Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7, Psalm 116:1, 10-17, Romans 5:1-8, Matthew 9:35-10:23
I have three more sermons to give you. My gift is not topical sermons on the issues of the day. My gift is these ancient Bible stories that have formed God’s people for 3000 years. But I don’t pick the stories. I accept whatever stories the ecumenical Lectionary has chosen for all the churches. That means I have to wrestle with them too, on your behalf, and I believe that is my gift to you.
Our three next stories are about Sarah, Abraham’s wife, and then Hagar, their slave, and then Isaac, their son. The Laughing of Sarah, the Crying of Hagar, and the Binding of Isaac.
The two constant characters are God and Abraham. God is treated as a character who acts in ways we might not like. Abraham varies. In the final story, he is tragic. In the middle story, he is shameful. Today Abraham is comical, with his rushing about and his exaggerated hospitality, even though he offers his guest “a little bread.” How much can three men eat? Eight pounds of flour makes how many hotcakes, and how long will that take Sarah? The three men have to wait and wait for their little bit of bread while the calf is selected and slaughtered and dressed and seasoned and roasted.
When does Abraham figure out that this is the Lord, and how can three persons be God? They play with him a little, and there’s the back-and-forth with Sarah in the tent. But even though it’s she who laughs, she isn’t comic. She hears what God predicts as a cruel joke, and her laughter inside the tent is bitter–we call it sardonic laughter. And yet she’s ashamed, so she denies that she laughed.
She carries shame. Her childlessness is blamed on her, as Abraham had been able to impregnate his slave-girl. What use to having been beautiful. When she was younger and Pharaoh saw her, he took her from Abraham, but God made him give her back. Over the years of her disappointment, when Abraham told her that God had promised them many descendants, did she laugh at him?
My two grandmothers both carried shame, sexual shame, body shame, for what they were innocent of. They lived in the Dutch immigrant community of North Jersey, which was very religious and very judgmental, which they both had to endure.
My mom’s mother, my Grandma Hartog, had that inside laugh. She could be sardonic. She was smart and funny and a cut-up. She was a devout believer but she rarely went to church, and that was from her shame. Her husband, my Grandpa, was an adulterer. For forty years he had a girlfriend, a married woman, and people knew. I’m sure the good people of this conservative community suspected that it must be partly my grandma’s fault.
She had been attractive in her youth. Back in the Netherlands, at the age of fifteen, she was sent out as a housemaid for a pastor, and in just months she was sent back in a hush, and she never trusted ministers again. If that story came up, her eyes froze and her face hardened. But she told us many other stories and sang songs and cooked great food and entertained us and teased us and giggled with us, and our Christmas presents she always made by hand. My mom says Grandma would take the bus downtown, study a dress in the store window, and then make the dress without a pattern.
Just before I was born my grandpa left my grandma to move in with his girlfriend, which didn’t work out, so he moved in with us. He repented and my grandma somewhat reluctantly took him back. But in his last year she cared for him like a professional nurse, even at the hospital. She could do anything. I adored my Grandma Hartog. But her laughter was always an inside laugh.
My dad’s mother, my Grandma Meeter, carried double shame. The first was my grandfather’s disability. He was crippled, and so he was never put up for deacon or elder. He didn’t marry till he was 37, and then to my Grandma, who was not a prize, as she was illegitimate, born out-of-wedlock. That was her deeper shame, a sexual sin of which she was innocent but yet the proof of.
When she was three months old her mother fled with her to America, and never told who the father was. Her step-father beat her. Her mother eventually lost her mind and ended her days in a mental hospital. My Grandma Meeter was always self-conscious, and never broke the rules. She loved to go church, twice on Sunday, and was in the Ladies Aid and did good works.
She bore her shame with dignity, and not only because she was blameless in the causes of her shame. I think it was more the depth of her faith and her love of God. I am proud of how relatively progressive she was on racial matters. She was proud of my dad as a pastor in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and she had no fear of taking the subway on her own, and she made friends in our congregation. She didn’t do handicrafts, and she didn’t tell jokes and stories, but she enjoyed them, and she had a loud and hearty laugh, with a high hoot. She had an outside laugh.
And so did Sarah, at the end, after the birth of Isaac in her old age. Her inside laugh became an outside laugh, and she invited others to laugh along with her. There is redemption in this story, even though there is misery to come. I see in these three women the cycle that St. Paul writes of in our second lesson, from suffering to endurance to character to hope. Of course the cycle so often runs the other way, from suffering to breaking to bitterness to despair. So what makes the difference?
Well, this passage from Romans is personal to our own Michael Cairl, and I call him as my witness, that what makes the difference is love, especially the love of God that has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. It is the presence and power of love that helps you to endure your suffering, and the presence and power of love that converts your endurance into character, and from your character it’s love that generates your hope, and your hope allows you to laugh out loud, even in your suffering. I invite you to believe this. I have four witnesses: Michael, my two grandmothers, and Sarah.
In 1982 we hosted an African Dutch Reformed domine who pastored a church in Soweto. He was doing graduate study in America, and during the Soweto Riots his congregants were suffering for fighting Apartheid. It pained him terribly, but his hope did not disappoint him. He told me, “We will be free, soon, and it’s up to us when, it just depends on how many of us are willing to die for it.” The great thing about this Domine was his laughter, despite the suffering, how frequent and buoyant his laughter was. God’s love had been poured into his heart, and that love could laugh out loud.
It’s not that suffering is good. Suffering in itself is never good. But if God’s love has given us hope that does not disappoint us, and character, and endurance, then from out of our own suffering we can voluntarily enter and endure the suffering of others. Of course I’m speaking about Black Lives Matter.
It has not been difficult for us to share the suffering of people from the coronavirus, where there is no shame, nor rage, nor years of guilt of which people may be innocent but yet the proof of. And we are right to honor our doctors and health-care workers and those who put their lives at risk. But it is proving difficult and challenging for people to share the suffering of generations of Black Lives, for whom our happy lives and our prosperity have been mostly a cruel joke.
To share their suffering is not to preach about their need for hope, nor to encourage yet more endurance, nor judge their characters, but humbly to ask how to share their suffering on their terms. And with their words, not our own, as our consistory had to remind me of last week. It will cost us, and we don’t look forward to it. We will have to question ourselves, and start all over. We will get it wrong, and when we’re told we’re getting it wrong it will hurt, but we will endure it, and adjust our characters one more bit, and whatever hope we hold out is for ourselves, if we believe God’s love.
In sharing this suffering, even if you cry—and you must cry—you are not to have a long face nor act as if you’re a martyr or in pain, for we’ve only just begun to feel the pain. You are rather to keep joyful and keep on laughing. That’s how I interpret what Paul says about “boasting in our suffering”—laughing within it. Not sardonically, not derisively, and not self-righteously, because the joke’s on us, but with relief. The joke is our obstinate foolishness and the laughter is of judgment recognized. The joke is the riddle of God’s undeserved grace and the laughter is the joy of God’s love.
Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
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