Genesis 17:1-7, 15-17
March 12, 2006
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
How many of you here know people who are really old?
Some of you think that you will never get old and that your parents are always old. Or perhaps, you want to be older than you are now. Honestly, don’t worry, you’ll get there! We’ll all get old someday.
I know some of you act like you’ve been old for awhile. Others of you worry about getting old and are doing everything in your powers to stay as young as you can be.
Last Monday, there was a newspaper article in the SF Chronicle based on a Stanford scientist’s research that suggests that there are now ways to extend the life span to 100 years old. Medical advances in anti-aging technologies could increase Americans’ average life expectancy in the near future from just less than 80 years to 100. Don’t get too excited too fast now—extending life expectancies is for future generations not for us. If you were born in 1950, you can generally expect to live until you are 68.2 years old and those born in 2003 can look forward to 77.6 years of life.
From 2010 on, the scientist said, anti-aging technology already available, such as cancer treatments, could increase life-span one year every year. By 2030 if you were born on that year, the average life expectancy in most industrial nations would be 100, if all of the available technologies were applied. And this elderly population will not be infirmed or decrepit either. They will stay physically, mentally and socially active for longer times. We were born too soon!
While the prospect of living until one is 100 is a matter for future generations, we all still have a reality to face today: “Are we aging well?” We may live longer but are we going to be happier? A psychiatrist from Harvard, George Valiant has been studying aging well for the past 60 years. He’s been interviewing people as they move through the life cycles, charting the course of their lives.
George Valiant found factors that characterize successful aging—good relationships with children and grandchildren, good health or a positive attitude toward health concerns, and so forth. But there was one characteristic that stood out—humor. That’s right. People who age well do so with a sense of humor. They are able to face the predictable trials and tribulations of aging with a smile. Those things that cause us to frown are faced with a smile.
A smile is evidence of someone who has learned not only to take the pain of life with a grain of salt, but also someone who has looked upon life with the eyes of faith.
A smile means that God is alive and active, that the good purposes of God’s plan will never be defeated by a frown. We move from tears to laughter because God makes us laugh!
I can’t preach a sermon about laughter unless I tell a joke.
Four old men were out golfing.
“These hills are getting steeper as the years go by,” one complained.
“These fairways seem to be getting longer too,” said one of the others.
“The sand traps seem to be bigger than I remember them, too,” said the third senior.
After hearing enough from his senior buddies, the oldest and the wisest of the four of them at 87 years old, piped up and said, “Just be thankful we’re still on the right side of the grass.”
Laughter in the Bible
Laughter is so rarely mentioned in the Bible. In the Old Testament, there’s the geriatric laughter of Sarah and Abraham when they were told that they’re going to have a baby. In the entire New Testament, laughter is only mentioned twice.
One of those times was when a leader of the synagogue named Jarius came to see Jesus. Jarius got down on his knees and begged Jesus to come to his house because his daughter was at the point of death. Jarius wanted Jesus to lay his hands on her so that she may be made well and live. Before Jesus got to Jarius’ house, word came that the girl is dead. But Jesus went anyway and upon arriving, he saw a loud commotion of weeping and wailing. After Jesus asked the people why all of the weeping, he told them, “The child is not dead but sleeping.” And the people turned to Jesus “and they laughed at him.”
The crowd laughed because Jesus dares to speak of life in the midst of death. Their laughter was a laughter of mockery, cynicism, disbelief. They have never seen anyone rise from the dead before so they laughed at Jesus. Their laughter could easily have said, “Can there be Easter after Good Friday?”
The second mentioned of laughter in the New Testament is found in Luke’s version of the Beatitudes. “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.” This laughter is a smile that breaks out on the face when things go better than you thought. This is the grin occasioned by the undeserved, unexpected grace of God. Just when you thought everything is going so badly but suddenly everything got turned around and is now going great, you let out this kind of laughter.
Abraham and Sarah
In today’s scripture, we meet a couple of old people. Now that I’m almost 57, I can talk about aging! It’s okay to talk about aging, the termination of life, the dead-end of life because it’s Lent. In this season of moving toward the tragedy of the cross, we are called to look honestly about our own lives especially if we are going to live longer.
You never want to reveal a woman’s age but Sarah was old at 90. Abraham was even older at 99. We can imagine Sarah, back bent over, no teeth, and digestive problems when God promised her that she was going to have a baby. Abraham according to Paul in Hebrew 11:11-12, was “as good as a dead husband.” Now these people must have looked pretty bad because they didn’t have any of these anti-aging technologies available to them.
God promised them that they would be parents of a great family, a family through which all the families of the earth would be blessed. When Abraham heard this, he fell on his face at 99 years old and probably laughed.
Later on without Abraham knowing, Sarah was listening at the tent entrance when God was talking to Abraham. When she overheard that she was going to have a son, Sarah laughed at herself knowing the she has passed the age of having children and that her husband was way too old to have fun.
God said, “Did I hear you laugh, Sarah?” When confronted about her laughter, Sarah denied it in fear of God. But God said at the end, “O yes, you did laugh.” God was telling Abraham and Sarah that nothing is too wonderful for the Lord. And that if he wants to bless them with a son, he would do that. God said to Abraham and Sarah, since you both laughed at this wonderful thing that he was about to make happen, he will name the new baby, Isaac which means “laughter.” God likes to have the last laugh.
So in three chapters later, “The Lord did for Sarah as he had promised.” Nine months later she laughed all the way from a geriatric ward to the maternity ward! Isaac was born. And Sarah laughed. But this time, her laughter was no longer the laughter of mockery, cynicism or disbelief. Hers was a laughter of wonderment. Sarah’s laughter was borne out of her many years of weeping.
Sarah said, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh
with me.” And she said, “Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would
nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.” (21:6-7)
Everybody in the old people’s home had a great time laughing with Sarah at the ability of God to work wonders. Blessed are you who weep now, you shall laugh—because nothing is too wonderful for God.
When the cynical laughter of disbelief becomes the astonished surprised laughter that comes from the unexpected intrusion of a loving, living God, we laugh. When the promises of God come true, we laugh. Even though we are deep in the dark days of Lent, we laugh and discover that it’s Easter.
Older people, perhaps because they have seen so much of life and have lived through so many challenges, seem sometimes to have a greater capacity to laugh. Though events may be sad, tragic, perhaps they have learned that there is nothing too wonderful for God.
Here’s another joke.
An artist asked the gallery owner if there had been any interest in his paintings on display at that time.
“I have good news and bad news,” the gallery owner replied. “The good news is that a gentleman inquired about your work and wondered if it would appreciate in value after your death. When I told him it would, he bought all 15 of your paintings.”
“That’s wonderful,” the artist exclaimed. “What’s the bad news?”
“The guy was your doctor!”
Laughter is Faith
In Paul’s letter to the Romans, Paul wrote about Abraham and Sarah as great heroes of faith. Let me read Romans 4:13-16.
For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or
his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation.
For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law, but also to those who share the faith of Abraham for he is the father of all of us.
When I read this Romans passage in light of how much disbelief and cynicism Abraham and Sarah had about having a baby, I’ve come to realize that it wasn’t as much Abraham earning God’s praise because he was such a strong believer as it was God’s grace.
Paul is pointing to God’s grace that allowed Abraham to have this amazing and unswerving faith, even in the face of the impossibility of having a son with Sarah, “hope against hope” as the text says. Abraham’s belief was not something he chose. It was not a sign of his internal strength. It was not a sign of his upstanding and religious character. For Paul, Abraham’s faith is remarkable precisely because it was not from Abraham. It was a grace from God.
Paul is saying that Abraham was blessed with many descendants not because he followed the law well. And if he tried to follow the law, he probably would have disappointed God. If the law was the way to God’s heart, there would be no doubt failure and violations. God blessed Abraham for his faithfulness which led to his obedience to God’s plan for him.
If Abraham’s faith says little about Abraham himself then what does his faith mean? It means that when we encounter God like Abraham did; God will show us that his extraordinary promises are true. God could bring new life even when old age would make it impossible.
Now we might thing that this is preposterous! Abraham and Sarah having a child at a hundred years of age is just a story. But this story is telling us that true faith will allow us to look at the truly hopeless situation in the face and see hope.
This story allows us to look at the broken heart and a casket lowered into the ground in the face and see not death but life, not just an end but also a beginning.
This is not tame stuff. This is truly extraordinary stuff. This is impossible stuff—and there is no way in the world that we can see it or believe it on our own. God’s grace allowed Abraham and Sarah to believe even when they were laughing with cynicism and disbelief about having a baby when they were very old. It is God’s grace that we received in Jesus Christ that we come to believe today.
Just like Abraham encountered the Lord, we encounter God in the risen Christ. Something in this encounter is convincing and the new life promised in that encounter, rings with truth. We encounter the living God when we meet Christ Jesus.
We may think this is preposterous too. We might question like the crowd in Jarius’ house that his daughter was only sleeping and laugh at Jesus. But if you don’t believe it, just ask Jarius whose begging on his knees turned to praising God on his knees. If you don’t believe that Christ is risen, just ask the soldiers, the Galilean women who followed him to Golgotha, Mary his mother. They would tell you that God makes real possibility out of real impossibility. One of the early church fathers spoke of Easter as “the joke that God played upon the devil.”
Since there is no way that we can see it or believe it on our own, we laugh turning our disbelief to belief, our cynicism to trust, our mocking to praising and believe that it’s God’s grace that has made it so.
Here’s my last joke.
There’s a grandmother in her late eighties who was about to embark on a long trip. As part of her preparations, she went to see her doctor to get a complete physical. The doctor asked her how she was doing, so she gave him a litany of complaints—this hurts, that’s stiff, I’m tired and slower, etc.
He responded, “You have to expect things to start deteriorating. After all, who wants to live to 100?”
The grandmother looked him straight in the eye and replied, “Anyone who’s 99.”
As we live longer, we can age better and perhaps well when we trust in God that he will continue to make us laugh all the way to heaven.
Let us pray.
Merciful God, thank you for granting us the gift of life to be able to see the promises you’ve made to your creation. Continue to surprise us with newness and recreation even when we find it difficult to believe. Make us laugh as our way to express our wonderment and praise to the miracles you make happen in our midst. We pray, O God in the name of Christ Jesus who surprised us with eternal life. Amen.