Holy Laughter

Third Sunday After Pentecost

Proper 6A: Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7; Psalm 116:1, 10-17

Romans 5:1-8; Matthew 9:35-10:8

June 14, 2026

https://vimeo.com/1202975096?fl=pl&fe=sh

Several years ago in 2020, deep in the bowels of the pandemic when we were worshipping completely via Zoom, I had a moment. Some of you may remember this. It was a 10 AM service which required the sharing of videos for our hymns and service music. These had been painstakingly put together by members of what we came to call “the mini choir” using something called the Acapella App. It was a whole thing. These videos had to be shared at the appropriate moment – opening hymn, hymn of praise, sequence hymn, Sanctus, etc. I led the service from our dining room table, with the area behind me arranged as a kind of rerdos. At the 8 AM, Kateri often sat next to me. At the 10 AM she and the kids would sit on the other side of the table, or the kids would lie on the floor and draw. At this point we had just one ancient cat, Sophie the tortie, twenty-something years old, who roamed around. I could see them all, but you all couldn’t. On the day in question, it was Advent, and our text entailed John the Baptist crying out in the wilderness. I remember this because Margaret read the gospel and preached, and as she read her internet kept going out – crying… out… wilder… it was kind of perfect. Then her dog started barking. When poor Margaret’s internet booted her out of the service in the middle of her sermon, Barry, our previous music minister, unmuted and said, “I hope her dog didn’t eat her.” Somehow she was able to return and heroically finish her sermon. Then it was my turn. Toward the end of the Eucharistic Prayer, Sophie intervened. She was at this point in her life completely deaf and meowed very loudly at random moments. This was one of those moments. As the mini choir sang the fraction anthem, “Alleluia”! she wandered over and the meowing began. I handed her off to Kateri but I was starting to lose it. “The gifts of God for the people of God,” I started to say, trying to stifle my laughter – unsuccessfully. So much so that one of my children piped up, “daddy sounds just like Cookie Monster.” People on the Zoom wondered if I was crying. I finally broke off my sentence and blurted out, “please play the hymn!” Barry interjected, “show us the cat!”

For any of us who have had a moment (or several) when we have found ourselves unable to keep from laughing at inopportune moments, this morning’s first reading provides a reassuringly ancestral frame of reference. Sarah can’t contain a guffaw and, as I read it, God is not so secretly delighted. God meets her with a kind of divine playfulness befitting the sheer foolishness, the utter absurdity of the Good News as it breaks open the norms and expectations of the world humans construct for ourselves.

The actual appropriateness of this laughter flows from the compounding layers of the scene. First, we hear, the Lord appears to Abraham at the oaks of Mamre. This is a profound scene of visitation in the story cycle of Abraham and Sarah. They have gone forth from their homeland, as we heard last week, sent by God to wend their way in the wilderness toward “the land that I will show you,” a promised and utterly unfamiliar locale (Genesis 12:1). The sheer strangeness of their journey is a theme from the very start. How can this all of this be? They were to trust in the promise of God, that God would bless them and that they would be a blessing (12:2). They make their way forward with a kind of holy uncertainty, inherently overwhelming. But God visits them in the midst of it. This is what has happened at the oaks of Mamre. The description oscillates between a singular and plural visitors – in our first sentence it is “the Lord” singular (18:1), then one verse later we hear that three men are standing near Abraham as he looks from the doorway of his tent. He addresses them (or him?) in a singular fashion, “my lord.” Later we hear, “they said to him,” and still later “the Lord” makes an inquiry of Abraham and replies to Sarah before “the three men finally “set out from there” (18:16). This combination of plural and singular may be tied to the combining of different biblical sources. Its singular-plural qualities have caused Christian readers to interpret it through a Trinitarian lens, and it inspired the famous icon of the Trinity by Rublev on the cover of your booklet. But I appreciate how the biblical scholar and theologian Walter Brueggemann suggests that we simply receive God’s “revelatory disclosure” in this story and see this “vacillation of identity” as a quality that “heightens the hidden source from which from which the disclosure comes.” “Allow for a playfulness in this regard,” Brueggemann says.^[1] Yes, even in our reading practice, a playfulness creates space for God to come among us, or rather, for our understanding and awareness to perceive God’s presence and invitation in our midst.

Meanwhile, as Abraham and Sarah respond to this divine visitation with a rapid, lavish show of hospitality, the guests ask after Sarah. When Abraham replies that Sarah was “there, in the tent,” one visitor says, “I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son.” As it happens, Sarah was standing behind him listening at the door to the tent. Upon hearing this she couldn’t help but laugh out loud. It was ludicrous, what the visitor had said. Theologian Miguel De La Torre writes, “And who would not laugh? After all, Sarah was almost ninety years old and her husband Abraham was ninety-nine.” Even twenty-five years earlier when God had made this same promise, Sarah’s age made it nonsensical (15:4).^[2] And one chapter before our passage, Abraham too had “f[allen] on his face and laughed” at God’s pronouncement, muttering to himself “can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?” (17:17) The laughing response is not limited to Sarah here. We are meant to hear and engage the ridiculous quality of this story.

As Sarah herself engages it. For she couldn’t help herself. Regardless of the stature and mystery of this singular-plural stranger, the pronouncement that she would become pregnant and bear a child was just too over the top not to laugh. Too absurd not to say to herself, essentially, seriously? But now God gets in on the humor. I can imagine it as a kind of comedy routine in which God, having heard Sarah’s chuckling commentary, speaks to Abraham with a twinkle rather than turning around and directly addressing Sarah. She thinks I’m funny. Why is she laughing? “Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?” To which Sarah, afraid, we are told – wondering if she has made a faux pas – denies: “I did not.” Perhaps not out loud? Or at least not intended for divine ears? And then comes my favorite divine response: “Oh yes, you did laugh.” God is having none of the denial. You laughed. I heard it. Don’t even try to pretend I didn’t. And while God does not go on to say this, we are I believe meant to hear further: how could you not have laughed?  

How can we not receive the promises of God with holy humor? Not in a spirit of disrespect or disregard. But in acknowledgment of our humanity, our folly, the massive limitation of our imaginations and in welcome embrace of their expansion. Sarah herself models this in the second part of our Genesis passage when Isaac is named. God had told Abraham to give the baby this name (17:19), and so he does (21:3). Yet as the biblical scholar Ilana Pardes notes, it is Sarah who interprets the name, who teaches us its meaning. “God has brought laughter for me;” she says, “everyone who hears will laugh with me” (21:6).^[3] No one would have ever predicted this outcome, she continues, yet I have done this thing. I have collaborated with God. “Is anything too wonderful for God?” God had asked. And now Sarah’s initially perhaps skeptical reply has transformed.^[4] And not, note, from irreverence to seriousness. Not from inappropriateness to due order. But from private chuckles to full throated, communally shared guffaws. Everyone who hears will laugh with me.

And so the question comes to us: do we hear? Do we hear God’s promise in its sheer foolishness? As Brueggemann writes, “by [God’s] powerful word, God has broken the grip of death, hopelessness… Laughter is the biblical way of receiving a newness which cannot be explained. The newness is sheer gift – underived, unwarranted.”^[5]It receives, expresses, participates in a fullness of joy that breaks through our very real contexts of suffering and destruction, persecution and death—contexts that we know we will continue to need to navigate in this world. In a collection of essays recently published to coincide with the installation of Bishop Sarah Mullally as the new Archbishop of Canterbury, the first time a woman has served in this role since Augustine of Canterbury was appointed in 597 C.E., there is a beautiful essay written by the Reverend Dr. Christina Beardsley. She is an openly transgender theologian in the Diocese of London where Archbishop Mullally previously served. Beardsley notes the name the Archbishop shares with our ancestor in faith: “did you laugh, I wonder, when you heard that you had been appointed Archbishop of Canterbury?” She continues, “laughter seems a healthy response to the prospect of assuming what is a daunting, and increasingly impossible role – a visceral sign of trust in God alone. God has called you and will provide the means to do it.”^[6]Beardsley goes on to call Archbishop Sarah to do all that she can from her place of authority and access to make the church and the world a more just, welcoming and hospitable place for trans people and indeed for all people. God will indeed provide her, and us, with the means to take on this work. Laughter is not the answer to all of it, but it plays no small part in making room for the expansive, life-altering, world creating power of God

This is how laughter was operating for me in 2020, I can now see, overwhelmed as I was by all that had led up to that moment on Zoom. I think of the horrific state of the world at that time – a state with which we continue to struggle – all that I, that you, that we together were juggling in that moment. And to be sure, laughter is not always warranted—to everything there is a time and a season. But when the wheels fall off, when the internet goes out, the dog barks uncontrollably, the cat goes crazy, it is meet and right for us all to lose it together. Oh yes, we did laugh, God says. God who bursts forth the chains of oppression and death; who calls us to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly together with God (Micah 6:8); who marches in Pride; who stands with the oppressed; who heals the broken hearted; God for whom nothing is impossible, or too wonderful. This God continues to be with us, a twinkle in the divine eye, dancing in holy drag, inviting us to join in laughter at the foolishness of this world and in joyous embrace of the transformative power of the Good News.

^[1] Walter Brueggemann, Genesis (Interpretation: A Biblical Commentary for Teaching and Preaching) (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1982),158.

^[2] Miguel A. De La Torre, Genesis (Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible) (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011),186.

^[3] Ilana Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 163, n. 2

^[4] Pardes, 111

^[5] Brueggemann, Genesis, 182

^[6] Christina Beardsley, “When Rights Are Rolled Back, ‘Let Justice Roll Like a River’” in Archbishop Sarah Mullally and Ten Urgent Challenges for the Church of England (London, UK: Darton, Longman, Todd, 2016), 105.