A Laughing Matter
Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7
You can feel it in the air. There’s a lightness, an exuberance, a sense of pent-up joy that’s being released. Some of it’s due to the Knicks’ winning the NBA championship last week for the first time in 53 years. I’m not much of a pro basketball fan (UConn all the way), but I have enjoyed watching the reactions of New Yorkers—famous and anonymous—to the Knicks’ winning. At the end of Game 4, a game in which the Knicks came back to win after trailing by 29 points, Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld stood on the court of Madison Square Garden, along with thousands of other fans, mouths agape with looks of utter disbelief on their faces. After the Knicks won it all in Game 5, New Yorkers of all ages erupted in spontaneous cheering at public watch parties, such as the one in Central Park, and at bars and restaurants across the five boroughs. For a moment, a city of 8 million looked like a small town in which everyone knew each other.
Now the World Cup is bringing that same positive energy to much of the country, from L.A. to Miami, from Seattle to Atlanta, and not only because the U.S. team has looked so good. Whether it’s the Scottish fans drinking Boston bars dry of beer, Norwegian fans sitting backwards on an ascending escalator while performing their rowing chant, Brazilian fans turning Times Square into Carnival, or Japanese fans in Dallas trying to get their mouths around Texas barbecue, for these past 10 days the world has seemed a smaller, happier, friendlier place.
And it has been heartwarming to see example after example of Americans practicing hospitality in ways that challenge the notion that we are not open to the world. In Lawrence, Kansas, the University of Kansas marching band serenaded Team Algeria with the Algerian national anthem. In Boston a young Scottish fan lost his passport and returned to the stadium the next day hoping for a miracle, and it was there waiting for him. In Boston! A city not exactly known for its kindness to strangers. Reports abound of gracious and warm welcomes extended, as well as spontaneous acts of kindness shown to foreign guests by regular Americans.
Hospitality is the heart of the first half of today’s reading. Abraham encounters three strangers and goes out of his way to welcome them. He runs from the entrance of his tent to meet them. He commands water to be brought so that they might wash their feet. He has his wife Sarah bake cakes for them of the finest flour. And he has a servant butcher a calf for a savory meal. He then stands attentively by them as they sit down to eat.
Abraham is a model of hospitality, something regarded as a sacred duty in the culture of the Ancient Near East. Even so, in addition to duty, Abraham seems to be acting out of a sense of reverence as well. In that regard, Abraham’s greeting is worth examining. He says to the three travelers (plural), “My lord, if I find favor with you, do not pass by your servant.”
That’s curious, isn't it? There are three of them, but Abraham addresses them as though they were one. No, I don’t believe that Abraham left his glasses in the tent. Rather, we as readers know something that he does not. We are told in verse 1 that it is the LORD who appears to Abraham. The Hebrew word that’s translated as “LORD” is the name for God, YHWH. But when Abraham refers to his guests as “my lord,” he uses a different Hebrew word. Rather than YHWH, the name for God, he uses another word, Adonai, which means “My lord.” Now, “My lord” can refer to God or it can be used as a polite address to a person, in the same way that we say “sir.” It can be read either way.
While the wording seems deliberately ambiguous, Christians have long read this passage as portraying the Trinity—the God who is three and one at the same time. Now, I don’t believe that Abraham, who lived long before Jesus, had any inkling of God’s triune nature. But he does seem to understand intuitively that he is in the presence of something holy.
The holy hidden in our midst is a theme we see again and again in Scripture.
The holy hidden in our midst is a theme we see again and again in Scripture. In the Letter to the Hebrews, the author writes, “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing so some have entertained angels without knowing it” (Heb. 13:2). More notably, in the Gospel of Matthew Jesus says that whoever welcomes a stranger welcomes him.
Regardless of whether Abraham understands who exactly he is hosting, his hospitality becomes the occasion for God’s inconceivable grace. When Abraham’s guests ask for the whereabouts of Sarah, whose name they know even though she has not been introduced to them, Abraham says that she is over there in the tent. Indeed, she is. In fact, hidden behind the tent flap, Sarah has been listening to their conversation with her husband. When she hears one of the guests prophesy that she will have a son, she laughs. She laughs and says to herself, “Are you kidding? Those days are long gone!”
Sarah believes that her time for giving birth has passed, and much time has passed since God first promised Abraham that he would make of Abraham a great nation. Abraham was 75 years old then and had a different name, Abram; he’s now 99. Twenty-four long years have passed without God’s promise being fulfilled. In fact, Sarah got so tired of waiting that she told Abraham to have a child via their enslaved woman Hagar. Through Hagar was born Ishmael.
But God’s promise was for a son to be born through Sarah. And yet that now seems out of reach. Thus, when Sarah overhears her guest speak once more of the promise of a child, she cannot take it seriously.
Unbeknownst to Sarah, while she overhears her guests, she also is heard. Her casual laughter at the thought of bearing a child at her now more advanced age has reached the ears of her guests. “Why did Sarah laugh?” they ask. Why did Sarah scoff at the notion that God could do the impossible through her? “Is anything too wonderful for the LORD?”
Is anything too wonderful for the LORD? What a question! The entire arc of Scripture is one example after another of God working through the unlikely to achieve the impossible. God’s choosing to lay the foundation of God’s people through a child born to a couple collecting Social Security is but the first of many examples of God’s wonderful ways.
God chooses Israel, the least powerful people of their day, a nation enslaved by the Egyptians, to be God’s covenant people.
The entire arc of Scripture is one example after another of God working through the unlikely to achieve the impossible.
God chooses David, the least impressive among the sons of Jesse, to lead the people as king, and as the one through whose lineage will come the Messiah who will redeem Israel.
The Messiah gathers to himself not soldiers but disciples—and not Israel’s best and brightest either but fishermen and tax collectors.
God ordains that the Messiah will achieve victory not by way of earthly power but by forsaking power and by suffering rejection and death.
God’s Holy Spirit entrusts the good news of resurrection, the forgiveness of sins, and salvation to new life not to those who endured the tough times and proved themselves worthy but to those who abandoned him, including the one who three times denied knowing him!
Is anything too wonderful for the LORD? No! No, it isn’t! Even Abraham, who is too old to father a child, and even Sarah, who is too old to bear a child, can be the vehicles through whom God works.
And so can you. And so are you. So are we all. Speaking for myself, it’s ridiculous that God would work through me. Trust me. I know myself…a lot better than you do! I may have some qualifications on paper, but they’re not worth the paper they’re printed on. When I come to the church each Sunday morning, the first thing I do is say a quick prayer thanking God for calling me, of all people, to lead God’s people. This is not false modesty. I never take for granted the absurdity of a sinner like me being used by God. I never cease to find it, in some way, humorous.
I am convinced that humor, while it may not be among the fruits of the Spirit mentioned in Scripture, is nevertheless fundamental to understanding how God works, and therefore fundamental to understanding God, to the extent that our feeble brains can comprehend the divine.
“But, Pastor John, I thought that God was serious business! Just look at how Sarah is scolded for laughing at God’s promise.” Yes, that’s because Sarah laughs in mockery, in disbelief. She is not doubled over with joy and delight. She scoffs.
But there is a kind of holy humor that appreciates the ironic nature of God’s wonderful ways. The gospel ought to make us smile and laugh because it’s good news. That’s what the word literally means: good news. God does not hold your sin against you. You are forgiven, fully and forever. That’s good news!
The Holy Spirit is at work in you, forming, equipping, and sustaining you to live with joy and gratitude. Good news! In Christ there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, Republican or Democrat because all are one. Good news! Because Jesus was crucified and raised from the dead, death does not have the last word over your life. Good news!
In the fall of 2013, shortly after I arrived in South Korea to lead the English ministry of a church in Seoul, I attended the general assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC). The WCC is an ecumenical organization of various Christian denominations from around the globe. The general assembly is held every eight years. Fortunately for me, in 2013 it was held in Busan, in the southeast corner of the Korean peninsula.
One of the exhibits featured an array of crosses and crucifixes in all manner of shapes and sizes, designs and ornamentation, from all over the world. I was struck by one that came from a Mexican artist. The whole thing looked like it had been carved from wood. Jesus was portrayed in a somewhat cartoonish manner, with exaggerated facial features and oversized hands. From the wounds in his hands and feet and the wound in his side there flowed what looked like single teardrops of blood. What drew my attention, however, were not the wounds on Jesus’ body but the expression on his face. Jesus was portrayed as laughing. Yes, laughing!
As I understood it, the artist wasn’t claiming that there was anything funny about crucifixion. Crucifixion was torture. It was the worst form of capital punishment meted out by the Romans. Crucifixion was designed to dehumanize the victim, showcasing their utter helplessness while they slowly bled out or suffocated.
And yet, to portray Jesus as laughing on the cross is to see a holy humor at play. It’s to see God working life even in the midst of death, sowing seeds of hope in the fields of despair. It’s to recognize that God uses the unlikely to achieve the impossible. The child Isaac born to the elderly Abraham and Sarah. Jesus’ death as the source of life. It’s to see sinners like you and me as the vehicles for God’s impossible grace. No, the gospel of Jesus Christ is not funny, but it is a laughing matter…a cause for joy, a reason to celebrate.