What are You Laughing At?

As we continue to experience the Word of the Lord together, Let us Pray. God of grace, and God of glory, You fill us with your wonderful gifts until we want no more. You surprise us with your grace. Come unto us again and again, so that we might share your manner with others. If these words are not Your Word, may they be forgotten and come to naught. But if they be Thy Word, may they adhere to our hearts, forever transforming us from glory into glory, into the creatures you would have us be, Thou who art our Rock and Redeemer, Amen.

Open your ears and your hearts to hear the The Word of the Lord as it comes to us in Genesis. Genesis 18.1-15, 21.1-7. The Word of the Lord…Thanks be to God.

I was a junior in college. My college was small, my graduating class was around 200, 210 maybe. Almost all of my classes had about a dozen people in them, especially in my major, which was religion and philosophy. I don’t remember the particular class we were in. I think it was Romans, but it might have been something else. Anyway, there was a guest lecturer that day, who was as boring as most guest lecturers are. Sitting next to one of my housemates, who wrote something on a piece of paper and pointed. The way many of you youth do. You do realize that Judy and I spend a good portion of Mondays looking at what you all have written as notes and try to piece together what you must have been writing about and thinking about. Anyway, the note was about our goofy friend, Russ Winderwedle. We called him the Wonderweedle. There was plenty of good reason for that. One Thursday, a day before he was to meet another housemate of mine to ride back to Orlando together, he came up to us and said this, “Neal, I’ve got two words for you. Be ready tomorrow.” Well, I just started laughing immediately. And Neal has this look on his face as he says, “Russ, that’s three words.” “I meant there to be a hyphen.” I laughed for a good two minutes straight.

Anyway, back to the classroom. Boring lecture, and a note about our friend Russ. He had clearly been in the sun the day before, and had left his sunglasses on so that he had a very distinct sunglasses tan line. Scott passes me a note that reads, “The Wonderweedle looks like Ricky the Racoon.” I began to chuckle. Out loud. But like I said, there are only 12 people in class. We aren’t in an auditorium, we’re in a room smaller than the Covenant Room here, about the size of half of it, and its set up as tables in a rectangle. The guest lecturer notices my laughter. “Did you just laugh?” And instantly, I’m pulling a Sarah. “I didn’t laugh.” “Sure you did,” she continued, making it even worse. “But you were right to laugh, and I’m surprised no one else did. What I just said was ludicrous. You all should have laughed.”

Sometimes unexpected laughter turns out to be a good thing. In Sarah’s case, a great thing. After all, she names her child laughter. You can find in chapter 21 the discourse where she says that the joke is on her, for she then laughs as she is nursing her child, named laughter.

Do you hear the same echoes that I do? When I look at this story, found within the first book in the Bible, I hear the echoes of Mary, as found in the first chapters of the gospels. Sarah says that she can’t have a child because she and Abraham are too old. Mary’s problem is that she is too young, and too much of a virgin to have a child. Their problems may be a little different, but they both approach God the same with them. “Uh, I’m sorry God. I hear you saying that I’m going to have a child. But you don’t understand.” If only God would understand, right.

You know, maybe God doesn’t care about our comfort as much as we might wish. God regularly calls us out of our comfort areas, and puts us in situations that we would consider impossible. Granted, the situation works out for the best for Sarah. She wants a child desperately, and gets one. And the situation works out okay for Mary too. This may be a little earlier than she wants her child, but she gets the child, Joseph sticks around, and the child turns out to even have some moderate fame, right. Could it be that God does understand, deeper than we do or even could, what is best for us? Could it be that we might have to go outside our comfort area to get where God is leading us?

Perhaps God leads us outside of our comfort area because God loves us. Look at what Sarah says, as found in chapter 21. She says essentially who would have thought that God would do something so wonderful. She starts out with laughter, for what kind of crazy would God have to be to think that she could now have children, at her age. And in chapter 21 she affirms that she still can’t believe how wonderful God is, and what wonderful things God does. She comes around. For God has said, in verse 14 of the 18^th chapter, “Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?”

Will we, like Sarah, come around to the realization that nothing is too good for the Lord, and that God will give us so much more than we could want, if we will follow where God leads us? So often, we would rather seek our comfort, or our routine, than seek where God is really calling us. God desires the absolute best for us, wants for us better than we can imagine. And our hang-ups about wanting to be sure of the ground upon which we tread hold us back. We don’t have the vision that God has. But we should never let our lack of vision stop us.

“About 350 years ago a shipload of travelers landed on the northeast coast of America. The first year they established a town site. The next year they elected a town government. The third year the town government planned to build a road five miles westward into the wilderness.

In the fourth year the people tried to impeach their town government because they thought it was a waste of public funds to build a road five miles westward into a wilderness. Who needed to go there anyway?

Here were people who had the vision to see three thousand miles across an ocean and overcome great hardships to get there. But in just a few years they were not able to see even five miles out of town. They had lost their pioneering vision. With a clear vision of what we can become in Christ, no ocean of difficulty is too great. Without it, we rarely move beyond our current boundaries.”¹

Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?

Tim Hansell writes of this story in his book, Holy Sweat.

One day, he and his son Zac were out in the country, climbing around in some cliffs, Hansell heard a voice from above yell, “Hey Dad! Catch me!” The father turned around to see the son joyfully jumping off a rock straight at him. He had jumped and then yelled “Hey Dad!” Instantly a circus act began, the father catching the son. They both fell to the ground. For a moment after Hansell caught Zac he could hardly talk. 

When Dad found his voice again he gasped in exasperation: “Zac! Can you give me one good reason why you did that???”

He responded with remarkable calmness: “Sure...because you're my Dad.” His whole assurance was based in the fact that his father was trustworthy. He could live life to the hilt because Dad could be trusted. Isn’t this even more true for a Christian?²

Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? No. And if you actually believe that, your faith can move mountains. You can jump into the unknown and the uncomfortable because God will be there with you. I’ve seen it happen. Don’t laugh. Amen.