Through Stained Glass: Choosing to Laugh, a sermon

Grammatical Caveat: Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation (i.e., are written for the ear), the written accounts occasionally deviate from proper and generally accepted principles of grammar and punctuation. Most often, these deviations are not mistakes per se but are indicative of an attempt to aid the listener in the delivery of the sermon.

“Choosing to Laugh”

Genesis 18:1-15, (21:1-7) & Matthew 9:35-10:8, (9-23)

June 11, 2020

Laughter.

The poet Robert Frost said that “If we can’t laugh, we would all go insane.”

Charles Dickens says in “A Christmas Carol, that ““There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.”

The late great poet and activist Maya Angelou said, “I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t laugh.”

Laughter has a way of relieving stress, releasing tension, and restoring hope. The power of laughter, psychologists say, is so strong that laughter decreases stress hormones and increases immune cells and infection-fighting antibodies, thus improving your resistance to disease. I guess laughing is the best medicine.

Today the Genesis text is about laughter. Actually, it is about so much more but the focus for us on Sarah’s laughter.

She laughs because of what the three strangers say, "I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife, Sarah shall have a son." From her tent, Sarah hears these words and does what anyone who is described as “old, advanced in age,” laughs. She has gone all her life with no children, and now, in the twilight years of her life, she will have a child?

Ha.

I was a fifth-grader trying out for the 7^th and 8th-grade basketball team. I wasn’t very big, but I was quick. The tryout consisted of basic basketball drills: dribbling, shooting, and passing. I was not Pistol Pete Maravich, but I could hold my own. At least until the defensive drills. Coach blew the whistle told all of us to get in line behind the free-throw line for defense drills. Wanting to make a good impression, my eagerness prevented me from thinking strategically about who I might guard. Instead of lining up behind or in front of someone like me, I found myself between two eighth-graders who could jump out of the gym! As you can imagine, it didn’t go well for me. I tried to go to the hoop only to have my shot blocked so hard it bounced off the wall. Then, when it was time for me to guard Omar Brooks, well, let’s just say I think that rim is still rattling from his slam dunk. It was embarrassing. But not as embarrassing as what happened next. Overcome with emotions and feeling like I lost any chance of making the team, I started crying. Then, one by one, I could hear the others laughing. As the laughter grew louder, my face turned as red as a Chicago Bulls jersey, and I wanted nothing more than to disappear.

Laughter.

It can hurt when you aren’t the one laughing.

             Did you know Abraham laughed at God, too? It is essential to know this because Sarah is often given a bad rap for laughing at God’s promise initially. It is true. In Genesis 17.17, it says that after God told Abraham [Abram at the time] that God will make a covenant with Abraham which will include many, many generations, Abraham fell on his face and laughed.

Did you know we sometimes laugh to protect our brain from going into overdrive? Take, for instance, those of us who have had to deal with tantrums with children. Psychologists say that human beings are programmed to spring into action when we hear cries of distress, which is why our blood pressure increases during these events. If there is no real danger, say, for example, you're watching a youngster, and they throw a fit because they don’t like that you told them that eating the packing peanuts from an amazon package isn’t going to happen. Laughter in this situation isn’t in a mocking way, but as an attempt to silence the false alarm, your ancient brain is sounding.

Laughter becomes a problem, however, when it becomes mockery.

Which is what I imagine Sarah experienced her entire life. In the ancient world, a woman’s worth was based on her fertility. With no children, Sarah had no power.

Until she laughed.

At God.

And the story changes, the power shifts, and we are told that nothing is difficult for God. God is relational, hospitable, and covenantal. The laughter of Sarah comes from the message that God will bring new life into the world through her, and that this new life will be a great nation, and that God has been, is, and will always be a God who fulfills promises.

The story ends in laughter, kind of. We see that Abraham and Sarah have a child and name him, Isaac. In Hebrew, Isaac means ‘he laughs.’ Here Sarah’s laughter is likely the laughter of joy, rather than the laughter from her earlier, disbelief. Sarah went from laughing for protection to laughing out of joy. A reminder that God is one who is big enough to handle our laughter, because God will have the last laugh always: that love will triumph over death, a new day will rise even after the darkest of nights, and joy will come in the morning.

The part I’ve skipped, an essential piece to this remarkable story from Scripture, is that the reality of God’s new covenant came only when Abraham and Sarah opened themselves and their home up to the strangers who visited. In receiving them, they were able to receive the new word from God—that nothing is too difficult for God.

Is there?

Friends, there is humor here, perhaps even comedy, but it is a comedy in the classical sense, in the way that Dante’s great work was titled the Divine Comedy. This isn’t comedy in the spirit of stand-up routines or canned laugh tracks, but comedy as something so extraordinarily good that it’s hard to believe, something so out-of-the-ordinary that we laugh until the tears stream down. It’s what Frederick Buechner calls “high comedy”: “the high comedy of Christ that is as close to tears as the high comedy of Buster Keaton or Marcel Marceau or Edith Bunker is close to tears -- but glad tears at last, not sad tears, tears at the hilarious unexpectedness of things rather than at their tragic expectedness.”

Is anything too difficult for the LORD? Can God bring life even out of the dry husk that is Sarah, not to mention 100-year-old Abraham, he who was “as good as dead,” as the writer of Hebrews acerbically puts it (Hebrews 11:12)?

Another miraculous annunciation, this one to a young woman, answers the question: “Nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1:37).

Abraham falls on his face in a fit of laughter. Sarah laughs behind the tent door. And the Holy One (I believe) laughs with them at the divine, incredible absurdity of it all. Given the humor of the scene under the oaks of Mamre and the comedy of a God who acts in unexpected ways to fulfill God’s promises, it is entirely appropriate that the child of the promise should be named “Laughter.”

Laughter is good. Laughter can heal. Laughter is what inspired Omar to come to my rescue, wrap his arm around me, and said, “You play good 'D,’ Quine.”