A sermon preached at Niles Discovery Church, Fremont, California,
on Sunday, May 28, 2017, by the Rev. Jeffrey Spencer.
Scriptures: Genesis 17:15-19 and Psalm 37:1-15
Copyright © 2017 by Jeffrey S. Spencer
One of the things I enjoy watching as kids grow is the evolution of their senses of humor. A big milestone is the ability to craft a knock-knock joke that makes sense. Another is the ability to craft a riddle. Later comes the ability to craft a joke at someone’s expense – which is sad. One I remember from my childhood (I was the one targeted) was when a classmate asked me, “Hey, Jeff, what are you eating under there?” I wasn’t eating anything, so I said, “What?” “Under there – what are you eating?” I shot back, “Under where?” “Haha! Jeff’s eating underwear!”
Eventually, some kids develop the taste for the pun. This, I deeply admire. Some come to understand how to work the rule of three for comic effect. The rule of three says that events or characters introduced in threes are more humorous, satisfying, or effective in storytelling. Think of the Three Bears in the Goldielocks story, or the Three Little Pigs, or the Three Billy Goats Gruff, or the Three Musketeers. It shows up in slogans, too. Think of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” or “stop, look, and listen,” or the Olympic motto, “Faster, Higher, Stronger.”
The comic triple is effective because it sets up the pattern with the first two elements, and then throws in a third element that somehow surprises – like the classic from The Dick Van Dyke Show, “Can I get you anything? A cup of coffee? A doughnut? A toupee?”
As much as I enjoy a good joke (especially if it’s not done at someone’s expense), the evening I laughed my hardest had nothing to do with jokes at all. We were telling stories after dinner and some of them were funny, so we started laughing. One funny situation reminded us of another, which made us laugh harder. And then we started laughing about how hard we were laughing. It was as if we had reverted to infancy and someone tearing a piece of junk mail would have cracked us up. I was laughing so hard, I fell out of my chair, which made me laugh at myself. I was laughing so hard, I had trouble inhaling. And then I stared laughing about laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe, which made breathing harder. If laughter is the best medicine, I got an overdose that night.
According to the Bible, God also laughs, “but it is not quite the carefree, throw-back-your-head-in-delight laughter I am hoping to share with God. Generally, when God laughs in the Bible, the laughter is derisive. God is laughing at, not with. “The first laughter that sounds in the Bible is laughter God provokes”[1]
We heard it in our first lesson, and to get the joke, it’s important to know that Abraham is 100 and Sarah is 90. God announces to Abraham that he and Sarah are going to have a baby. The New Revised Standard Version does a pretty good job of translating not just the words, but the feeling of the Hebrew. Abraham “fell on his face and laughed.” This is almost vaudevillian slapstick. Imagine Mel Brooks directing the scene for one of his movies. He would bring, as one commentator put it, the “mind-boggling, body-toppling laughter in the Hebrew text” to life.[2]
“Upon hearing Abraham’s laughter, God tells Abraham to name the child Isaac, or Let-Him-Laugh. Translator Mary Phil Korsak argues that this response is, in essence, God getting in on the joke: Genesis does not say directly that God actually laughed in response to Abraham’s laughter, but in telling Abraham to name his son Let-Him-Laugh, God is joining in.”[3]
Notice that so far, only Abraham has the news of this unlikely pregnancy. Sarah gets the news indirectly in the next scene in the story. It’s mid-day and three strangers show up. Abraham does the culturally appropriate thing by welcoming them for rest and refreshment. Of course, this means Sarah has to do some cooking. While she’s in the tent making some cakes, one of the strangers tells Abraham that the next time the stranger comes to visit, Sarah will have a son. Sarah was listening at the tent entrance, so she overhears.
Her response was much like Abraham’s was. She laughs. But the Hebrew says that she laughs “inwardly.” “Rashi, the great eleventh-century biblical interpreter, said that Sarah’s laughter was ‘inward’ in two ways – she was laughing to herself, but she was also laughing at herself, at her dried-up inner parts. Sarah had just performed dazzling hospitality, whipping up cakes for three visitors she hadn’t been expecting, but her womb, she thought, was inhospitable, and she laughed at it, scornfully.
“God, who had seemed delighted with Abraham’s laugher, responds differently to Sarah’s laughing. Rather than joining in with Sarah, God once more talks to her husband. ‘The Lord said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh, and say, ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?’ Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? At the set time I will return to you, in due season, and Sarah shall have a son.’…
“What is wrong, to God’s ears, with Sarah’s laughter? And what is right about Abraham’s laughter? Rashi says the problem lies in a distinction between two kinds of laughter – his is joyful, and hers is scornful.… “Sarah will laugh again later, once Isaac is born. This second laughter is joyful and expands to include multitudes: [From later in Genesis:] ‘Now Sarah said, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.”’”[4]
Lauren Winner offers an interesting analysis of this story. “Typically, the three episodes of laughter in the story of Isaac’s conception and birth are assessed as good and faithful (Abraham’s laughter, in which God joins, and Sarah’s final laughter,…) or bad, untrusting, and shamefully doubtful (Sarah’s initial laughter, upon overhearing her guest’s prediction). But when we think about God’s own laughter in the scriptures, our assessment might change. God will never again laugh the way Abraham laughs – joyful and mirth-filled hilarity. Instead, God will laugh derisively and scornfully at God’s enemies. If derision directed at God’s enemy is the paradigm for divine laughter, it seems that it is Sarah, not Abraham, who is laughing like God. Put starkly, she is laughing scornfully at something that (she thinks) will interfere with God’s program – her own womb. Without quite understanding what she is doing (and therefore unable to give a correct account of it when asked), she is laughing at the limitations she perceives in herself; at what she thinks she knows about her own body; at the self she thinks is not fit for God’s designs. Yet through the laughing, she is transformed – it is Sarah’s scornful laughter (and her denial thereof) that brings about God’s direct communication with her and that opens her up to participation in God’s admittedly [ridiculous] plan.”[5]
We need simply turn to the Psalms to get a taste of God’s scornful and derisive laughter. In Psalms 2, 37, and 59, God laughs because of evildoers and plotters of injustice. In fact, God laughs at evildoers and plotters of injustice. If you weren’t listening for it, you might have missed the reference to God’s laughter in our reading from Psalm 37.
“The wicked plot against the righteous,
and gnash their teeth at them;
But the Lord laughs at the wicked,
for he sees that their day is coming.”
“In Psalm 59, the enemies of the psalmist are crowding around yelling violent things, and God meets them with a mouth full of scathing laughter.”[6] And in Psalm 2, God laughs at the political rulers for their plotting against righteousness. Winner says, “God is laughing [in these Psalms] because God knows the right ordering of the cosmos, the final ordering: God knows that ultimately the unjust will not triumph.”[7]
“The psalmist’s notion that God laughs at those who want to thwart God’s aims is consistent with that most striking biblical proclamation about laughter: those who weep now will laugh later, Jesus says in his sermon on the plain [in Luke’s gospel], and those who laugh now will weep later.”[8]
I agree with Winner, that “the laughter of God is inseparable from God’s justice. In the here and now, the kinds of laughter that friends of God pursue is laughter that is proleptic – laughter that hints at, or partakes of, the world to come. The best laughter now is laughter that bespeaks a heaven in which those who have been made to weep by earthly rulers will, in the fullness of time, heartily laugh. In other words, laughter is political. Laugher arranges power, and God provokes us to laugh as testimony – testimony to our belief in a God who is ruling over a calamitous or oppressive situation, despite all signs to the contrary.”[9]
In late April, there were to big marches in Washington, D.C. One was a march for science and the other a march about climate change. There were sibling marches and rallies around the globe, including here in the Bay Area, which I attended. My favorite part of both events were the creative, humorous signs. I got pictures of a few of them.
And thanks to the internet, I’ve been amused by some others.
This guy has his priorities.
Chant it with me.
And then there were the signs with puns:
And, I think my favorite:
Winner tells us, “Scholars who study the role of laughter in protest say laughing serves several ends. Laughter binds together oppressed people and expresses criticism of dominant institutions. Laughter alleviates the stress and tension of political organizing and protest, and can ‘defuse threatening situations.’ Costumes and funny songs also command observers’ attention (and garner media coverage), perhaps more than a humorless rally with only serious signs and ponderous speakers.…
“When read through a biblical scrim, laughing during a political protest seems to do something even greater than what the sociologists and humorologists enumerate. Laughter indeed relieves stress and forges bonds. But it is also a sign of defiance, a sign that the ruler who rules unjustly is not ultimately in control. Because it is hard to laugh when you are terrified or furious, laughter fosters (and proclaims) confidence. If those who laugh now will weep later, and those who weep now will laugh later, then saying that God laughs and provokes laughter is synonymous with saying that God overturns the hierarchies of the world. That overturning will make you laugh or cry, depending on where you sit.”[10]
A little over 100 years ago, the French painter Georges Rouault went through a period where he painted clowns. His “contemporaries noticed resonances between his paintings of clowns and his paintings of Jesus, between pieces like Head of a Tragic Clown (1904-1905) and Head of Jesus (1905); Rouault’s depictions of costumed harlequins and of the savior of the world had begun to resemble one another. Rouault’s ‘clowns have the faces of Christ ravaged and sublime,’ wrote novelist Francois Mauriac.
“Head of a Tragic Clown” 1904-05
“Head of Christ” 1905
“Rouault was taking up a long-standing, if quiet, tradition in the church: the idea of Jesus as a clown. Arguable, that tradition goes all the way back to Paul, who reminded the Corinthians that the world deemed ‘foolish’ the things of Christ and that disciples were to indeed be ‘fools’ for Christ. In those verses, Christians have discerned a suggestion that Jesus Himself is a holy fool or a trickster. Rouault’s clowning Christs expressed at least two true things about Jesus: Jesus is the marginal wayfarer, and Jesus specializes, as clowns do, in interruptions, in behavior that violates etiquette and social norms, in impropriety, surprises, and mockery of convention.
“Jesus interrupts the normal order of things before He is even born – what is the Virgin Birth if not a transgression of the normal order? Throughout His life, in His teaching and preaching and friendships, Jesus shows up where He is least expected and does unexpected things once He gets there; He is rude at dinner parties; He speaks in riddles. And at the end of His life, He is the protagonist in a drama that is both parodic and ironic: The Crucifixion.… Jesus’s crucifixion was layered with many … layers of irony – calling Him king, clothing Him in mock-royal garb. But if Jesus’s elevation was mocked by the Roman punishment, that very mocking was in turn undone by the resurrection. It was not the Romans who had the last laugh.”[11]
In fact, the resurrection may be the best practical joke ever played on anyone. And it may be God’s greatest laugh.
Amen.
[1] Lauren F. Winner, Wearing God, (New York: HarperOne, 2015) 181.
[2] I’m not sure who said this, but Winner quotes it, 181.
[3] Ibid, 181-182.
[4] Ibid, 183-184.
[5] Ibid, 185-186.
[6] Ibid, 187.
[7] Ibid, 186.
[8] Ibid, 189.
[9] Ibid, 190.
[10] Ibid, 192.
[11] Ibid, 196-198.
Doubt is part of the life of a disciple. Doubt is normal and as much a part of the life of a disciple as trust is. In fact, the famous theological Paul Tillich said, “Doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.… Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful.” 16th century reformer John Calvin said, “Surely … we cannot imagine any certainty that is not tinged with doubt, or any assurance that is not assailed by some anxiety.” Madeleine L’Engle said, “The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget the questions, and we become smug like the Pharisee who listed all his considerable virtues, and thanked God that he was not like other men.… Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.” And, perhaps my favorite quote about doubt comes from Frederick Buechner: “Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”[1]
This sermon started out as being for our high school graduates and I was going to focus on doubt, because doubts are such a normal part of the faith journey, especially for young adults. It became something for us all. We all experience doubts in the midst of our faith, and we can use those doubts to encourage our journeys. We are all called to mission, often in different forms, for we are different people, often in different forms at different stages of our lives, for we are evolving people. And we all are recipients of Jesus’ promise, that he is with us, present tense, to the end of time.
