Sermon Tone Analysis

Can I get a laugh?

Why do we laugh?

Anthropologists have been studying that question for years, even centuries.

Freud looked at it.

Darwin studied it.

They, of course, were attempting to probe the question without consideration to a Creator.

But there is something laughter unique to humans.

Laughter seems to be in our DNA.

So much so, that when someone does not laugh when the occasion calls for such, we think: what’s wrong with that guy?

We laugh without consciously prompting ourselves to do it.

We also know a fake laugh when we hear it.

Laughter is used in therapy.

Laughter really is the best medicine, creating positive environments in healing.

Laughter is contagious… it is more often than not, shared in the community.

One person laughs and pretty soon everyone is laughing.

And that brings us to our topic and text this morning.

Laughter is at the heart of the salvation story.

The laughter of our salvation.

If we had not considered it before, our text this morning forces us to reckon with the laughter of our salvation… in the birth of a son.

Sarah is barren

This morning we are with Abraham and Sarah.

By the time we get to Genesis 18, there’s a real problem with Abraham and Sarah.

Abraham and Sarah have been nomads wandering the boundaries of the promised land for more than 30 years.

God promised to make Abraham’s name great and give him offspring as numerous as the sand of the seashore.

But there was one problem.

Abraham has no son.

Sarah is barren.

She has no child.

As we progress through the chapters of Genesis, year after year goes by… more than 30 years after the first promise of the covenant was made to Abraham… what was once a faint whisper, “Sarai is barren” begins to blare like a siren to drown out the story… “Sarai is barren, having no child.”

Abraham and Sarah are getting old.

And there’s no heir.

The Promises hang in the balance.

God shows up

We get to chapter 18, and God shows up.

Abraham throws a grand feast.

This passage says God rests and reclines at the feast.

Something special is going on.

God is about to fix the really big problem for Abraham and Sarah.

The elephant in the room.

The problem of Abraham’s lack of an heir himself.

God Promises

God gets to the point of his visit:

Genesis 18:9-10 ““Where is your wife Sarah?” they asked him.

“There, in the tent,” he answered.

The Lord said, “I will certainly come back to you in about a year’s time, and your wife Sarah will have a son!”

Where is your wife Sarah?

The full weight of the question must’ve stunned the two nomads.

Sarah’s name hasn’t been mentioned by Abraham (at least as far as the text lets on).

She seemingly hasn’t been introduced to the visitors, and yet they know her name.

By invoking Sarah’s name, this story takes on heightened drama.

It is electric.

The fuller picture of the occasion is being brought into view.

God is pulling Sarah into the conversation and into the story.

And then God makes the pronouncement he came for, a Promise for the ages, a Promise that reverberates through history.

There is a promise of a son, but it’s a two-fold promise.

“I will surely return.”

What is inseparable from the birth of a son to Sarah is God’s activity and presence.

“I will surely come back” conveys a sense of personal participation and presence.

God’s presence will result in fertility.

This visit will be at the appointed time.

In the appointed time, God will visit Sarah and she will give birth to a son.

There will be no son if God is not present… a fact, that is necessitated by what follows.

Implied here is a clue of what Abraham and Sarah may have suspected all along: Her barrenness was not a quirk of nature.

Her barrenness was not a physical abnormality.

God had shut the womb to be opened in the fullness of time… for such a time as this.

Such a pronouncement borders on the stupendous.

While her barrenness is attributed to divine activity, in the providence of Abraham and Sarah’s lives that barrenness is taken to an entirely different level.

Sarah isn’t simply barren, having never given birth to a child.

She is beyond barren.

Sarah was passed the age of child-bearing.

She’s 89 years old.

Sarah is too old to have kids.

Yet over against that impossibility, God has just said, “in the appointed time, I will be present among you again, and Sarah will have a son.”

In fact, it’s the impossibility that is precisely God’s design.

The birth of this promised son defies possibility.

The son of promise through whom all of the nations will be blessed over the whole of the earth will be born in a birth that is not of this world.

This birth will be other-worldly.

It can be no other way.

Abraham knows it.

Sarah knows it.

Israel knows it.

The whole world knows it.

The advent of this “son” is utterly and completely of God’s doing.

A Laugh at the Promise

And how does Sarah respond to this?

A ridiculous proposition elicits an incredulous response.

Genesis 18:12 “Sarah laughed to herself"

Sarah’s response is at the heart of this pronouncement.

Sarah laughs.

“Sarah laughed to herself”.

This laugh is one of disbelief, more than likely unbelief.

It is not mocking.

It is simply taking stock of the impossibility and the ridiculousness of the proposition, all things being equal.

The word “laugh” is mentioned four times in these few verses.

God’s promise of the birth of a son, in light of its physical impossibility, is met with unbelief, and the unbelief produces a subconscious reflext, a laugh.

The pronouncement has pulled out of Sarah a response that cannot be concealed.

Her laugh betrays her heart.

Here, in the presence of the divine, Sarah is at the end of herself, but she refuses to let go of those inner thoughts that assert themselves into the equation.

Sarah is not yet ready to concede that God will do this without her help.

Her barrenness, for her, has become the identity of her faith.