imagine what Abraham and Sarah must have been thinking? I love the concreteness of Paul in Romans 4, as he tells us what it was like for this frail old man and this fruitless woman to notice their hopeless, wrinkled bodies that seemingly had no vitality left and then to be totally amazed at their gift beyond rationality and reason.
What are we to make of it? Well, first there’s Abraham’s laughter. God makes an incredible promise and all Abraham can do is laugh in God’s face. One chapter later, if you read on, Sarah will also fall on her face with laughter when she hears this improbable promise of a child. I once heard it said that we in the church are custodians of God’s outrageous promises. Well folks, it’s hard to find a promise more outrageous than this one. And so Abraham laughs. But why? Is it the laughter of cynicism, doubt, disbelief, what one theologian calls the laughter of “Yes, but…”? “Yes, God, but Sarah and I are too old…Yes, God, but she’s never going to get pregnant…Yes, God but we have only Ishmael…Yes, God, but it’s been a lifetime since we have changed a diaper or looked for daycare.” The laughter of “yes, but” – and when you think about it, it’s a sane, sober, logical response to a wild and crazy promise. “Yes, but” means settling for the possible and nothing more. We know how to do that – we’re real good at doing that.
Or could, as Paul seems to suggest in Romans, this laughter be not a denial of faith, but an affirmation. Could Abraham and Sarah be laughing because, for once in their long lives, things might actually turnout to be better than they seem? Rather than the doubting laughter of “yes, but”, could this be the hopeful laughter of, “well, isn’t that something”? Abraham and Sarah, as good as dead says Paul, yet still hoping against hope, daring to believe that there’s nothing too wonderful for God. And so, much to their shock and surprise – and who knows what the neighbors were thinking – Abraham and Sarah found themselves laughing all the way from the geriatric ward to the maternity ward. Says William Willimon, “The cynical laughter of disbelief becomes the astonished, stupefied laughter that comes from the unexpected intrusions of a loving, living God, from the humble recognition that the fate of the world, the significance of our lives, is not left entirely up to us. God is busy, so we are not permitted to give up hope for ourselves or our world.” The laughter of hope and faith. The laughter that comes from the recognition that with God new beginnings – even totally unexpected, outlandish and outrageous new beginnings – are always possible.
So this ancient story makes a powerful statement about faith. But, as I have already suggested, it also makes quite a statement about God. Okay, so perhaps you cannot take the story of Isaac’s birth literally. Perhaps, you just cannot quite wrap your brains around the concept of a ninety-year-old birth mother. And I can hear you saying, fine for Sarah, but Lord, please don’t let it happen to me. I agree that the details of the story are rather hard to take literally, but what about the God we meet there, the God embraced by Abraham and Sarah? What are we to learn about this God? I believe that in this text we encounter a God who essentially throws our cautious and rational “yes, but” right out the window. I mean, look what Paul takes from this text. In what has to be one of the most remarkable assertions in the Bible, he proclaims his faith in a God who, “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”
What does this text tell us about God? It tells us about a God of surplus surprises that outrun our capacity to control or predict or explain. Says Brueggemann, “The God who can work this new life can work new life in every circumstance. The bounds of possibility are broken. This is not confidence in human technical capacity or ingenuity or wisdom, but amazement about the power of life at work beyond our management. Every aspect of life is now set to song and lyrics that invite celebration and amazement.” Can’t take the story literally? Fine, but, as I said earlier, are you prepared to believe and trust and risk and relinquish? Are you prepared to receive God’s newness into your lives, a newness that is against all rational possibility, that pushes against our carefully constructed and rehearsed “yes, buts”? With Abraham and Sarah, are you prepared to hope against hope? Are you prepared, in the words of one theologian, to have, “eyes that see what cannot be seen, and hands to grasp that which cannot be touched” although it is present always and everywhere? Calling into being things that do not exist. It took a while, but finally Abraham and Sarah saw it – that genuine new possibility, that new thing God is working – that God is always working – beyond our expectations.
I really struggled with this sermon this week. I struggle with them all, but I’ve really struggled with this one. Perhaps, because I feel like I’m preaching against my own personality. Because I am a classic “yes, but” person. Perhaps it’s my proud capacity to control, or my fearful need to control. I get so immersed in present realities – budget deficits, crowded calendar, institutional maintenance, leaks in Memorial Hall, human pain and brokenness – I get so immersed in it that I can fall into the mindset that there is really no more than what I can see, explain, manage, control and predict. And when that happens, I don’t hear the song, I forget the lyric. And almost without realizing it I find myself just grimly holding on. And I suspect I am not alone in these troubling and challenging days.
But you see, that is why there is such power in these old crazy stories, why we tell and re-tell them. They are relentless. They reveal a powerful grace, an unquenchable hope, an unexpected newness that assault and break down the “yes, but” of our resistance. We are confronted with those impossible possibilities of God, a God who always seems to want to overcome our tightly disciplined, fearfully guarded notions of what is possible. These stories want us to understand that there just might be more going on in any moment than we can comprehend. This is no conventional God. And this God intends for us no conventional life. Says David L. Bartlett, “Abraham hopes against hope, and God brings forth Isaac from Sarah’s barren womb. Jesus hopes against hope, and God brings forth Jesus from the empty tomb. From Genesis to Easter to judgment day, God gives newness of life and hope. And there is no question about who gets the last, delighted, triumphant laugh.”