Hope does not disappoint
Sermon for the Third Sunday after Pentecost (June 18, 2023) at St. James’ Episcopal Church in Hyde Park, NY. A video of the entire worship service is available here.
What are we talking about? View the scripture readings and the Collect of the Day: Proper 6, Year A
Sarah and Abraham Offer Hospitality to the Visitors, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN.
Look at Sarah’s face!
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Then one said, “I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son.” And Sarah was listening at the tent entrance behind him.
Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age; it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women.
So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, “After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?”
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.”
But Sarah denied, saying, “I did not laugh”; for she was afraid.
He said, “Oh yes, you did laugh.” Genesis 18:10-15
Edited Transcript
May only truth be spoken here and only truth be heard. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Please be seated.
Who here has gotten to see the New Deal Creative Arts Center's production of Fiddler in the Roof? Even if you haven't seen it, you're probably familiar with the show. I got to see the production on opening night. And it's been really fun, because since we're reading these stories from Genesis, I end up imagining the characters in Genesis as characters from Fiddler. I imagine them talking to one another in the same way. There's a comedic element that we shouldn't miss in these Genesis stories of our patriarchs and matriarchs. It's certainly there in today's reading, right?
Three men show up at Abraham and Sarah's doorstep, or I guess tent-step. Abraham starts of by saying, so glad you are here! Let me just get you a little bread and water before you continue your journey. And then he proceeds to go and kill two calves and barbecue them. And then he has his wife take the equivalent of 21 liters of flour to make "a few" loaves of bread. And so by the time he is done, they've got this giant feast and everyone in the camp is running around like crazy.
Once the three visitors have settled and they're all enjoying their food, they get down to business. The visitors ask, Where's your wife, Abraham? Well, she's in the tent. So, we have something to tell you. You, at one hundred years old, are about to be a father! And your wife Sarah is the mother.
And Sarah is listening behind the tent flap, You gotta be kidding me. You gotta be kidding me! And so she laughs to herself.
Now, God, instead of talking to Sarah directly, God says to Abraham, What's she laughing about? Is anything too wonderful for me?
And Sarah's all, Oh, I wasn't laughing! God' says, well, yes you were. You did laugh, oh yes you did!
There are so many kinds of laughter. I'm not sure exactly which one is happening in this story, but I suspect it's a laughter of disbelief, maybe even a bit cynical. Oh sure! Me, at the age of one hundred years old, I'm going to have a kid. You've got to be kidding.
There's other kinds of laughter too, though, right? Not just cynical laughter, but there's also laughter of joy, laughter of delight, laughter of surprise.
In the last part of our reading this morning, we see that what God said would happen, does happen. These two... you know, I should have researched this between services! Because there's a word for octogenarian, nonagenarian... there's a word for someone who's one hundred years old and I can't remember it, and I know it's not centurion because that's a Roman soldier! All right? So, uh, centenarian! These two centenarians do in fact have pleasure and have a kid. And they name him Yitzak, Isaac, which means, "he will laugh."
Who will laugh? Maybe it's their son, maybe its the two of them, because they are finally experiencing this laughter of delight and joy and surprise. Or maybe it's God, because God gets to have the last laugh! But they laugh.
This second round of laughter, where it goes from sort of cynical disbelief to joyful delight, is a laughter that reminds me of a psalm we often say in our noonday prayer in the church, Psalm 126:
When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion
then were we like those who dream.
What happened is better than we could have believed. It's only what we could have dreamed or hoped.
When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion
then we were like those who dream.
Our mouths were filled with laughter then
and our tongues with shouts of joy.
This is the kind of laughter that comes with the birth of this child who'd been hoped for and promised. And somehow, even for these folks who are a hundred years old, that promise was not too wonderful for God.
There are a lot of ways that we could possibly apply this story about Abraham and Sarah and their miraculous son. How about as a metaphor for the life of the Church?
I spend more time than I should on Twitter and other places reading commentary on the end of Christendom. We've all seen these charts that show how every Christian denomiination n the US is experiencing declining numbers. What is increasing more and more each year—and certainly accelerated with the pandemic—is the number of people who identify as unaffilliated, not associated with any religion.
It seems less and less reasonable, and more and more laughable, to hope, at this point, for Christianity to make much of a difference. There was a time when we could say we were in the prime of our life: everybody (it seemed) went to church, and everyone was part of church. That was the time when we could have reasonably expected to fulfill God's dream, if ever there was a time. Just like Abraham and Sarah might have reasonably expected to have a child when they were twenty. Or thirty. But not one hundred. It seems like we've gone past the point—just like Abraham and Sarah—where we could reasonably hope to be fruitful.
And yet, at the same time, all around us, we see the need for hope. We look out like Jesus in todays Gospel, and we see the world is full of people who are "harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd." More than ever when we look around we know how important it is to share God's dream and to be part of healing and hope, as Jesus sent and commissioned his disciples. And yet it seems that our pour to help has declined past the point where we might reasonably hope to bring God's dream to birth through our body.
St. Paul says, "Hope does not disappoint us, because the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us."
What if God were to tell us, as we look out on this world, that we, the people of God, the people of this church, the people of St. James' and the people of the "Church" more widely... that WE are going to be part of the rebirth of hope? That we are called by God through the hope that has been placed in our hearts, by the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. That we, the people of God, the Church, are going to be part of the healing of the world. If God were to tell us this, would we be more likely to laugh with delight? Or with cynicism and disbelief? We might be more like Sarah behind the tent flap, than Sarah after the birth of Isaac.
Our laughter, though, still has the power to be transformed! I don't know what else we do if we don't have that hope in our hearts that is there because the Holy Spirit is in our hearts through the love of God.
The world is so harassed and helpless, especially for our younger people. The world—as we all have experienced in the last couple of weeks with the cloud of smoke—the world is literally on fire everywhere we look. And it's going to keep being that way. Climate change is forcing more and more people to migrate from their homes, as is persecution, as is war and violence, which are exacerbated by the changes in our weather patterns. My heart was broken this last week when I heard on the news about a ship of migrants in the Mediterranean that was sunk. A bit under a hundred people were rescued, but hundreds of people drowned as they were trying to get to a better life. These tragedies are going to get more intense, more frequent rather than less in the years ahead.
So the Church has to dig deep. And we are called now, to say with St. Paul: hope does not disappoint us! Because the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us. We need to dig deep, so we don't lose that hope. So that we can answer that call and that commission from Christ to go wherever people are harassed and helpless, to bring healing, to raise the dead.
And if that seems like something laughable, that's because it is. But God says, why do you laugh? Is anything too wonderful for God?
When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, even we, our mouths were again filled with laughter, the laughter of delight and our tongues with shouts of joy.
Because in a world that may seem hopeless, our hearts are still filled with hope and we are still called to be part of God's dream. May it be so. Amen.