Unraveled by Surprise
Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7
September 12, 2021
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HQFlDhoge8
Sarah is beautiful. Drop-dead gorgeous. I never really considered that before. When she was 65, the Pharaoh of Egypt saw her and wanted her. I guess my ageism is showing. Sarah’s part in the Biblical narrative begins when she is advanced in years and somehow I never stopped to think about what she might have looked like.
This week, I came across this photo of Stasia Foley. She is 102 here. I know that Stasia is a white American and Sarah was a Middle Easterner, but this is now my mental image of the Biblical Sarah.
This picture of Mrs. Foley was taken on the occasion of a good surprise. She was in hospice care. Her granddaughter, Tara, was engaged to be married. Mrs. Foley was not well enough to travel and would not live to the date of the wedding. So her granddaughter traveled from Texas to Florida. She brought along her wedding dress to surprise her grandmother with one last visit. Tara didn’t tell anyone what she had done. On her wedding day, several months later, she surprised her family with pictures of herself with her grandmother in her wedding dress. It was a very good surprise.[1]
I think about Stasia Foley, radiant at 102, and about all that her life had held. And I think about Sarah and all that her life had held.
Sarah never had children. Infertility, the absence of children to parents who want them, is such a painful thing, even today. In Sarah’s time, it was additionally complicated because a woman’s worth was intricately connected to her ability to produce heirs. The years kept passing without the appearance of a child, lowering Sarah’s self-esteem and status further and further. It was a grief and a burden that she carried always, everywhere they went.
When they went to Egypt, her beauty became a liability. And Abraham failed to protect her. He anticipated that powerful men would want her. He anticipated that they might kill him to get her, so he told her to say that she was his sister. He allowed the Pharaoh to take her like a wife. He even profited from it, accepting the gifts of sheep and oxen and donkeys and servants in exchange. He not only got to stay alive, he got rich while Sarah had no say about it. Sarah is a survivor of sexual violence and of abandonment by her partner. She carried that trauma on top of everything else.
When more than a decade passed without a baby, Sarah convinced Abraham to take Hagar as his second wife. Hagar bore him a son. But Sarah’s plan backfired. Hagar become contemptuous of Sarah. Sarah became jealous of Hagar and abusive to her.
Sarah is beautiful. She has the rank of first wife. But her beauty and status have not led to an easy life. In some ways, the opposite has been true. Like all human beings, Sarah is a complex character with a range of life experiences. She has painful memories and undoubtedly behaviors of which she is not proud.
Maybe she appears tough, even cynical, on the outside. Maybe cynicism is the armor she has learned to wear in a world where she failed at the one thing expected of her, the one thing that would have made her “normal” which is to be a mother and grandmother.
And then there comes the day when the strangers arrive at the oaks of Mamre. Sarah is in the tent, listening to the conversation. She hears them talking about her, saying that she will have a son, now, when she is 90 years old. And she laughs. Of course she laughs. Wouldn’t you?
She laughs because the idea is so ridiculous. A few decades earlier, this would have been the best possible news, but now, it is painful. She laughs because she knows her own body very well, much better that those strange men out there who are making pronouncements about it. She laughs, because she has seen the hard side of life and nothing much surprises her anymore, but this does.
There is a mystery around these strangers. Sometimes it seems that there are three of them, clearly messengers from God. And sometimes, it is just the Lord who speaks. After Sarah laughs, God asks Abraham why she laughed and she denies having done it. God insists that she really did laugh.
In the previous chapter, God had announced Sarah’s impending pregnancy just to Abraham, and Abraham had fallen on his face laughing. God did not chastise Abraham for laughing, but it is common to read this chapter as if God is angry with Sarah for it. One scholar says the fact that God would descend to a “no, I did not”/ “yes, you did” squabble with Sarah tells us that this narrative is supposed to be funny.[2] Sarah does not need to be afraid, for as she proclaims in chapter 21, God has brought laughter for her; everyone who hears will laugh with her.
It would be easy right now to sink into doubt, to wrap ourselves in cynicism because everything is hard. Pain and suffering is deep and real everywhere, all across the globe. But there are also genuine surprises, moments of delight and joy.
Maybe you heard about the Afghan woman who went into labor with complications on an evacuation flight. The other women on the plane stood around her holding up shawls to give her a modicum of privacy. The pilot descended to an altitude which increased air pressure, stabilizing her and probably saving her life. Upon landing in Germany, still inside the plane, she gave birth to a healthy baby girl. The baby is named Reach, after the airplane’s call sign.[3] After all that the woman must have endured, I can imagine her laughing with relief and joy.
Another image you may have seen was the Afghan girl skipping on the tarmac in Belgium. I don’t know whether she is old enough to understand what she escaped, but the millions of people who have seen the viral photo have some sense of it. “God has brought laughter for me,” Sarah said.
The message of this story is not that God will deliver faithful people from infertility if they wait long enough and pray hard enough. The message is not that having faith eliminates suffering. Those are cruel interpretations which ignore the messiness of the circumstances in which real people live. They ignore the complexity of human beings who are simultaneously faithful and flawed.
I submit that the message of this story is that God is a God of surprise. Good surprise. Yes, the catastrophe in Afghanistan is real. We lament and mourn for it, while still rejoicing with the girl skipping in Belgium.
I love good surprises. I had one last week. You might remember that over Labor Day weekend, Jim and I went to the Wild Goose Festival. We’ve gone before. I go to this mostly for what I learn. I go to learn about the activism of progressive Christians. I go to absorb what people are doing around issues like immigration or creation justice or mass incarceration. I also go for conversations with people who have been wounded, those who have left the institutional church, but haven’t entirely given up on Jesus yet. They have important things to say. There’s not a lot of preaching or worship at this event, which is fine with me. It’s not why I’m there.
Even so, I was a little irked when we arrived on the last morning for what should have been a key note presentation followed by closing worship. A change of plans was announced. The expected preacher had not made it to the festival, so the keynote presenter was going to preach. And a team of three people were now going share the keynote presentation slot. Well, hmm. I wasn’t very pleased. I had already heard the presentation by one of the three people and I really didn’t want to hear it again. Plus I had wanted the original keynoter to have an entire hour instead of the 20 minutes she might get for a sermon. I was cynical. This was not a good way to end. What were the festival organizers thinking?
Of course, as you are anticipating. I was wrong. About many things. But in a very big way about the sermon. The preacher started off by making us laugh. She was witty. I was admiring her craft, trying to take notes so I could repeat it for you sometime. But she went too fast and I gave up. Which was good because it enabled me to be fully present in the moment. One minute, we were laughing at Jesus’ disciples, I mean really laughing out loud because she was funny. Then she took a quick turn and all of sudden, we realized that we were guilty of the same behaviors that we were laughing at. So then we were laughing at ourselves, but it wasn’t so funny.
A couple of times she said that she didn’t know why she was there, why she had even been invited to speak, but from the attention of the crowd, it was obvious that the Spirit of God was moving.
She drew me in deeper and deeper. I became aware that I was hearing strong truth proclaimed boldly and vulnerably. More than once, I had to wipe my face – I didn’t even realize I was crying. Friends, this was the most powerful worship experience I have had in a long time. Such a good surprise.
And not just for me, not just for the crowd. During the music which followed the sermon, I saw the preacher wiping her own face. The next day, she tweeted, “Yesterday, I cried in front of a large group of people, and then I cried on a plane a little more (ok a lot more, I was that lady weeping on the plane). . .”
Laughter . . . tears. . . truth. . . unexpected grace . . .delivered by a preacher who didn’t even know why she was there. The God of surprise showed up despite my cynicism, despite my desire to keep to the schedule.
Then there was communion. The station nearest us had a long line, so I stayed seated. After a bit, I noticed another station with a short line, so I got up and went there. Because of the crowd, I couldn’t see who was serving until the moment when it was my turn to receive. And then I realized that standing in front of me was a trans woman and she was offering me the bread. I immediately remembered the story of Wild Goose communion that I shared with you a few weeks ago, and chuckled to myself about God’s sense of humor. Just a little extra surprise.
So friends, here is the part where I might say – go and have a good surprise this week. But, of course, you can’t manufacture surprise. It just doesn’t work like that.
What we can do is to allow ourselves to be open to it, to relax the cynicism or world-weariness or despair or doubt that we wear like armor. What we might attempt every day, is to embrace the question “Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?’
What we might do is allow ourselves to hope, to wonder, to delight, to accept goodness in the midst of pain. And perhaps, in God’s own time, we may be graced with laughter. Thanks be to God.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/bride-brings-wedding-photo-shoot-ill-grandmother-make/story?id=65249688
[2] Song-Mi Suzie Park, in Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year A, Volume 3 Joel Green, Thomas Long, Luke Powery, Cynthia Rigby, Editors, , (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2020), p. 70
[3] https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/25/politics/evacuation-baby-named-reach/index.html