Hilariously Impossible (9.15.19)

Hilariously Impossible
Mark 10:17-27 and Genesis 18:1-15; 21:1-7
Sunday, September 15, 2019
Rev. Elizabeth Mangham Lott
St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church

The Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. 2 He looked up and saw three men standing near him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent entrance to meet them, and bowed down to the ground. 3 He said, “My lord, if I find favor with you, do not pass by your servant. 4 Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. 5 Let me bring a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on—since you have come to your servant.” So they said, “Do as you have said.” 6 And Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah, and said, “Make ready quickly three measures of choice flour, knead it, and make cakes.” 7 Abraham ran to the herd, and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to the servant, who hastened to prepare it. 8 Then he took curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree while they ate.

9 They said to him, “Where is your wife Sarah?” And he said, “There, in the tent.” 10 Then one said, “I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son.” And Sarah was listening at the tent entrance behind him. 11 Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age; it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women. 12 So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, “After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?” 13 The Lord said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh, and say, ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?’ 14 Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? At the set time I will return to you, in due season, and Sarah shall have a son.” 15 But Sarah denied, saying, “I did not laugh”; for she was afraid. He said, “Oh yes, you did laugh.”

One of my very favorite scenes of any movie ever is the scene in the original Mary Poppins with Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke. The pair goes to visit Uncle Albert who is having “an episode.” The children, Jane and Michael, nervously and curiously follow along and are delighted to find Uncle Albert’s “episode” has him floating near the ceiling and unable to stop laughing. Mary Poppins chides the children for laughing and says, “It’s really quite serious.” Bert warns them, “Whatever you do, keep a straight face. Last time it took us three days to get him down.” And Bert immediately begins giggling. Two minutes later, he’s floating up at near the ceiling, too. Once the two men begin singing together, “The more we laugh, the more we fill with glee,” Jane and Michael begin floating up, too.

The men begin telling each other corny jokes as they float and flip through the air which only fills them with more laughs and keep them stuck up high.

“The other day when it was so cold, a friend of mine went to buy some long underwear. The shopkeeper said to him, ‘How long to you want it?’ And my friend said, ‘Well, from about September to March.”

—

“I know a man with a wooden leg named Smith”

“Oh, really? What’s the name of his other leg?

—

Well, it’s about my grandad, see? And one night, he had a nightmare, he did. So scared that he chewed his pillow to bits. Yes, to bits. Next morning I say, ‘How do you feel, grandad?’ He says, ‘Oh, not bad. A little down in the mouth!”

—

Mary Poppins finally tells them it’s time to come down, and Uncle Albert knows the only remedy is to think of something sad. And so he begins:

“Yesterday, when the lady next door answered the bell, there was a man there. And the man said to the lady, ‘I’m terribly sorry. I just ran over your cat.’

“Oh, that’s sad. The poor cat.” (The children begin to sink slowly toward the floor.)

“And then the man said, ‘I’d like to replace your cat.’

And the lady replied, ‘That’s alright with me, but how are you at catching mice?’” And they all fly up to the ceiling again.

As a child watching the film, it was as magical and joy-filled as just about anything I could possibly imagine. I’d never seen adults be so utterly silly and ridiculous, and the thought of having a tea party on the ceiling seemed just as wonderful. As an adult, I crave the moments when I am lost that hard in laughter, and they almost always come with my family. No one makes me laugh harder and more often than Nathan and the kids. Just as much as home can be mundane and routine, the familiarity of home can access the full range of our emotions faster and more passionately than pretty much anywhere else. It’s the stuff of home and those deep, full emotions that run through the story of Isaac’s birth.

Sarah and Abraham were in their elder years. Whatever promises God had made years ago about making a great nation out of them was surely thought to be a metaphor they no longer understood. Sarah likely continued thinking of the surprise of babies years beyond when that unexpected news might seem possible, but she has now reached a point where the ache and sadness of that loss is as familiar as her old husband beside her. So the divine word these angelic beings bring of a son to be born in a year’s time has her laughing in a way deemed quite rude to one who is welcoming strangers passing by. 

Frederick Buechner describes it like this:

"QUANTITATIVELY SPEAKING, you don't find all that much laughter in the Bible, but, qualitatively, there's nothing quite like it to be found anywhere else. There are a couple of chapters in the book of Genesis that positively shake with it. Sarah was never going to see ninety again, and Abraham had already hit one hundred, and when the angel told them that the stork was on its way at last, they both of them almost collapsed. Abraham laughed "till he fell on his face" (Genesis 17:17), and Sarah stood cackling behind the tent door so the angel wouldn't think she was being rude as the tears streamed down her cheeks. When the baby finally came, they even called him "Laughter"—which is what Isaac means in Hebrew—because obviously no other name would do.

Laughter gets mixed up with all sorts of things in the Bible and in the world too, things like sneering, irony, making fun of, and beating the competition hollow. It also gets mixed up with things like comedians and slipping on banana peels and having the soles of your feet tickled. There are times when you laugh to keep from crying…or even in the midst of crying… But 100 percent, bonded, aged-in-the-wood laughter is something else again.

It's the crazy parrot squawks that issue out of David as he spins like a top in front of the ark (2 Samuel 6:16-21). It's what the Psalms are talking about where they say, "When the Lord had rescued Zion, then our mouth was filled with laughter" (126:1-2), or where they get so excited they yell out, "Let the floods clap their hands, let the hills sing for joy together!" because the Lord has come through at last (98:8). It's what the Lord himself is talking about when he says that on the day he laid the cornerstone of the earth "the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy" (Job 38:7), and it's what the rafters ring with when the Prodigal comes home and his old crock of a father is so glad to see him he almost has a stroke and "they began to make merry" and kept on making merry till the cows came home (Luke 15:24). It's what Jesus means when he stands in that crowd of cripples and loners and oddballs and factory rejects and says, "Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh" (Luke 6:21). Nobody claims there's a chuckle on every page, but laughter's what the whole Bible is really about. Nobody who knows a hat from home plate claims that getting mixed up with God is all sweetness and light, but ultimately it's what that's all about too.

Sarah and her husband had had plenty of hard knocks in their time, and there were plenty more of them still to come, but at that moment when the angel told them they'd better start dipping into their old-age pensions for cash to build a nursery, the reason they laughed was that it suddenly dawned on them that the wildest dreams they'd ever had hadn't been half wild enough.”

“[I]t suddenly dawned on them that the wildest dreams they'd ever had hadn't been half wild enough.”

The man wants to know he will inherit eternal life, and he’s fairly confident Jesus has the answer to what it’s all about. But Jesus wants him to let go of everything to which he ascribes value and meaning. Whatever stuff of this earth tells you that you matter, let it go. Whatever possessions and luxury items you buy to make yourself believe that’s where your value is, get rid of it. If your loyalty to the distractions around you are more important than caring for your neighbor and pursuing the unfolding path of God, then keeping the commandments won’t help you find joy. And the man is heartbroken by this news. He goes away sad because he wanted to control the terms of his faith. Follow these rules over here in this column but don’t let them alter your life or change anything about what you value and how you work or who you welcome to your table. The wildest dreams he had ever had weren’t half wild enough, and he couldn’t even muster the imagination to entertain what Jesus was offering him.

What a challenge to us today! The jaded, the clever, the cynical, the seasoned, the seen-it-all, the well-reasoned. This faith thing is about holy imagination and giving into delight and amazement. What dreams do we have that aren’t half wild enough? What  do we stubbornly hold onto as the real value of life and don’t even realize it only ever leaves us sad? What hilariously impossible dreams of God do we write off as metaphor instead of believing surprise and mystery and miracle are real and possible and happening all around us?

We talk about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, offering water to the thirsty, visiting the prisoner, and welcoming the stranger as the work of welcoming Christ himself. Are we dreaming big enough dreams as we do this holy work? Are we delighted and amazed by the foolishness of our imaginations and the radical nature of our dreams? 

One of my favorite prayers is a paraphrase of Ephesians 3 written by the late Eugene Peterson: “I ask him that with both feet planted firmly on love, you’ll be able to take in with all followers of Jesus the extravagant dimensions of Christ’s love. Reach out and experience the breadth! Test its length! Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God. God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams!”

May you, my brothers and sisters, go wild in your dreams. May you dream bigger dreams without the fear of them never being realized. May you laugh with the holy one who will fill your very home with a child named laughter. This Christ journey is one of unending joy and not solitary sadness. Our task is to continue untethering and releasing and freeing and unloosing ourselves and our neighbors and the strangers we meet until the wild laughter and imagination of God is what becomes more real than the jaded heartbreak that permeates far too much of this old world. May you dare to believe in the hilariously impossible today!

Amen.