Armadale Uniting Church

Sermon for 11th Sunday 

Abraham - Surprised by Joy

Sermon for the 11^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Martin Wright

Armadale Uniting Church, 15 June 2008

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

When C. S. Lewis came to write the story of his conversion to the Christian faith, he called it Surprised by Joy.  What he means by “joy” is different from how we usually use that word.  He’s not referring to happiness or contentment or pleasure in the ordinary sense.  Lewis’s “joy” can probably best be summed up as the sense of encounter with God, the knowledge, however fleeting, that you are not alone, that you are made for more than dust.  He said it felt more like a desire or longing than anything else, a desire perhaps for a distant homeland; but the sort of desire that you wanted to experience again. 

Well that description may or may not ring true for you.  But the important thing that Lewis realized was that these moments of encounter with God, whatever shape they take, cannot be controlled or predicted.  They are not something within our grasp, we cannot hold onto them.  We get very good at living as if God is not there.  So when we are momentarily confronted with the awareness of God’s presence—whether through worship or prayer, music, a scene of beauty, an encounter with another person, perhaps even our own sense of weakness and aloneness—that encounter always comes as a surprise.  For Lewis, the whole journey of faith, in his case a journey which began in atheism, was summed up as being continually surprised by the unexpected joy of God’s presence. 

Last week we read the story of God’s calling of Abram, and his willing response, and I talked about the way that Abraham is the great paradigm of faith for the rest of us.  But as the book of Genesis unfolds, it becomes clear that Abraham and his wife Sarah are real human characters, and in spite of their great and foundational faith, even they have their moments of unbelief.  They had been promised a son, but time was ticking by and nothing was happening, so they decided to take matters into their own hands.  As Sarah was obviously well past the age of childbearing, they arranged for Abraham to sleep with the slave girl Hagar, who would bear him a child.  Well it worked—she conceived and bore a boy, Ishmael.  But this was not what God had promised, and Ishmael was not the child through whom the promises would be realized. 

After this false start, God and Abraham had one of their many interviews, and God said, “You’re still going to have a son, and Sarah is going to bear him”.  Abraham’s response was to fall flat on his face with laughter.  So the Lord God Almighty, who never wanted for a sense of humour, replied “Not only will you have a son, but you’ll call him Isaac”—which means “laughter”.  In today’s story, Sarah responds in much the same way.  When the three mysterious visitors call by her tent, and somehow speaking with the voice of the Lord, they say “Next time we call by here, Sarah will have a son”, she laughs, just as Abraham had laughed. 

This of course is the hollow, cynical laughter of disbelief.  We know it well, I think.  It’s the laughter we use when we hear a promise that is too fabulous to believe in, when hopes are raised that are too good to be true.  If our Prime Minister said tomorrow, “We’re going to disband the military, sell all our guns and live in peace and love towards our neighbours”, we would laugh, because it’s too good to be true.  If President Mugabe said, “I’m going to stand down the militia, put an end to all persecutions, and let the Zimbabwean election take its natural course”, we would laugh, because we simply wouldn’t believe him.  If—and this is a true story I once heard—if we were at a conference about the future of the church, and a speaker got up to say, “We have no idea how God might renew the church.  For all we know, the Holy Spirit might choose to descend tomorrow and begin an extraordinary movement of renewal, beginning in the Uniting Church in Australia.”  The audience would laugh—as indeed they did. 

Maybe we can’t do without this sort of laughter.  When we find promises that are too good to be true, and then see the world as it is, we have to either laugh or cry, and laughter seems the less painful option.  It’s comforting to know that we have a good precedent in Abraham and Sarah. 

But we can’t end the story of Sarah’s laughter with chapter 18 of Genesis.  There’s another instalment in chapter 21, which finds us back at her home after the child is indeed born, a promise Sarah could never fully believe until the baby was wriggling in her arms.  She said, “Who could have believed this?”—and she laughed.  In that moment, the hollow laughter of cynical disbelief was transformed into the spontaneous laughter of unexpected joy.  And she named the boy “Isaac” for her laughter. 

Isaac was the first in a long line of miraculous births in the history of God’s people Israel.  The last and most miraculous of all was Jesus Christ, born from the utter emptiness of the virgin’s womb, and born again from the emptiness of the tomb where they had laid his lifeless corpse.  That was life brought out of darkness!  And those who heard the news responded in much the same was as old Sarah.  The young Mary, when she was first told, sang “My soul gives glory to the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my saviour”; and the disciples who met the risen Lord said to one another, “Did you not feel your heart burning within you?”. 

The promised child has been born for us, Jesus Christ, who is laughter after sadness.  May his surprising joy rise up in your hearts again.