Magnolia Presbyterian Church Rev. Deborah Sunoo

September 6, 2009

"The Gift of Laughter"

(Genesis 18:1-15 & 21:1-7)

H. L. Mencken once said "the Creator is a comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh." There is much about the Christian story that is serious, but our faith doesn't need to be somber. One of God's greatest gifts to us is the gift of humor. And certainly the book of Genesis offers plenty of material to keep us chuckling. From God's first encounter with Adam in the garden (comically trying to select a worthy partner for him from the rest of the animal kingdom) to the tabloid-worthy errors of Abraham on his misguided trips to Egypt that we heard about last week. And this morning’s text is no exception.

Granted, for some of us this particular story about Abraham and Sarah is so familiar that we may not be struck as we once were by the absurdity of it all. Frederick Buechner has terrific insight into what is going on in these two chapters from Genesis. So I’m going to treat you to a bit of story time this morning. Let's listen in on the way he sees this couple's life unfolding before them...

The place to start is with a woman laughing. She is an old woman, and [her face shows the signs of] a lifetime in the desert... She hunches her shoulders around her ears and starts to shake. She squinnies her eyes shut, and her laughter is … [full and hearty and] tears [are] running down as she rocks back and forth in her kitchen chair. She is laughing because she is pushing ninety-one 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 by cracking up too. Even the angel is not unaffected. He hides his mouth behind [the folds of his golden robe], but you can still see his eyes. They are [sparkling] 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’s being born in the geriatric ward and Medicare’s 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 had had quite a life, the old pair. Years before, they had gotten off to a good start in Mesopotamia. They had a nice house in the suburbs with a two-car garage and color TV and a barbeque pit. They had a room all fixed up for when the babies started coming. With their health and each other and their families behind them they had what is known as a future. Sarah got her clothes at [Nordstroms], did volunteer work at the hospital, was a member of the League of Women Voters. Abraham was pulling down an excellent salary for a young man, plus generous fringe benefits and an enlightened retirement plan. And then they got religion, or religion got them, and Abraham was convinced that what God wanted them to do was pull up stakes and head out for Canaan where God had promised that he would make Abraham the father of a great nation which would in turn be a blessing to all nations, so that’s what they did, and that’s where their troubles started.

They put the house on the market and gave the color TV to the hospital and got a good price for the crib and the bassinet because they had never been used and were as good as new. Abraham wrote an eloquent letter of resignation to the president of the company and received an equally eloquent one in reply, assuring him that there would always be a job waiting for him if he ever changed his mind and came back. “If he ever regained his senses and came back” was the way the president expressed it in his first draft because though he thought religion was a good thing, like social security and regular exercise, he didn’t think it was something to go overboard about… but in his final draft he settled for the milder wording.

So off they went in their station wagon with a U-haul behind and a handful of friends and relations who, if they didn’t share Abraham’s religious convictions, decided to hitch their wagons to his star anyway. Among the people they took was [Abe’s nephew] Lot. It turned out to be a bad mistake.

The Yiddish word schlemiel has been translated as the kind of person who is always going around spilling soup on people, and a schlemozzle as the kind of person he is always spilling it on, and by that definition, Abraham was a schlemozzle…when they finally limped into the promised land… Lot and his crowd claimed that the place wasn’t big enough for both of them, and Abraham’s crowd said they couldn’t agree more, so, as a way out of the impasse, Abraham proposed that they divide the land in two and each take half. He then made the mistake of telling Lot he could have first choice, and of course Lot chose the half that was fertile pastureland around the Jordan River and Abraham was left with the disaster area around Dead Man’s Gulch. In other words, all of Canaan was the Promised Land, but some parts were more promising than others.

The next thing was the worst. Chosen by God himself to be the prospective father of a great nation, Abraham discovered that he didn’t stand a chance of becoming the father of anything because after extensive medical examinations all the leading authorities agreed that [the couple] was as barren as the real estate Lot had stuck them with.

So the years rolled by like empty [cribs and carseats] until finally when Abraham was one hundred and Sarah was ninety, the angel arrived to make his shattering announcement. He said that when God made a promise, he stuck to it, and Sarah was going to have a boy. Then they laughed. One account says that Abraham laughed until he fell on his face, and the other account says that Sarah was the one who did it. She was hiding behind the door of their tent when the angel spoke, and it was her laughter that got them all going. According to Genesis, God intervened then and asked about Sarah’s laughter, and Sarah was scared stiff and denied the whole thing. Then God said, “No, but you did laugh,” and of course he was right. Maybe the most interesting part of it all is that far from getting angry at them for laughing, God told them that when the baby was born he wanted them to name him Isaac, which in Hebrew means laughter. So you can say that God not only tolerated their laughter but blessed it and in a sense joined in it himself, which makes it a very special laughter indeed – [Creator and creation] laughing together, sharing a glorious joke in which both of them are involved. [from Telling the Truth, pp. 49-53]

... That's the way Buechner tells the story.

Now as you may know, this isn’t the end of the story of Abraham and Sarah and Isaac. Life hadn't been all fun and games for this family up to now, and there would be no simple happily-ever-after for them either. But the sadder elements of their journey are not the concerns of this moment and this episode. The rhythms of the biblical story, like those of life itself, include laughter and tears, comedy and tragedy, ups and downs, and today we are treated to one of the ups. Today we can enjoy the laughter.

It seems to me that there are two reasons for the laughter of Abraham and Sarah, and Buechner has touched on them both. The first, of course, is that the whole scenario is so preposterous. God's promise sounds so unrealistic that they probably wonder if God even believes it himself. Walter Brueggemann reminds us that Abraham and Sarah are not offered as models of faith in this story, but models of disbelief. God's powerful promise so outdistances their ability to receive that promise that they laugh at first only because they don't know how else to respond.

But about a year later, the new parents find themselves laughing again, this time in pure joy at the birth of their child. They laugh because God is a God of surprises. They laugh because with God nothing is impossible, and God fulfilled that incredible promise after all. And, like all parents, I imagine they laugh too at the delightful things little Isaac does to keep them entertained: "Did you see that? He smiled at me!" "Oh how sweet, his first burp." "I think he just said 'daddy'!"

Whether or not they are our own, children are one of the ways God can offer us the gift of laughter. Have you noticed that children laugh a lot more often than most adults do? They have a sparkle, an exuberance, a joyful energy that (while hard to keep up with at times) can also be marvelously contagious. One of the great things about being a part of a church family is that we all get to share the laughter of our children. When we welcome a new child into this congregation, we promise to nurture that child in faith, but we also celebrate the gift of joy we know that child will bring to our church family. Whether their particular age has them gurgling and cooing along with the hymns, sharing their fabulous insights with us during children’s time, or zooming around fellowship hall at coffee hour with their buddies.

When Abraham and Sarah laughed in disbelief at the divine promise, God didn't condemn them for their doubts. Instead God participated in the silliness of it all by fulfilling the promise and bringing onto the scene a little boy called Laughter.

Surely God wants us to enjoy the humor of this and other biblical stories, inviting us to embrace the gift of heavenly laughter wherever else we may find it. Amen.