Hopelessness, Creation, & Laughter - Genesis 21:1-7

Bible Study Lesson for October 21

Hebrews 11:11-12 recounts the story of the birth of Isaac: “By faith [Abraham] received power of procreation, even though he was too old—and Sarah herself was barren—because he considered him faithful who had promised. Therefore from one person, and this one as good as dead, descendants were born, ‘as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore’” (emphasis added). In order to fully grasp the significance of these seven verses of fulfillment, we have to remember that we first met Abraham as Abram, at the end of Chapter 11, one of the first things we learned about his family was the simple statement, “Now Sarai was barren; she had no child” (11:30). 

What follows is ten meandering chapters. God calls seventy-five-year-old Abram out of the city of Haran to go to Canaan, promising him that he will be the father of a great nation. Abram and Sarai travel to Egypt to avoid a famine and then travel back to Canaan and settle in the Negeb region. All along the way, God promises them a child. Abram and Sarai try to secure fulfillment of the promise for themselves by means of a surrogate mother in Sarai’s slave woman, Hagar. Abraham argues with God over what is possible. But God insists on being faithful to the promise. Even when Abraham can’t believe God, God is faithful.

This passage is fundamental to the faith of Israel. The birth of God’s people rests in a miracle. We have to remember that this is no ordinary birth. Walter Brueggemann points out that the birth of Isaac, along with the creation of the universe from nothing and the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, show us  a central characteristic of God: bringing hope out of hopelessness. Sometimes we lose sight of this in our desire to understand and explain the activity of God in ways that make sense to us. Abraham and Sarah, we tell ourselves, experience a strange birth. They are older than the average parents. But this sells the miracle short. The author of Hebrews gets it right: Abraham and Sarah are not just old, they are “as good as dead.”

The central miracles of our faith are like this. The resurrection of Jesus is a miracle without precedent. Even though Jesus has brought a few people back to life, the assumption of the story is that those people would age and die again. But when Jesus dies, the situation becomes completely hopeless. Who is going to raise Jesus from the dead when Jesus, the giver of life, is dead. Jesus’ resurrection is life from death, and it becomes increasingly clear in the gospels that Jesus’ resurrected life is completely different. This new resurrected life will not end in death. It will go on eternally. His resurrection is, in the New Testament, a model for all of us, a foretaste of the resurrection that awaits all of us in Christ. But an important aspect of this resurrection hope is that it does not rule out the experience of mourning and pain that accompanies death.

The birth of Isaac is that kind of miracle for Abraham and Sarah. It’s that kind of miracle for the people of Israel. I wrote a note that’s been up in front of my desk for the past month: “The birth of Isaac does not cancel out Abraham and Sarah’s pain in waiting.” I’ve been thinking about the birth of Isaac for a couple of months now. Every time I got to a Bible study where the story mentioned God’s promise of an heir or Abraham and Sarah’s frustration, I tried to put myself in their shoes. When Sarah (then Sarai) arranged for her husband to sleep with her slave so that he could produce an heir, I tried to imagine the type of pain that would lead to that. When Abraham cried out to God, “Oh that Ishmael might live in your sight!” (Genesis 17:18), I tried to imagine his anguish. God is asking Abraham and Sarah to believe in something quite unimaginable. The birth of Isaac is the fulfillment of their painful waiting, but it doesn’t undo their suffering.

A couple months ago, I was text messaging with one of my friends about quarantine and pandemic life. It was a conversation similar to a conversation a lot of people have had over the past seven months. My friend shared a song with me I hadn’t thought about for a long time, by an artist named Colin Hay:

“Any minute now, my ship is coming in

I'll keep checking the horizon

I'll stand on the bow, feel the waves come crashing

Come crashing down down down, on me

And you say, be still my love

Open up your heart

Let the light shine in

But don't you understand

I already have a plan

I'm waiting for my real life to begin”

I think a lot of people can understand that song today. We are waiting for life to resume, for it to be safe to go and do the things we want to do—without masks.  We are wondering what “normal” will look like when it comes back. It’s easy, when you are waiting, to lose track of yourself, your goals, or why you are doing the things you are doing.

Over the last year and a half or so, I have rediscovered an old love of running. In early April I was scheduled to run in my first marathon. When Covid took over the world in March, my race along with so many others was cancelled. Since then, many races have been cancelled, postponed, or made “virtual.” In a sport like running, competitions provide athletes with anchor points to build their schedules around. It has been tempting to either stop running or to over-train with no real end in sight. It may seem like a small thing, but the running world (at least the amateur running world) has entered a season of waiting. We will not forget the time we had to struggle through, even when this season is over and competition resumes.

As Christians, we believe that the world is waiting for the return of Jesus, to establish the Kingdom of God once and for all. We believe in the resurrection of the dead. We believe, as it says in Revelation 21, that in God’s kingdom:

“See, the home of God is among mortals.

He will dwell with them as their God;

they will be his peoples,

and God himself will be with them;

  he will wipe every tear from their eyes.

Death will be no more;

mourning and crying and pain will be no more,

for the first things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:3-4)

Some people lift this promise up as a way to escape the pain we feel as we wait. Indeed, it helps in times of mourning and grief to know that a better world is coming. But we are wrong to use verses like this to silence the real mourning we encounter in our lives. We are wrong to use the hope of a perfect Kingdom to stifle those who cry out for change to make the world a better place. We need to sit with our grief, to reflect on how the world we live in does not measure up to the world God had planned, or the kingdom God is bringing into being. Jesus says, “blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” Sarah’s comfort is here at the birth of Isaac. And when Isaac is born, all Sara can do is laugh.

The laughter of Sarah reminds us of the last time we saw her in the story. In Genesis 18, when Sarah overhears the angels telling Abraham that he will have a baby within a year, “Sarah laughed to herself, saying, ‘After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?’” (Genesis 18:12). When the promise is fulfilled, Sarah laughs again, but instead of cynicism she has joy. Joyfully, she names her son Isaac, which is also the Hebrew word for laughter. When God moves us out of the pain of this world into the miraculous future we have in store in Jesus, all we can do is laugh. We will laugh because we will be done with crying. We will laugh because we found hope out of hopelessness. We will laugh with the sheer relief that the ridiculous but real suffering of this present age will be no more. Laughter is a Biblical response to miracles. Let’s find laughter amid our tears today.