The Church Laughs

This is my newsletter article for August.  Though it's not directly connected to the theme of change, it is a good reminder of who we are called to be as "church" and how God reminds us of that call.
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This summer I’ve really enjoyed journeying through the appointed lessons for each Sunday.  We’ve truly had some thought provoking texts that can be approached in a variety of ways.  A couple of weeks ago we had the familiar story of “The Good Samaritan”—and, as I shared with you during worship, I found it both incredibly frustrating and incredibly thought provoking for the same reason:  It says SO MUCH and changes whenever we, the reader, change how we enter the story.  If we see the events in the story from the eyes of the man in the ditch, the story says something differently than if we see the story from the eyes of, say, the innkeeper. 

This past Sunday we looked at the story of Father Abraham and Mother Sarah entertaining three strangers.  If you remember the story, Abraham is sitting in the shade of his tent and, in the distance, spots three people approaching.  Abraham rushes to meet the strangers, offers them simple hospitality and ends up laying before them an elaborate feast in an exercise of radical hospitality.  (Remember, too, that the word hospitality means “love of the stranger.”)  As the story continues to unfold, we hear again God’s promise to Abraham and Sarah, that they would indeed have a child, and we witness again Sarah’s infamous response:  She laughs. 

Sarah laughs. 

It had been so long since she had initially heard this promise from God and here she was, years later, being reminded of it.  She had lived with that promise, had bought into that promise, had held onto that promise for SO LONG…but things weren’t happening the way she had hoped they would or understood that they would and so, in the face of one more reminder, Sarah laughs. 

Whenever I think about Abraham and Sarah’s relationship, I can’t help but inject a little bit of my own experience into it.  I mean, can you imagine what it was like for Abraham to convince Sarah that God was speaking to him and that God had big plans for them?  Can you imagine what it was like for Sarah to listen to Abraham’s crazy talk, to leave everything she had known, and to journey to a new land all on a string of promises that somehow never seem to take shape?  (At least some of my crazy talk comes to fruition and Monica has the chance to see promises realized.)

This was Sarah’s reality: following Abraham, listening every day to Abraham reciting his “crazy talk” about promises of prosperity and promises of children and promises of a future and becoming a great nation.  And, of course, Sarah eventually finds herself believing these promises, living with these promises, waiting for these promises to become reality.  A child!  That’s all she wants!  That’s her purpose in the world in which she lived:  To provide heirs for her husband and children to remember who they were and where they had come from and all that was important to them.  But…it never seems to happen.

And so, as she sits inside the tent, doing the dishes after preparing this feast for these three strangers, she hears this promise again.  And she laughs.  And who can blame her?  It’s “ceased to be with her as the way of women.”  She’s passed childbearing years.  What had started as crazy talk and become a real promise had now become a cruel joke.  And she laughs. 

The church laughs. 

I think the church is in a similar position as Mother Sarah.  We have been offered this promise:  That through us, the world will change.  We’ve seen this promise reinforced:  Many of our congregations once thrived, our buildings were filled to capacity, we once occupied a place of prominence in the culture—not unlike some of the reinforcement that Mother Sarah experienced whenever they camped in a beautiful place, when they had a really good spring and multiplied their flocks and herds and their wealth.  But all of those factors that seemed to reinforce this promise of prosperity and success and a secure future dwindled, their power diminished, and the reality of age and the change that comes with that age settles in.  And the church looks back on these promises of God and..laughs. 

We have something that Mother Sarah didn’t have:  We have a story filled with examples of a God who keeps God’s promises—including Mother Sarah’s own story.  Sarah didn’t have that.  In fact, Mother Sarah was in on the “ground floor” of the creation of this story.  Despite having this record of promises kept, we still struggle to believe in God’s promises to us:  That God is with us and that, through us, the world will be changed.  We struggle to believe this because it doesn’t happen the way we think it should, according to the schedule we think God should follow.  And with each passing year we seem to lose more and more of that ability we feel we possess to make the changes that need to be made—not unlike Mother Sarah.  Our numbers shrink, our wealth dries up, our influence wanes. 

God continues to remind us of God’s promises.

What I find most fascinating about this story is that the promises of God are not restated or reinforced in a designated holy space or by appropriately credentialed individuals.  God’s promises are made clear through total strangers in a seemingly chance encounter when a faithful servant rushes to offer the strangers hospitality (love).  In moments of doubt and despair, God comes to us in unexpected ways, pushing back against our systematic understandings and our fears that what was promised will never be, and gently reminds us, with the voice of strangers, outsiders, people we don’t even know, that God is still with us and that God’s promises are sure. 

Yes, many of the things that we took as validation or success are slowly and steadily fading away.  Every time we lose a member, every time we gather for a Sunday School Christmas program, every time we meet for a WELCA meeting and see fewer and fewer faces we experience the same thing that Mother Sarah experienced:  Fear that God’s favor has shifted, that the promise will not become real, that our window of opportunity is closing. 

But I think that, in God’s wisdom, this story offers us a reminder of how to refresh the reality of this promise as we as to rediscover our purpose as the Body of Christ.  This whole story hinges on one act:  Father Abraham rushing out to meet total strangers and offering them hospitality.  In this act love and kindness, Father Abraham and Mother Sarah’s faith is, I think, restored.  Challenged, most definitely—particularly for Sarah.  But in serving these outsiders, these strangers (and serving them not scraps or leftovers or what can just be scraped together but rather with the BEST of all that God had given Abraham), Abraham and Sarah are again connected to the community of God and are offered again words of promise:  You have a future.

The church has a future.  The thing is, though, that it’s THE FUTURE and it will not look like the past.  To realize it, to get into it, to feel the promise again, I think, is going to take some of that radical hospitality that Abraham exercised, that the prophets call us to, that Jesus modeled for us, and that the epistles in the New Testament reinforce.  It’s in the acts of loving our neighbor—particularly the marginalized and the outsider—that God comes to us and says, “I’m with you and through you, I will change the world and make you great.”