Genesis 18:1-15; 21:1-7 - September 17, 2023

Our story this week on Abraham and Sarah is like the Old Testament version of the Christmas story. Just like the birth of Jesus, our story today takes us from the big announcement (or "annunciation") to the joyful birth; from a promise to fulfillment. The birth of Isaac is the fulfillment of all the promises God had made, an end to all the emptiness and heartbreak. 

But before we delve too much more into the story, maybe we should do a little catching up. 

We have once again started our journey through the Bible. Last week, we began at the beginning with creation. And as the autumnal weeks move on, we will work through the Old Testament story, hitting the highlights of God and God’s people. Toward Advent, we will start to hear from the Prophets, who speak of God’s promised future. Then at Christmas, we will start the story of Jesus, beginning with his birth and working throughout the spring hearing about his life, death, and then resurrection at Easter. We will wrap up our journey through the Bible just before summer, hearing about the early church and reading from Paul’s letters. It’s a great way to get a better feel for what the whole story of the Bible is about. 

But for today in particular, there is a good bit of important stuff that happened between God creating everything and Isaac being born. We pick up today in the middle of Abraham and Sarah’s story. 

To understand where it all began, we need to look back to Genesis 12 where God makes an initial promise to a man named Abram, whose wife, Sarai, “was barren; she had no child.” In this chapter, God makes a three-fold promise to Abram. 1) Abram would have land. 2) He would become a “great nation” (that is, have many descendants). And 3) he would be blessed to be a blessing. “In you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” 

For our purposes here, being a couple with no children doesn’t really lend itself to making promise #2 happen. And if promise #2 doesn’t happen, what good are the other ones? 

And so, years went by after God made these promises. Sarai remained childless. Her and Abram’s story was one of aging and empty cradles.

In Genesis 15, God renewed the promise, taking Abram beneath the clear, starry night and proclaiming, "Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them. . . . So shall your descendants be.” However, one can't have a galaxy full of descendants when there isn’t even one child to begin with. And still, Sarai remained barren. She and Abram had no child. And they grew older still.

Of course, over the decades since that first promise, many other events happened, including a name change for them both, but those were the pivotal ones: Land, descendants, and being a blessing… yet, they all remained elusive dreams. 

So, today we arrive at Chapter 18. The promise that Abraham hears - and Sarah overhears - isn’t anything new. In fact, hearing it again probably made it only more challenging to accept. What kind of promise is harder to believe than one that has been repeatedly left unfulfilled? More than that, what kind of promise-maker is harder to believe than one who has consistently not kept their word? 

So when God yet again repeats the promise - “I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son” - one can hardly blame her for laughing. 

Now, there are lots of interesting things about this piece. The word “laugh” shows up four times in four verses. Sarah laughs. She is berated for laughing. She denies having laughed. And the messenger says, “O yes, you did laugh.” 

It seems like the laugh is somewhat important. On the one hand, this emphasis sets the scene for the surprising turn in chapter 21. But if you didn’t know that part yet, there is something else that heightens the current pain and sadness a bit more. 

Our English says, “Sarah laughed to herself.” But there is more nuance to the phrasing: it’s more like Sarah laughed “inside of herself” or “in her guts.” It’s almost like Sarah had a big belly laugh at God and God’s repeated promises. And having it phrased like that makes it hard not to feel in Sarah’s deep belly laugh the pain of one who has hoped for a child but is too old to conceive. 

But what follows is the most important phrase in the whole conversation. Sarah scoffs, “Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?” The messenger asks a question in return: “Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?” 

Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? And that phrase changes the whole perception of this final scene. Instead of God rebuking Sarah - “oh, yes you did laugh!” - it takes on a more positive meaning. It’s almost like God is saying, “yeah, you did laugh, and rightly so. Promises in the midst of this type of emptiness can seem cruelly funny. But just wait.” Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? 

And maybe Sarah,
made cynical by the passing years,
exhausted by God’s unkept promises,
afraid to hope again,
maybe she thinks that there are plenty of things too wonderful for the Lord.

But then…

But then we get to the second scene in this week’s passage. It brings us the culmination of a whole series of promises - the promises that have routinely been made since Genesis 12. This marks the initial fulfillment of the covenant promises to Abraham and Sarah. 

The child Isaac is born — the child whose very name means “Laughter.” 

We didn’t review this part earlier, but when God renewed the promise to Abraham in chapter 17, the old man laughed. When God renewed the promise yet again in chapter 18, the old woman laughed, too. So when the child is born, it seems that God gets the last laugh. 

But of course, the point of the story isn’t really that a child is born. It isn’t that Abraham and Sarah are old. Those are nice things, but the point is that God keeps promises. This is how God operates. God is faithful. God turns darkness into light, God changes mourning into dancing, God transforms weeping into joy, God brings life out of what is empty, sad, and barren. When it seems too late for anything to be done, God comes through. 

God keeps promises. God transforms Sarah’s skeptical guffaw into the joy of faith.
God keeps promises. God follows through on the covenant with Abraham, spreading blessings to the whole world through Jesus Christ, his descendant.
God keeps promises. Even the ones that seem too unbelievable to be true.

God promises to send the Spirit to us to work through this community and through us individually. Jesus promises to be with us always, to the end of the age. God promises to empower us through the Gospel, through the sacraments, through bread and wine and water so that we may strive for God’s kingdom here and now. And God also promises to forgive us and welcome us back when we fall. 

We may laugh or doubt or say, “That can’t be true for me.” But, let Abraham and Sarah show you, God promises more than what is, and God promises to be present in whatever is right now. 

God acts. God is always at work. God keeps those promises we deem too fantastical to be true. And still, God is with us: to give us life, to pour out love and grace on us, to bring life where we think it can’t be. And no matter how skeptical we might be, God keeps the most incredible promises of all: to love us, to forgive us, and to give us life.

Because, is anything too wonderful for the Lord? Nope, not at all.