Sermon: LOL (Laugh Out Loud)

Texts: Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7

Date: June 15, 2008

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

An elderly woman walked into the local country church. The friendly usher greeted her at the door and helped her up the flight of steps. "Where would you like to sit?" he asked politely.

"The front row please," she answered.

"You really don't want to do that," the usher said. "The pastor is really boring."

"Do you happen to know who I am?" the woman inquired.

"No." he said.

"I'm the pastor's mother," she replied indignantly.

"Do you know who I am?" he asked.

"No." she said.

"Good," he answered.

It’s good to laugh, isn’t it?  I got that little funny off some website after doing a brief search for religious jokes.  I’m happy to report that a person could spend days, if not years, reading all the jokes on the internet that are labeled “religious.”  Maybe there’s hope for us yet.  Here’s another one: 

The Baptist Church decided to get their church building re-painted. Jock put in a bid, and because his price was so low, he got the job.  And so he set to erecting the trestles and setting up the planks, and buying the paint and, yes, I am sorry to say, thinning it way down with turpentine.

Well, Jock was up on the scaffolding, painting away, the job nearly completed when suddenly there was a horrendous clap of thunder, and the sky opened. The rain poured down, washing the thinned paint from all over the church and knocking Jock clear off the scaffold to land on the lawn among the gravestones, surrounded by tell-tale puddles of the thinned and useless paint.

Jock was no fool. He knew this was a judgment from the Almighty, so he got on his knees and cried: "Oh, God! Forgive me! What should I do?"

And from the thunder, a mighty voice spoke... "Repaint! Repaint and thin no more!"

Seems like the human ability to laugh stretches way back in human history, as we can see in the ancient story of Abraham and Sarah, where laughter is featured.  There are lots of scholarly things written about the history of humor; lots of knowledgeable people who have studied it and written about it.  I like playwright Jane Wagner’s take on the beginnings of humor as well as any scholarly analysis I have read.  In her play The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe one of the characters is a bag lady named Trudy who has made contact with some aliens and is helping them learn about earthlings.  She reports, “We are delving deeply into the history of humanity.  I’m a mound of information.  Yesterday we stumbled across the first recorded history of when humankind made an ass of itself.  Then we discovered when humankind first laughed.  Guess what!  We first laughed the day we first made an ass of ourselves.  They [the aliens] love that about us!  Right after we laughed, we began to reflect on ourselves.  Around this time we discovered evidence of the first ‘knock-knock’ joke.  ‘Knock-knock.’  ‘Who’s there?’  ‘We’re not sure—we’re new at this.’  Not very witty, but it does give us insight into the size and shape of Cro-Magnon’s funny bone.”[1]

Ah, knock-knock jokes.  For many of us, the first jokes we learned to tell.  Knock-knock, who’s there, Ida, Ida who? Ida called first, but the phone’s not working.  Knock-knock, who’s there, O’Shea, O’Shea who, O Shea can you shee by the dawn’s early light.   Knock-knock, who’s there, Euripedes, Euripedes who, Euripedes pants, I breaka your face. Generally not too funny, except maybe this one: Knock-knock, who’s there, the German border patrol, German border patrol who?  Don’t ask qvestions!

One has to wonder if the rebuke dished out to Sarah for laughing in the Genesis story has a “Don’t ask qvestions!” flavor to it.  I mean, why does the Lord call Sarah on laughing behind the tent door about the news that she’s going to have a baby when she’s past ninety and her husband is a centenarian?  It is pretty laughable.  Having God use what sounds like an accusing tone seems particularly unfair in that Abraham, in the previous chapter, had laughed so hard when he heard again about God’s promise to bless them with a son that he literally fell on his face.  God doesn’t appear to give him a hard time about his hilarity at all.

Is it a difference between men laughing and women laughing?  I don’t think you can rule that out completely; for some reason it’s not as socially acceptable in many cultures for women to laugh as is it is for men to laugh.   Maybe it’s because laughter can be so subversive.  Lots of women the world over instinctively cover their mouths if they laugh.  And we’re not immune to viewing men’s and women’s laughter differently in this culture. Just recently in the presidential primaries I heard a media analyst talking about how much had been made in various news reports of Hillary Clinton’s “cackle.”  They played a sound bite of Hillary laughing, and then a whole string of sound bites of commentators calling the sound a “cackle” and talking about how annoying it was.  Nobody was commenting on other candidates’ way of laughing.  And in our vocabulary, who “cackles?”  Witches cackle.  Which isn’t too far off from…you know. 

So is that why Sarah gets slammed for laughing and feels compelled to deny it—good old fashioned sexism?  It’s possible.  We also have to keep in mind that the Lord could hear the tenor of Sarah’s laughter, which does not come across in the ancient text.  Everyone knows that not all laughter is alike.  There is joyous laughter.  There is evil laughter—such as the BWA-HA-HA-HA of various villains.  There is nervous laughter, inappropriate for the occasion, that bubbles up unbidden from time to time.  And there is laughter that mocks, sarcastic laughter, laughter at the expense of others.  Maybe what Sarah emitted was a snort of derision.  Maybe her laugh said to God, “As if.” 

One could hardly blame her, under the circumstances.  They had received this promise of progeny many years earlier, when it had been maybe a little more plausible.  And then, years of barrenness.  A hard life of travel, wandering toward the promised land.  A loss of pride, as Sarah and Abraham took matters into their own hands, so to speak, and decided Abraham should make a baby with their slave woman Hagar during the years of waiting for the son that hadn’t appeared.  That hadn’t worked out too well.    If Sarah, hearing this promise repeated during her waning, wrinkly years, responded with a “HA!” it would be understandable.

Understandable, yes.  But still the story wants to warn those with ears to hear that one sure-fire way to make an ass of yourself is to suggest with your laughter or your speech that you know the limits of what God can do, should do, or will do.

The Divine-human relationship is rich, complex, and mysterious.  As people of faith, we affirm that there is real interaction between God and humanity—but the interaction is so varied and enigmatic that it’s difficult to define.  Of course, that doesn’t stop us from attempting to describe, define, even prescribe the relationship we have with God.   

We have our moments of wanting to give God directions, based on our desires to have God be some kind of Cosmic Butler, always on call.  As in this little anecdote: A little boy and his grandmother where walking along the seashore when a huge wave appeared out of nowhere and swept the child out to sea.  The grandmother, horrified, falls to her knees and says, “God, please return my beloved grandson.  Please, I beg of you.  Send him back safely.”  And, lo, another huge wave washed in and deposited the little boy on the sand at her feet.  She picked him up, looked him over, and, looking up at the sky, said, “He had a hat!”

Even more perilous than expecting God to do too much for us is expecting too little of God.  This may be what was going on with Sarah.  In one lectionary commentary I read, Dan Clendenin suggests that the key to understanding the scene is in this question which functions like a punchline: “Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?” [Genesis 18:14]  Sarah is rebuked by God not because of the laughter but because she has too limited an understanding of what God is able to do.  Clendenin writes, “When I was in seminary my classmate Phil coined a wonderful term for that sort of religious faith that has a firm and unwavering belief in a tame and innocuous divinity. It's a faith that doesn't have any expectations that God will meddle in human affairs, intercede in your life, providentially guide human history, care for a loved one, heal the hurts we suffer, or — God forbid — do the impossible. Phil characterized that sort of tepid faith as ‘functional deism.’ Functional deism never denies the existence or reality of God, but it also never expects [God’s] decisive action in your personal affairs. Yahweh thus rebuked Sarah for her timid faith in a tiny god.”[2]

Another preacher, Ben Patterson, has a similar take on Sarah.  First he shares his research about what makes things funny.  He notes that most agree that two elements that make for humor are incongruity and surprise.  He writes, “Incongruity is the juxtaposition of two or three apparently contradictory or unrelated ideas or situations. Surprise comes from the introduction of something into a scheme or story—an idea, an event, a person—that is totally unexpected and unanticipated. Incongruity and surprise are closely related, of course, and are sometimes indistinguishable from one another. Both capitalize on the twist, the unforeseeable. Both jolt us out of one mental attitude into another, which may be completely and even violently opposed to the first. It’s incongruity and surprise that lie behind the humor of one-liners like Henny Youngman’s: ‘Take my wife. . .please.’ Or Woody Allen’s: ‘I don’t believe in an afterlife, but I’m taking along an extra pair of underwear just in case.’… Incongruity and surprise go together in humor. But—and this is the crucial point for us in understanding Sarah’s laugh—it is possible to have humor that deals only in the incongruous and is completely without surprise. That is Sarah’s humor. She can laugh at the preposterousness, the incongruity of an old bag having a baby, of having one foot in the grave and the other in a maternity ward. But that is all she can laugh at: its incongruity. She expects no surprises from God, no novelty, no violations of the world she has grown accustomed to living in and, as a result, her laugh can be only bitter and cynical.”[3]

One might say that Sarah’s laughter was too small.  It was, perhaps, a derisive snicker or an embarrassed titter rather than the gale of guffaws that would be called for if she really got God’s joke, the wonderful surprise that was coming her way via her (up till now) barren womb.  She might originally have laughed at God but what she needed to do was laugh with God.  Which, eventually, she does.

One writer said that in his family they get to laugh at a joke three times: Once when the joke is told, once when someone explains it to them, and once again when they understand it.  When Sarah laughed the first time it was when she heard the “joke”—the hilarious surprise God intended to bring about.  The punchline “Is anything to wonderful for the Lord?” can stand in as an explanation of the joke.  We don’t have another report of laughter from Sarah at this point but we can fill in the blank in our imaginations.  When Isaac is actually born in chapter 21 there is a definite sense that everyone “gets” what is going on—they understand the joke.  They name the baby Isaac, which means “Laughter,” which God had proposed to Abraham before the conception.  Sarah says, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.” [Genesis 21:6]  They are laughing full out at God’s grand surprise--what Frederick Buechner points out didn’t happen out of necessity, nor was it inevitable, but happened gratuitously, freely, hilariously.  And this astonishing, gratuitous and ultimately hilarious gift is none other than the grace of God.  “The tragic,” Buechner writes, “is the inevitable.  The comic is the unforeseeable.”[4]

              “Everyone who hears will laugh with me,” Sarah says.  Laughter is incredibly catching, isn’t it?  Some hilarity spreads out in waves through a room, through a family, even passing down from generation to generation.  Such is the great cosmic comedy of God’s grace at large in the world.  Just when we think all is lost, just when we think we are cornered, just when we think life itself is circling the drain, God finds a way to surprise us.  The bitter get better.  The lost and the last become the found and the first.  That which is barren bursts into bloom.  The jaundiced turn joyful.

            The invitation to people of faith is to be ready to take notice of and celebrate the joyful surprises that God is forever springing on the world.  We must not allow ourselves to become so burdened by the troubles of this world that we forget or overlook God’s grace springing up like so many jack-in-the-boxes all over creation, Surprise!  Writer Ralph Milton proposes a different spin on the Trinity: He writes, “We are children of a compassionate God who weeps and dies with us.  We are children of an angry God who struggles with us for justice.  We are children of a fun-loving God who laughs with us.”[5]  Too often we neglect that last aspect of the Trinity, the God who laughs uproariously and tickles us into laughing along.

            I’ll leave you with a little devotional poem by Hafiz, a favorite of my daughter Karen’s and mine: “God and I have become like two giant fat people living in a tiny boat.  We keep bumping into each other and laughing.”[6]

[1] Wagner, Jane  The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe New York: Harper & Row, 1986, p. 74

[2] Clendenin, Dan http://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20080609JJ.shtml

[3] Patterson, Ben  http://www.directionjournal.org/article/?639 

[4] Buechner, Frederick  Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy & Fairy Tale  New York: Harper & Row, 1977, p. 57

[5] Milton, Ralph  Sermon Seasons: Collected Stories to Spice Up Your Sermons  Winfield, BC: Wood Lake Books, 1997, p. 94

[6] Hafiz  Quoted in Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West Daniel Ladinsky, ed.  New York: Penguin Compass, 2002, p. 171