Last week we began this extended look at the story of Abraham and Sarah with God’s call to Abraham to leave the land of his kindred and his father’s house and journey to a land that God would show him, with the promise that his offspring would be as numerous as the stars in the heavens and that all people would be blessed through him. This morning we confront the central conflict within this promise of God, which is that Abraham and Sarah have no children, and in their advanced age have no hope for one. And so they are faced with the question of faith that ripples through the pages of scripture into our own lives and the world as we know it: can we trust in God’s promises of a future that seems impossible in the present?
I.
And “impossible” is an apt description of their situation. We’re told Abraham and Sarah were “advanced in years” when all of this happened, and just to make the stakes perfectly clear, we’re told, “it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women,” which is just a fantastic euphemism, and won’t be the last one in this story. Needless to say, it’s quite rare for a couple to conceive and have a child in their late 90s. In fact, rare is not strong enough a word. It’s nothing short of miraculous. Some would even say it’s terrifying!
Sarah is rightly suspicious of these wild promises of God. More than suspicious, I think it’s fair to say she is skeptical. When she hears, through the tent, these mysterious travelers tell Abraham that she will give birth, she laughs to herself. And also to be fair, it wasn’t only Sarah who laughed. Just a chapter earlier, God had come to Abraham and told him this plan for Sarah to give birth to a son and that nations will come from her, and the text reads, “Abraham fell on his face laughing.” Sarah’s laughter feels a bit more complex. On one hand, it’s innocent enough. But there’s surely an edge. When she says, “As old as I am and as old as he is, now I’ll have pleasure,” let’s just say one does not need to be a biblical scholar to get the joke she’s making. She’s being dismissive, perhaps with a touch of bitterness and even a whiff of objection. Is it so hard to imagine that Sarah had put those dreams to rest a long, long time ago, and was not interested in dusting them off again? In any case, hearing her through the tent, God asks Abraham, Why did Sarah laugh? And then asks that central question of faith that scripture will return to again and again: Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?
Are some things simply out of bounds for God? Are there some things that God simply cannot, or perhaps will not, do? Some wounds God won’t heal, some wrongs God won’t right? Some prayers God won’t answer, some hopes that will remain deferred? These are the fundamental questions of scripture because they are the fundamental questions of faith. And if they feel unsettled for us, we can take comfort in knowing that they are unsettled in the pages of scripture. We know this because they keep asking and answering them over and over again—it’s as if the biblical writers keep having to remind themselves, keep talking themselves into it. We don’t need to be persuaded of things we already easily believe.
Sarah, understandably, is a bit embarrassed that her private joke and laughter were heard by her guest. She protests: Oh no, I didn’t laugh!—Oh yes, you did laugh, the Lord says, not letting her off the hook. God, it seems at this point, is not in on the joke. God doesn’t seem to get why she would laugh at this wild promise—but we do.
II.
You do. You’ve almost certainly laughed in a similar way about someone or something that seems out of the bounds of reasonable judgment. All those lessons your grandmother told you about how things that seem too good to be true usually are.
It may be that you’ve even laughed in a similar way at God, out of your own sense of barrenness. This can be a harsh term to our modern ears, but it is such a prominent symbol and metaphor in scripture to describe a sense of hopelessness and a lack of a future. It speaks to the ancient world’s understanding that life and death are communal realities.1 People understood themselves less as solitary individuals and more as part of a lineage—that’s why God would tell Moses, I’m the God of your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. For the ancients, to live, fully and abundantly, is live in the company and love of others, and so to not have people is to cease to live, or at least is felt as such. It’s of the same order of grief today as outliving your peers or of being cut off from your family; even how we seem to bury a part of ourselves with each loved one lost.
For Abraham and Sarah, the stakes were quite high. Though, in truth, they were perhaps not all that much higher than any couple today who’s wanted a child with all their heart but has not been able to. You know that it feels like a matter of life or death.
It’s also true that each of us has our own places of barrenness. Our own losses and disappointments and shame. Promises unfulfilled and prayers unanswered. It’s been said that “laughter is always the laughter of a group.”2 In other words, we laugh from an experience of life and the world that others share. So it’s important to remember that though Sarah was laughing in private, she was far from alone. In a way, we all were laughing there with her.
And though she didn’t know it at the time, so was God. God, it turns out, was in on the joke. In due course, Sarah conceives and has a son. She names him Isaac, which means laughter, saying, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.” The private laugher of bitterness and buried dreams has been transformed into the outward, shared laughter of praise and thanksgiving. Sarah is able to laugh at herself, and even more so, now she’s able to laugh with God, which is such a beautiful metaphor for faith.
III.
There are few things closer to the heart than laughter. When it’s shared with others, it almost becomes its own language. There have been studies examining the language that twins seem to share. How they communicate with each other without speaking; how they simply know each other on such a deep level that words aren’t necessary—just glances or gestures, or who knows what. There’s even a word for it: cryptophasia, literally “secret speech.” Some have suggested that for the rest of us, the closest we will ever get to this kind of deep communication is through laughter.3
In laughter, we share a kind of secret language, connecting with another on a deeper level, understanding each other beneath words. Is anything more capable of breaking down walls? In collapsing the distance between people? It’s mysterious, in a way. How it moves, how it can seem to come from nowhere and overwhelm you. This is why Audrey and her mother can’t sit next to each other in church. One of them gets tickled about something, or maybe about nothing at all, and then the other will start laughing, and soon they’re laughing uncontrollably, and the whole pew is vibrating. It’s worst, I have to say, during funerals, when spontaneous laughter is not a socially welcome response.
But this actually reveals the complexity of laughter, I think. There’s something playfully subversive about it. There’s actually a term for this kind of inappropriate, spontaneous laughter. It’s known as “corpsing,” a term from theater that refers to the tendency for someone playing a corpse on stage to break into spontaneous, uncontrollable laughter. This, apparently, is a historical phenomenon in theatrical production, dating back to Shakespeare. And there have been many theories on why this would happen, but most understand it as a kind of “rebellion of the body.”4 The body is being told to act in this one way, a way that is in utter contradiction to what it understands itself to be. It’s told to act like it is dead, and it resists this, on a subconscious, maybe even spiritual level. And so it erupts in perhaps the most powerful expression of life there is, in laughter.
George Orwell writes, “A thing is funny when—in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening—it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution.” Put another way, laughter can be our response when something violates, in a more or less harmless way, “the way [we] believe the world ought to be.”5
It’s true, I think. Laughter is often our innate response when what we see, or experience, doesn’t align with what we expect. When it doesn’t align with the world as we know it. It was Sarah’s response to a suggestion so far removed from the world as she had come to know it. For her, it was the opposite of “corpsing.” She was being told to play someone fully alive when she had been convinced that a part of her was gone for good. Her body rebells. And yet against her rebellion, God’s joke of a future child comes as a tiny revolution: what seems impossible is not out of sight; what is thought to be dead can live again. Here, very near the beginning of scripture’s story, we’re given a hint of its completion. Laughter may be a revolution, but it can also be a kind of tiny resurrection.
I remember almost ten summers ago now, we packed up to head to the beach with my side of the family for our annual trip. It also happened to be the first vacation we’d all been on together since my mother had gotten remarried the previous fall, some years after my father had passed. Her then-new husband, Dennis, who we loved and still do, had endured his own losses, too. Just two years before, his only son, Brett, had died of a tragic overdose.
So we all gathered in a house rented for the week at one of those Carolina beaches we love. I remember things were a little awkward as we arrived, all of us moving with just the slightest bit of caution, treading lightly, over-apologizing for little things, saying “excuse me” in the kitchen, struggling to make small talk. It was like that for a full day until supper on Thursday, which we had planned to have a luau theme. We all put on Hawaiian shirts and leis, and the kids, who were all so young at the time, danced with each other in grass shirts and seashell bras. After putting the kids to bed, the six of us adults finally sat down at the table together, looking at each other face to face, taking stock, in some unspoken way, of who was there and who wasn’t. We played some card game my sister brought that, I have to say, was terribly vulgar and inappropriate—and thus incredibly funny. Before long we were laughing until we cried, and crying until we laughed, and before we knew it the future that once had seemed so impossible to imagine was suddenly alive among us.
IV.
Last week we had the camera fixed on Abraham in this story, and the journey he was called to, one of leaving home and heading off into the unknown. Today we fix our eyes on Sarah and her journey, which is more personal. It was the journey from laughing at God to laughing with God. This is a special laughter. Not the silent laughter of bitterness, or the nervous laughter of first family vacations, but a deep, hearty laughter that sounds just like the breaking down of walls. Laughter that sounds like wounds healing and flowers growing out of cold earth. Laughter that sounds like new possibilities. Like wombs filling and hearts warming. Laughter so strong it’s been known even to raise the dead.
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1 Walter Brueggemann, Genesis, Interpretation Series. Brueggemann’s commentary was helpful in shaping much of this sermon.
2 Nuar Alsadir, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation, p. 88
3 Michel Tournier, found in Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of the Desire: Reflections on Genesis, 100-101.
4 Alsadir, 66
5 Ibid., 119