I had a terrible thing happen a few weeks ago when I was taking a service in a wee church (that shall remain nameless) in the country. I had got to that stage in the service where I was leading people in the prayers of confession and as I was just about to finish a particularly sombre bit about the ways in which we all let God down an old man at the back broke wind really, really loudly. I glanced up to see the wee kid sitting next to him giggling and saying, really quite loudly to his mother, “He just did a fart.”
At this point I was desperately trying to stop myself from laughing and eventually I managed to just sort of cough, move on and finish the prayer. Laughter can be a very dangerous thing, I, like most of my family, have a really loud laugh that is hard to keep in and once laughter starts it can be very difficult to stop. You see it all the time in these programmes of outtakes, such as “It’ll Be Alright on the Night,” or that one that Terry Wogan does, “Auntie’s Bloomers.” You see actors trying to play out very serious or depressing scenes from films or soap operas and they have to keep stopping because when they go to say their lines they end up laughing.
We Presbyterians aren’t exactly renowned for our sense of humour. We are often portrayed as being a very serious group and for many people Christianity and comedy, or Christianity and laughter do not sit too well together. The preacher Martyn Lloyd Jones once commented that the pulpit is not a place for humour, it is a place of battle between heaven and hell for the souls of those who are listening. I heard a preacher a good few years ago who went into great detail about the fact that the Bible states that Jesus wept but never at any point said that he laughed.
I came away from that sermon with a very distorted picture of Jesus as this dour, miserable figure and it took a while for me to realise just how wrong that image was. The Bible contains many examples of humour and comedy. In I Kings Solomon is treated as a comedy figure, set next to descriptions of how excellent he was as a king, the many good things that he did and the palaces that he built are bitingly ironic comments about how he mistreated the poor and showed more concern for his riches than for God, in other words the kind of political comedy that you would expect from Have I Got News For You, or the Hole in the Wall Gang.
In Luke’s Gospel we have the story of Zacchaeus; in John we have Nicodemus, the wise man of Israel, trying to work out how he can be born a second time; in Mark we have Peter making a fool of himself half of the time but especially at the Transfiguration when his tongue runs away with him and he wants to put up a couple of tents for Moses and Elijah; finally in Revelation the great powers and empires of this world are ridiculed as they are compared to prostitutes and shown to be helpless before the power and authority of God.
This leads us on to the three examples of foolishness and laughter that we are going to look at this morning because they deal with the power and the authority of God. We are going to look at the laughter of Sarah, the laughter of the world and finally we are going to look at the laughter of God.
Sarah laughed and no wonder, it was such a crazy notion, how old was she? She was maybe ninety or ninety-one years old, can you imagine how you would react if a lady you knew, maybe your granny, came up to you and said, I’m ninety years old and I’m going to be having a baby. I think after you got over the shock then maybe you would laugh too.
Sarah might have laughed but her words are actually very sad. She describes herself as “worn out,” maybe she feels that God can do no more with her. You don’t have to be ninety-one to feel that you are worn out. To feel that not even God can do anything with you, to feel that you are hopeless.
Sometimes when we laugh its not because we are happy or because we have seen something really funny but it’s because we are feeling cynical or bitter about life. You know the expression, “If you didn’t laugh you’d cry?” That seems to be the sort of laughing that Sarah does here.
What does God say to Sarah in response to her dry cynical laughter? Does he say, “Stop laughing, how dare you criticise me?” Does he say, “You laughed in my face so I’m not going to give you what you have longed for all these years?”
No, instead he presents her with a question, he goes to this worn out old lady and asks her the same question that he asks all of us when we feel worn out in his service, when we feel that we can go no further, when we feel that surely God can do no more through tired, broken and weary people like us.
He says simply this “Is anything too hard for the LORD?” How do we answer that? How do you answer that question? “Is anything too hard for the LORD?” How do I answer it? And I don’t just mean, what is the right answer? I mean how do you or I answer that question deep within our hearts?
To answer yes, to say deep in our hearts that God does not, God cannot, intervene miraculously in our lives means that we live in a dull, predictable and depressing world. To answer truthfully, to say “No, nothing is too hard for God” is not an easy thing to do, its not some kind of intellectual cop-out, a way of switching off our brains and leaving all our mysteries to heaven.
If there is nothing too hard for the LORD then why did Sarah have to go through all those years of infertility? If nothing is too hard for the LORD then why is there so much suffering and pain in this world that God has made. To admit that God is God is not to take the easy option, look at Jesus, in the Garden of Gethsemane, saying to his father, “Everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” He knew that nothing was impossible for God, his father, but yet he still had to face suffering and death on a cross.
We know that Jesus suffering was not in vain and neither was the shame and the anguish of Sarah, through both of these situations God was working out his plan in the same way that he is working in your life. Sarah was as unaware of the final outworking of God’s plans as we are, she would be long dead before her ancestors would be as numerous as the stars in the sky or the sand on the seashore. We don’t know God’s plans, but we do know his character, that he works for good for those who love him.
Sometimes the world around us laughs and no wonder as they look at the means God has chosen to proclaim all of this good news to the world. What was it Paul said of both the Christians in Corinth and ourselves in the second reading?
He said “Think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth.” Have you ever found it funny God called people like us to spread his word, to tell those around us of the Good News of Jesus Christ? Have you ever worried that you were not good enough to witness to people, to tell them about the Gospel? Have you ever had someone tell you that you are a hypocrite for calling yourself a Christian after all the things that you have done?
What Paul is saying is that God must have had some strange sense of humour to pick people like you and me for the task of bringing his message to those who are lost. He goes on to say, “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.”
It has always been like that, he chose Abraham and Sarah, who laughed because they could not understand the power of God, he choose Joseph, a man was so much of a bighead, had such an ego problem, that it almost drove his brothers to murder him. He chose King Saul, an unstable madman; King David, an adulterer and murderer; King Solomon, a man who was more fond of the high life than looking after his own people; throughout the Old Testament God chooses the most unlikely characters to advance his cause and to spread his word.
In the New Testament the same pattern occurs, he sends his only begotten son to earth and instead of placing him in a palace where he would have the best food, clothes, medicine and education money can buy, he sends him to a joiner and his teenage fiancé to look after him in a small country town that hardly anyone had ever heard of.
Instead of picking the great intellectuals of his day to spread the word Jesus chose some fishermen, a terrorist, a man whose previous job involved extorting money from people by force and a bunch of other unlikely characters.
God seems to like a challenge, instead of giving the task of reaching the people of Monkstown and its surrounding areas to some skilled international evangelist, some Billy Graham figure, he gave that job to us.
God did not pick us for this job because of any great skill or talent that we might have but he chose us because he wanted to demonstrate that it is purely by his grace that we become Christians, not through any ability or good works of our own and once we have become a Christian we do not live by our own strength, we don’t work for God in our own strength but we should rely 100% on him. Verse 30 in the Message translation reads, “Everything that we have – right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start – comes from God by way of Jesus Christ.”
In the end the only thing that we can boast about in this strange situation is that although it might look hopeless God is in charge.
In the end it is God who will have the last laugh!
God is going to have the last laugh because no matter how strong our doubts are, no matter how convincing the people are who laugh at us or mock our belief in God and our reliance on him, it is God who is in charge. Psalm 2 reminds us in sometimes quite frightening language that God is in control of this world.
This Psalm must have been quite a statement to make in its day, even at the height of King David’s short-lived empire, Israel was only a tiny, tiny part of the world and her God was worshipped by few enough even among her own people. To proclaim then that their God was the ruler of all the earth must have seemed ludicrous, it must have seemed tragically funny to the nations surrounding them. See those Jews, they think their wee God is in charge of the whole world!
But it’s not the nations who are laughing in Psalm 2; it is God, looking in wondering pity and then anger at those who would reject him, his love and his justice. God laughs because in the end it isn’t God who is foolish but everyone who tries to live their life without him. Anyone who thinks that they can reject God, or even that they can dare to stand before him confident in their own good living is a fool.
Yes, God has the last laugh, and sometimes he lets us in on the joke. Sarah laughed again, a year later, when she had a baby boy whom she named Isaac. She said, “God has blessed me with laughter and all who get the news will laugh with me!” It turned out that God knew what he was doing all along!
So thank God for laughter, for all those things that cheer our hearts and bring joy into our lives; thank God that, as the Bible says, in his “foolishness” he chose us to be his servants; and thank God that he is in charge and that there is nothing too hard for the LORD. Amen.
