To listen to the sermon delivered by the Rev. Elizabeth Meade at the 9:00 am service click here.
To listen to the sermon delivered by the Rev. Elizabeth Meade at the 10:30 am service click here.
St. Charles’ Episcopal Church – St. Charles, IL
Sunday, June 15, 2008 ~ Proper 6A
The Fifth Sunday After Pentecost
Genesis 18:1-15; Psalm 116: 1, 10-17; Romans 5:1-8; Matthew 9:35-10:8
The Reverend Elizabeth Meade
So Sarah laughed….… But Sarah denied it saying, I did not laugh.”
I’ve been aware of laughter a lot this week. The other night, I heard the delighted yips and giggles of children in my neighborhood as their daddy sprayed the garden hose at them. One little girl, convulsed with giggles, squealed, “Over here, daddy, over here!” trying to entice her father to spray her as she ducked behind a large maple tree some distance away. There’s nervous laughter too. I heard it the other night when I asked a politically loaded question at a conference on The Emergent Church. The speaker was uncomfortable with my question, so he used laughter to relieve his own tension. The truth is, we use laughter in many ways. Obviously we us it when we find something funny, but we also use it when we’re embarrassed, or nervous, and sadly, we often use it poke fun at another’s misfortune or foolishness. Sarah, in this case, used her laughter to express the absurd chasm between God’s divine promise and her own human expectation – that abyss that exists between God’s promises and our expectations.
I imagine that Abraham and Sarah shared a lot of laughs in their life together. Most marriages do. Earlier in the book of Genesis, we discover that Abraham himself laughed when the Lord first told him that Sarah would bear him a son. The Lord says to Abraham:
“I will bless Sarah, and moreover, I will give you a son by her, and she shall be the mother of nations”. Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed. (Gen 17:16)
Here’s the Father of Nations, the man who we consider to be obedient and faithful to God’s plan – and even Abraham could not fully wrap his head around the possibility that God could give him a child. His laugh was probably of the nervous ilk – a laugh that expresses our human inability to understand the fullness of God’s power. I imagine Abraham returned to their tent that night and said,
“By the way, Sarai, I talked to God today over by those oaks in Mamre, and he said you outta be called Sarah from now on. Oh, and GET THIS, he also told me we’re going to have a baby next year.”
And I imagine Abraham and Sarah both chuckled over that news.
After all, he was 100, and she was ninety, and well past childbearing years.
Months later, three travelers arrived at their encampment and one said, “I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son.” Sarah, in the tent busily preparing their dinner, probably heard that and thought, “Oh, not these guys again!”
You see, laughter seems to be a very human reaction to the preposterous. We laugh at the impossibility of it all. We say things like, “When pigs fly!” to diffuse the tension between our reality and God’s limitless imagination. I think that’s the tension we often discover in our own prayers.
“Impossible,” we say, or “I shouldn’t ask for that.” Even though we’ve been taught since childhood that we can ask God anything. On some level, most of us probably do believe in God’s ability to DO just about anything, but what we can’t get our heads around is when God says, “And I’m going to use YOU to accomplish it.” To quote that line from Mark’s gospel: “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.”
We just can’t quite believe that God would use unlikely people like ourselves to create something wildly beyond us – or use us to accomplish some heroic feat when we aren’t a particularly heroic group.
In today’s gospel, we heard the story of Jesus sending out the disciples. Jesus, the story tells us, had been curing every disease and calling out unclean spirits, but then, the text also tells us, Jesus gave his disciples authority over those illnesses and spirits as well. And I imagine that the disciples, like Sarah, struggled with the apparent impossibility of it all. Down throughout the ages, people have wondered, “Sure, GOD can do this – but us?” And we’re no different. We all know that line from Matthew’s gospel:
“With God, all things are possible.” (Matt 19:26.)
But do we believe it? Do we really believe that God would single us out to affect change in OUR world?
That God might use US to CHANGE the world for the better? Again, it’s that chasm that exists between divine promise and human expectation. Do we really believe, that God might just rely on us to heal someone, or to lay our hands on a leper and make him clean? Well, God just might. Christian formation is about narrowing the chasm – coming to a belief that God just might want to use the likes of us to bring the kingdom of heaven into clearer focus for the rest of the world. The harvest is plenty, but the laborers are few. It’s up to us.
So what can one person do? Well, Nazi party member Oskar Shindler decided to save 1200 Jews from certain death during WWII, by hiding them in his factories. And American Greg Mortensen, after he’d climbed K2, saw kids in Korphe, Pakistan had no school to attend, so he built them a school. In fact Greg has since gone on to build 61 more, thus educating 25,000 children (half of them girls) in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
What can one person do?
One person might encourage a child to take risks, and that child might grow up to solve the mystery of the AIDS virus – as risk taker Jonas Salk solved the mystery of polio. One person might ask five friends to buy five mosquito nets to send to Africa, and those nets they sent might save the lives of 100 babies over the next five years. One person, might speak kindly to a despondent teenager, and unknowingly stop that person from taking his own life. One person.
Our Youth Group returned yesterday from their mission trip to rural Prestonburg, Kentucky. Who knows what wonderful things God has accomplished through them – what seeds of hope and joy they may have planted among our nation’s poorest of the rural poor?
What is God asking you to do or be for Him?
Is it to be a better neighbor to your neighbor than he is to you? Is it to organize a group to come together over a community injustice or to pray for peace? Is it to visit someone this day, Father’s Day, who may be, for the first time in his (or her) life, without a father? What is it that God is asking of you?
And finally, you may have noticed that God did not shame or punish Sarah for her disbelief or for her lie.
God merely stated the truth. “Oh yes, you did laugh.” God knows our weaknesses, recognizes our human frailties, and keeps reminding us of the truth. We can continue to live in denial, or we can start listening to that still, small voice that speaks to the depths of our souls – the voice that says: “Oh, yes, you can.”
God does seek only perfectly formed Christians to work in the kingdom. Sarah lied, Moses murdered, Peter denied, and Paul persecuted. Yet God used all of them as central characters in this ongoing story of salvation. God invites all, regardless of our moral or spiritual condition.
To paraphrase Eugene Peterson:
“God does not require good people in order to do good work.
God does some of his best work using the most unlikely people.”
We can laugh and deny, and stand hiding behind the maple tree as the little girl in my neighborhood did, or we can enter into the fray and enjoy the splash. As that cool living water awakens us, we begin to realize that God has need of us as the salvation history of the world continues to unfold.
Like the disciples before us, our attempts at radical love and hospitality may be less than perfect, but God doesn’t care. God honors our attempts and accepts our continuing laughter and our doubts as He whispers, “I have need of you.” Well, guess what?
Those disciples have gone the way of human men, and it’s our turn now.
The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. God has need of us. Amen.