Sarah's Laughter

Good morning.

Today's reading is from Genesis 18, verses 1 to 15.

Genesis 18:1–15

And the Lord appeared to him by the oaks of Marm as he sat at the door of his tent in the heat of the day.

He lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, three men were standing in front of him.

When he saw them, he ran from the tent door to meet them, and bowed himself to the earth, and said, O Lord, if I have found favour in your sight, do not pass by your servant.

Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree, while I bring a morsel of 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.

And Abraham went quickly into the tent to Sarah, and said, Quick, three sea is of fine flour, knead it, and make cakes.

And Abraham ran to the herd and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to a young man, who prepared it quickly.

Then he took curds and milk and the calf that they had prepared, and set it before them, and he stood by them under the tree while they ate.

They said to him, Where is Sarah your wife?

And he said, She is in the tent.

The Lord said, I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife will have a son.

And Sarah was listening at the tent door behind him.

Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years.

The way of women had ceased to be with Sarah.

So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, After I am worn out and my Lord is old, shall I have pleasure?

The Lord said to Abraham, Why did Sarah laugh and say, Shall I indeed bear a child now that I am old?

Is anything too hard for the Lord?

At the appointed time I will return to you.

About this time next year, and Sarah shall have a son.

But Sarah denied it, saying, I did not laugh, for she was afraid.

He said, No, but you did laugh.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

It's my one of my favorite things God says in Scripture.

There is no, but you did laugh.

It feels so petty.

We'll unpack it a bit more.

Um it reminds me of another uh thing that I love.

Do any of you read the Jesus Storybook Bible to your kids or just to yourself?

It's a wonderful Jesus storybook Bible.

But in the story of the Last Supper, uh, the story ends and it says, and then the disciples got up and they went to one of their favorite places, an olive garden.

And they're referring to the Garden of Gethsemane.

But every time we read that, it just cracks me up.

Like the disciples are like, Do we got reservations?

Like unlimited breadsticks.

Uh but those lines feel the same to me.

Okay, welcome to Redemption Church.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

And I've got a couple of announcements before we get into our text for today.

First off, baby dedications will be on May 9th.

So if you have a baby that you would like dedicated here, uh a newborn, one of the COVID babies, of which there are many, uh, then uh uh email uh Megan at redemptiondenver.com.

And uh it should be up here, yeah, Megan M-A-E-G-A-N.

It's one of like the 15,000 ways to spell Megan.

Um uh so we can get scheduled for that.

Likewise, baptisms are coming up on uh the week following that, which is May 16th.

So email me for that.

So if you're interested in a baptism for yourself, for your child, which has made raise some questions for some of you, but yes, it's a thing, that uh we'd like to make available to you as well.

And that's something you email me directly.

Because that's stuff I'd like to just be in conversation with you about, and we can get into that baptism tech track and have those sorts of conversations.

Sound good?

Uh next is uh just a general announcement uh that we want to be become more consistent in announcing.

We have an app that we use a lot.

Uh and you can download it in any app store.

Uh, redemption, just search Redemption Church Denver.

There's a company that like makes church apps, and we use it, and it's very good.

So uh we recommend uh downloading it, and you can get notifications from us to learn more about what's going on.

It's the easiest place to access signups for studies and things of that nature.

Likewise, there's a Bible reading plan that's built into the app, and it's been one of the most joyful experiences my time in ministry has been doing this Bible reading plan and knowing others in our church or doing it at the same time.

And having this sort of shared language around, hey, did you read this last week?

Wasn't that strange?

Or wasn't this an encouraging part of scripture, or being able to share questions and like uh and things with each other out of that?

So uh yeah, just want to uh make an announcement about that.

Also, the app is a very easy way to give to the church.

Uh so make that a part of your worship as well.

All right, let's pray, and we'll get into the text for today.

Holy Father, we pray that you would attend this time and that we would, by your spirit, not just be seeing the particulars of this text, Lord, but that we would see in it how you've crafted your world.

And that in seeing how you've crafted your world, you would show us how we are to relate to you and to one another in it.

Lord, by your word, would you give us wisdom to understand the world that you've placed us in?

Father, I pray that your spirit would move in our hearts to accomplish that this morning.

Lift us up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

In today's text, we get one of the most wonderful phrases in Scripture that's repeated throughout Scripture and a lot of different circumstances.

And uh the phrase is said by God himself in response to Sarah's laughter uh at him.

And God says, Is anything too hard for the Lord?

Jeremiah will use this later.

It's picked up in throughout the Psalms.

It becomes this phrase that's used throughout all of Scripture is anything too hard for the Lord.

It's a wonderful thing, and I want us to sort of view this story as a way to meditate on that phrase together is anything too hard for the Lord.

Part of the reason that we're spending this time in Genesis, and what we're doing, just to kind of provide some context, is uh we just preach through books of the Bible.

And the book that we're in currently is Genesis, and we kind of split them up throughout the year.

So we did the first 10 chapters of Genesis in the spring of 2020 and or the winter spring, first half of 2020 in January to whatever this is.

And then we uh uh did the first 10 chapters of Mark uh in the fall.

And so now in 2021, we're here in the uh next 10 chapters of Genesis.

And the reason that I wanted to preach through Genesis is because these are foundational truths that describe the world that we're in.

And if we don't get these, then we won't even have the categories available to ourselves to be able to accurately assess the situations that we're in.

Instead, we'll just pick up on whatever categories happen to be given to us.

You'll notice that there's a trend currently where our culture has sort of lost um language of morality, morality.

And so we don't speak in terms of rights and wrong anymore.

Uh instead, we tend to use uh therapeutic language to discuss moral things.

So we'll we'll speak of health and unhealth, uh, or we'll speak of trauma and responses.

Those are real things.

I'm not saying those aren't real things, they are.

But it's worth noticing that the categories that our culture gives us are not as complete as the categories that scripture gives us.

And so when we move back to Genesis, we're able to gain an understanding through the categories that it provides us of the world that we're actually in.

And the most fundamental category that Genesis presents is given right away, and that's this distinction between God, the creator, and us, his creatures.

We have to be able to understand this fundamental distinction of existence, that there is a creator who is infinite and all-powerful, and that we are his creatures, who are finite and contained, dependent upon him.

And if we have any hope of understanding ourselves as people, we can't lose sight of that fundamental reality.

We are not self-created things.

We cannot come up with who we are.

But who we are is in fact given to us by a creator.

We are limited.

God is unlimited.

And we have to understand that key distinction of reality.

And if we don't, then we won't be able to interpret even the most mundane parts of our own lives.

So I want you to consider this question kind of in light of that distinction.

We think God is the creator, nothing is too hard for Him.

For us, His creatures, there are lots of things that are too hard for us.

Things that in who we are as creatures, we simply can't accomplish in ourselves.

So I want you to take a moment and try and be honest with yourself.

Open your heart in as legitimate of a way as you feel you're able.

And I want you to consider this question.

What is something that you really need?

Something you really need in your life that is too hard for you?

Take a moment and consider that.

Something that I I can't live without this.

This has to be accomplished, but it's too hard for me to do.

Do you have something like that?

Now, before you spin off into somewhere crazy, like uh if you're thinking like, well, I I have to, I don't know, make humans an interplanetary species.

Like if I'm preaching to Elon Musk this morning.

I want you to instead think and think relationally.

Think in terms of your relationships.

It could be a relationship with a with your father or your mother, or your spouse, a way of relating that you've given up on hoping for.

Or a relationship with a church community that you've you've given up on improving.

What is too hard for you?

When we're encountering those places that are too hard for us, that we know we need, you know, they're good, we're coming up against this limit of our creaturliness, and we're discovering our need for a creator for whom nothing is too hard.

It's in those points where we must learn how to relate as people that can't just make things happen for ourselves, but instead that require a God for whom nothing is too hard.

So I want you to zero in on that place, and I hope that it's personal and real, you know, kind of tangible for you in your thinking, and realize that those are the very places that we discover the God for whom nothing is too hard.

But it's a difficult thing to actually live in those places.

It requires two things, and we'll see examples of this in uh the response of Abraham to these three strange visitors, and in the response to Sarah, in the response of Sarah to these three strange visitors.

The first is that we need to learn to practice trust, trusting God, which makes us open to surprises.

Practice trusting God in a way that makes us open to surprises.

And the second is we need to own our limits before a limitless God.

So those are two things, and we'll see that they're both deeply related to trust in our own hearts.

Okay, so the first one, learn how to trust so that we can be open to surprises.

That's what we're gonna look at in Abraham's response.

So let's jump into our story.

Genesis 18, 1 through 2.

And the Lord appeared to him by the oaks of Marm as he sat at the door of his tent in the heat of the day.

He lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, three men were standing in front of him.

When he saw them, he ran from the tent door to meet them and bowed himself to the earth.

Okay, so Abraham is, it's the siesta, it's the middle of the day, the heat of the day.

And so they typically would have taken a break from their labor, and that's what Abraham was doing.

He was sitting in front of his tent, it's the heat of the day, and he sees three men that are walking.

And he has this incredible response of hospitality to the unexpected arrival of these three strangers.

Now, who the strangers are becomes more clear, but initially they're just strangers.

As we read on, Abraham will refer to them as the Lord.

And it's this strange dynamic.

Some interpreters say uh that there's a representation of the Trinity here.

I think that's less likely.

Others say that it's perhaps the Lord himself, some sort of incarnation of the Lord, and then angelic messengers.

Others say that they were all three angelic messengers, but as representatives of the Lord, he would refer to them as the Lord as they spoke the Lord's word.

To plunge into those mysteries with any specificity is just beyond my pay grade.

But but what we need to see is that in their coming to Abraham at this point, that the message of God to Abraham is becoming incredibly explicit.

In fact, it's so explicit that there's not just one of them, there's three of them that are in agreement reiterating these promises of God that have been given to Abraham already, but will be reiterated more and more.

And so we see a very explicit revelation from God to Abraham.

It's three physical people, it's it's that are sent from the Lord.

It's something that's that's undoubtable, irrefutable.

Now, compare this to Abraham's original call.

Do you remember the original call of Abraham?

Our first series, our first part of this in uh of this year in Genesis in Genesis 12.

John preached it.

And the original call of Abraham is Abraham, Abram at that point, go from your people to a place that I will show you, and I will make you a blessing, and everyone who blesses you will be blessed, and those who curse you will be cursed.

He just hears it.

He's not shown anything.

In fact, he's not even told where he should go.

He's just told to go.

See how vague the call of God is on Abraham's life initially.

You know, if we were to talk about it in like modern contemporary terms, we'd probably say something more like, Abraham seemed to leave kind of like on a whim.

It's like Abraham had this hunch that he was given from the Lord to go.

And he wasn't really told where he was going, but he he left kind of on this hunch.

He followed what seemed like obedience to him at the time.

But then as the story moves on, it progresses, and the revelation of God becomes more and more clear and more and more particular.

God says that your offspring will be like the dust of the earth.

And then God says that his offspring will be like the stars that are in the heavens.

And he becomes very clear about the particular land of Canaan that he is going to give him, even naming the particular nations that will inhabit it and will be driven out.

And when Abraham and Sarah begin to doubt that it will be their biological offspring together, God reiterates several times, it will be Sarah's son.

It will come through Sarah.

And then here we'll see this explicit description that's given to Abraham later in this passage, which uh says that very same thing from these three physical, physical men who he's able to look at and see and hear.

We see the the revelation of God to Abraham is progressive.

It grows as Abraham is moving in obedience.

See, this is what life is like.

This is why we're reading Genesis, right?

Because we're trying to learn the patterns of how God relates to us.

And we're shown this in Genesis.

And what is it like?

Oftentimes, you know, you hear people trying to discern their calling all the time, especially at pivotal moments if you're discerning between jobs or things of that nature, or a city to move to, or all those sorts of things.

And and uh but when we look at what the calling of God is like in our lives, oftentimes it it's we would like for it to be, he tells us the very end right at the beginning, and then we just get to go make it happen on our terms.

You know, he would show up to Abraham and be like, hey, check it out.

You're gonna have a son, it's gonna be late in life, so just you know relax for now and enjoy not changing diapers until you're a hundred.

And then uh you're not going to see the land claimed, the land is going to be claimed by your descendants, so just don't stress about that one.

But that's not the way God does it.

God reveals this progressively, he reveals himself more particularly in our lives as he matures us into what he's calling us towards.

God is working, uh God reveals himself progressively as he works in us at the same time as he's working through us.

And so he starts off on a whim at kind of a hunch.

Uh and here's here's the important thing.

So many of us won't move until we've heard the end of the story.

That's not the way God works.

God is saying, like, look, what does God say to Abraham?

Go.

I'm gonna be with you, I'll bless you, and I'll protect you from people who try and curse you.

And that's the same type of faith that He calls us to act in.

And then it becomes more and more particular.

You know, I uh I was talking with some folks this morning, they were asking, How did how did you become the pastor here?

It's like, well, it was kind of the same way.

It moved from a hunch to a job to a more explicit job until what until being the pastor but not feeling like it, and then realizing the responsibilities in relationships that I was deeply invested in here and realizing they were there, and then almost reflectively looking back and saying, like, oh, I'm the pastor here.

Somebody should do something about this.

As I'm staring in the mirror.

But isn't that what life is like?

Isn't that what any calling is like?

It becomes progressively revealed.

So we got we we need to learn how to understand these patterns in life to grasp the particulars of what God is calling us to, you know, even relationally.

Like, think back to some of your closest friends.

What was the week like that that you first met them?

Oftentimes you can't even remember.

You're like, I don't remember our first conversation.

It was just kind of a hunch.

But now you look and it's like I feel a sense of real responsibility for this relationship.

I feel a real sense of God's calling on my life to be in these people's lives.

That's the way God works.

You know, all of a sudden, this thing of like, hey, you should really be there for this friend moves from a hunch to like three people knocking at your door, like, hey, we need dinner, you need to be there for that friend.

You know, it's more and more explicit.

That's what we see happening to Abraham.

Now, Abraham receives this explicit calling.

And he's even open to receiving explicit callings from the Lord like this.

And I think one of the features that we can prepare our hearts in the same way as Abraham, to be open in that same way, one of the features that he has is a response of radical hospitality.

Radical hospitality to strangers.

Genesis 18, 3 through 4, this is what Abraham says.

And said, O Lord, if I have found favor in your sight, do not pass by your servant.

Let a little water be brought and wash your feet and rest.

Yourselves under the tree while I bring a morsel of bread that you may refresh yourselves.

So he says, Don't pass by.

Here's a little water and a morsel of bread.

You can wash your feet and just relax.

You know, don't pass by.

And then in the next pass it passage, which you'll see up here, but I won't I won't read, uh he goes to Sarah and says, Hey, bake cakes.

And he goes to one of his, he goes and grabs the fatted calf and gives it to a servant, is like, slaughter it and prepare the meat and get it ready for these folks.

And he goes to another one, he's like, get the milk and the curds.

And they go and lay them all out under one of the oaks.

And as they're eating, the three men are like, Wow, a morsel of water, uh, a little water and a morsel.

This is a feast that he's given to them.

And he stands by as they eat, you know, like a like a servant ready to attend to them.

And he takes this posture of radical hospitality towards an unexpected blessing.

He views his life in such a way as, you know, this there's just a hunch that there might be some goodness in this.

I'm gonna go all in on it.

There's just this like inkling, hey, these are just some strangers that haven't really revealed much yet.

I'm going to demonstrate a real care and a real hospitality towards them because I've been given this blessing from the Lord.

If I bless them, they'll bless.

And if they curse me, then all then they'll be cursed.

I'm just going to trust these ordinary promises that the Lord has given me.

The life of faith moves forward despite uncertainty and is open to respond generously to serendipity.

I'm using that word kind of strangely because serendipity is like a happy accident, right?

But when we live a life of faith, what we're saying is there's no accidents.

The Lord is over all things.

And so we can live in such a way that isn't guarded, but is actually open to the vulnerability of trust.

In his response, in that hospitality, he receives this deep clarity of vision from the three men.

Genesis 18, 9 through 10.

They said to him, Where is Sarah, your wife?

And he said, She is in the tent.

The Lord said, I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah, your wife, shall have a son.

And Sarah was listening at the tent door behind him.

Okay, look at the clarity.

It's time stamped.

The Lord says, I will surely return to you.

When is it going to be?

It's at this time next year.

And is the offspring really going to be theirs?

Sarah will have a son.

See the particularity that God now speaks to Abraham in.

It started as just a whim, but now it has this real clarity because he was moving in faith throughout this whole journey.

Now we often miss this sort of clarity and miss this experience of this sort of clarity.

And simple little things can be in the way of it.

For Sarah, it was just, she was just sitting in the tent, overhearing.

And that tent flap became enough to prevent her from receiving that explicit, wonderful promise.

Instead, she views it cynically.

Now, I think that it's that cynicism where we attempt to guard and protect our own hearts that prevents us from being open to an accident of life and thinking this could actually be positive.

So we're going to see that in Sarah's story, we're going to see that the way to prevent that cynicism is to own our own limits before a limitless God.

Okay, so in Genesis 18, 11 through 12, it says, Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years.

The way of women had ceased to be with Sarah.

So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, After I am worn out, and my Lord is old, shall I have pleasure?

Okay, so Sarah is just on the other side of the tent flap.

Abram is talking with these three men.

They give this promise of the child who will come this time next year.

It will be Sarah's child.

And she laughs to herself, saying, After I'm worn out and Abraham's old, shall I have pleasure?

Is this really going to happen?

Like this is absurd.

And she's laughing at it.

She's literally calling it absurd.

Now we see that Sarah is in such a frame of mind where she's gridlocked in her doubt of what is possible.

Her own frame of viewing the world has become so limited that she can only think in terms of her own limitations.

That becomes the frame of her whole world.

A helpful insight.

His name is Edwin Friedman, and this is he died in the 90s, I think.

I'm looking for someone else who's read to confirm.

Nope.

So he says he says this, and I think you'll hear the connections between what's happening in Sarah's life.

He says, when any relationship system is imaginatively gridlocked, it cannot get free simply through more thinking about the problem.

Conceptually stuck systems cannot become unstuck simply by trying harder.

For a fundamental reorientation to occur, a spirit of adventure that optimizes serendipity and enables new perceptions beyond the control of our thinking processes must happen.

Want me to read that again?

For a fundamental reorientation to occur, a spirit of adventure that optimizes serendipity and enables new perceptions beyond the control of our thinking processes must happen first.

We see that Sarah is in a place that is imaginatively gridlocked.

And the way that she thinks she can get out of it, or the way forward and through it, is just to keep thinking harder about the problem.

What's the problem?

They were promised a son, they don't have it yet.

It's been a very long time.

It's been so long, in fact, that she is incapable of having a child now.

So what is she moling over and thinking about?

After I am worn out and my Lord is old, shall I have pleasure?

You can even hear in her language, it's a very sensual understanding of God's promises.

She's viewing all of God's promises as something that just takes place within her.

There's a sense in which that's true, of course, she's going to be having the child, but there's another sense in which she's seeing her limits as the real limits of reality.

She's not seeing her limits as what's bringing her up against the limitless God.

The Lord will not let Sarah remain gridlocked.

God is great at breaking our imaginations apart.

He says this in Genesis 18, 13, the Lord said to Abraham, and you know, Sarah is listening, why did Sarah laugh and say, Shall I indeed bear a child now that I am old?

Okay, we're gonna spend a bit of time with this question.

Why did Sarah laugh?

Why did Sarah laugh?

What did Sarah's laughter mean?

We saw a couple of weeks ago that Abraham also laughed when God said that he would have the child this time next year.

Abraham's laughter was very different, though, from Sarah's.

Abraham's laughter, it seemed to be a joyful expression of wonder.

Sarah's laughter seems to be a demonstration of cynicism.

And so our culture is really torn about what to laugh about right now.

We've we you can tell because we have the onion and we have the Babylon Bee.

We have both.

And that means we can't agree on what's funny.

We don't know any anymore.

We have uh uh we we even have particular like comedy events.

Like did any of you see the net, the Hannah Gatsby stand-up thing?

Okay, that's the way everyone has responded when I've asked that.

But it's like the most influential stand-up comedy that's ever happened, but like nobody's watched it.

It's like the revolutionary revolutionary event of Hamilton when it was in Broadway, and it's like, yeah, like 3,000 people have seen it.

Um okay, anyway.

Uh but the anyway, that that that was interesting because it's a stand-up comedy special that's that's not funny.

Right?

It's not meant to be funny.

It's sort of meant to shine a light on what's wrong in comedy.

Okay, so uh I want to talk a bit about laughter and how it plays out in our culture and the ambiguity.

So uh Ricky Gervais, we all know him.

Yeah, that's right.

So created the office, the British Office.

Um I only watch the British Office.

Uh he describes comedy as like puppies wrestling.

And puppies, when they wrestle, uh occasionally they hurt each other and then they back off a little bit.

But then they get back to wrestling and playing with one another.

And and what they're discovering is where are the limits of play and the limits of where we actually get hurt.

And he says comedy does that same sort of role for a culture, it establishes our limits, where it's like you're you're going right up against the edge, and if you're not right up against the edge, it's not funny.

Uh it's just it's, you know, we'll say like that's cheesy or corny or something, but if it's right up against the edge, we'll say that's funny.

And then it establishes that particular boundary.

But if somebody gets hurt, we say, oh, we've gone over it, we've gone over the edge.

You know, he he crossed the line, we'll say.

And this is uh important to recognize that comedy, laughter, is about defining boundaries.

Laughter is about defining particular boundaries.

And this has been the understanding of humor sort of throughout history, is that it it upholds particular norms and boundaries.

And where laughter is, is establishing certain boundaries.

So think of the court jester.

You know, that was a real thing that king's courts had.

And what did the court jester do?

He would go and make himself absurd.

He dressed absurd, very unlike the king, and uh unlike the rest of the court that would be there.

He is absurd and he does silly things, and he makes himself the butt of the joke.

The court jester or the clown is himself what is absurd and what is to be laughed at.

And so he's playing a pretty critical role because by making himself absurd, he's saying this is what's absurd, the rest of the court isn't.

Do you see?

He's establishing a particular boundary of what is the norm and what is the margin, what is congruous and what is incongruous, what's normal, what's absurd or strange.

And that's the role that was played.

But what happens when the norms of the society you view as no longer worth upholding?

Then all of a sudden, that line of the norm and the absurdity becomes blurred.

So our culture is working through this right now.

If if you're a white guy and you want an Oscar, who do you play?

The Joker.

Who would have thought that like what character gets you an Oscar?

It's not like, I don't know, a famous character in a famous play of whom I know none.

There's it's it's the it's the joker, is who you play.

And what boundary does the joker play?

He's not the butt of the joke.

All of society is the butt of the joke.

He's the he's the observer who stands back and says, see, everything that you're doing is absurd.

These rules and this morality and these games that you're playing are archaic and outdated and just absurd.

Right?

So comedy in that sense is drawing a certain line, a certain limit, but instead of doing one that that upholds what is good by shining a light on what's absurd, it destroys what is good by calling all that is good absurd.

Do you see that?

Okay, so we get these sort of ideas of there's a proper laughter, which is surprised.

You know, they're both dealing with this limit.

And there's a proper laughter which sees going over the limit, and there's an absurdity over there that's that's laughable, and we can laugh at it.

And then there's another laughter which stands on the outside of the line and says, I am the only normal one here, and I laugh at all of you.

I am the determiner of normality, and I call all of this absurd.

One is a laughter of joyful wonder at the goodness of the boundaries that are put into the world.

The other is a laughter of absolute cynicism, a totality of cynicism.

Do you see the distinction?

I want you to have your antenna kind of up for these things when you're just looking out into movements in our culture.

Where is the laughter?

What type of boundary is that laughter reaffirming?

Is it destroying the good biblical boundary that's been given to us, or is it upholding it?

Okay.

Now let's look at Sarah's.

Sarah is literally behind a boundary, right, of the tent.

And she's listening in to what God is saying.

And she laughs, saying, No, I know what is in the realm of normal.

What is in the realm of normal is when you get this old and your husband's worn out and you're worn out, you can't have kids anymore.

So where does that place God?

God is in the realm of the absurd, the outrageous.

You know, he's in the abnormal.

And so how do you respond to that?

With a cynical laughter.

And we see this where so often in our culture the goodness of God is met with a cynical laughter.

Because we've defined ourselves as the norm, even though we are limited creatures, and we call him absurd because he's outside of our boundary.

So that's why God responds with a question about limits.

Limits and boundaries.

That's what laughter is all about.

Genesis 18, 14.

Is anything too hard for the Lord?

Do you hear?

God is so good at that.

Do you hear how He's piercing right to the heart of the matter?

You're saying that your plane or frame of reference is the ultimate in understanding is anything too hard for the Lord?

In order for her to answer that question, in order for her to understand her own laughter, she's going to have to say, I was just thinking of me.

I was thinking of all of existence, just in terms of my own limits, my own desires, my own wants, what I could accomplish for myself.

I wasn't viewing the world as though there really was a God who transcended it all.

And he reaffirms his promise to her.

At the appointed time, I will return to you, about this time next year, and Sarah shall have a son.

Is anything too hard for the Lord?

Do you remember when we started with that question?

I want you to consider what that particular thing was that you were thinking.

Is anything too hard for the Lord?

Where where do I need him to come through with this?

You might laugh at him if he did, you know, with cynicism.

What if that got transformed into wonder?

In Genesis 18, 15.

But Sarah denied it, saying, I did not laugh, for she was afraid.

He said, No, but you did laugh.

Now, why does he hold her to it?

Why does he hold her to remembering the laughter?

Here's my hypothesis.

Here's what I think.

She has to do two things simultaneously.

She has to discover the limitless God and discover her own limits.

Those are the same.

So she has to, at the same time of in encountering, this is where you, if you just, if you just discover the limitless God, then this is where God starts to act like, you know, you know, like the secret, where like if I just imagine these things, I'll manifest them into the world.

That's like discovering just the limitless God, right?

And and I can learn how to control him and get what I want from him if I manage my life in this particular way.

But if you discover just your own limits, then you're you be you plunge into cynicism.

But here he's calling her to see, right after saying that he will fulfill this promise.

He says, No, but you did laugh, saying, Remember your limits and how they relate to me, the one who is limitless.

That experience of the creator who is limitless relating to the creature who is limited, that's called grace.

That's where we experience grace.

And so we're learning how to be creatures again.

Ones that don't manifest our own world, but ones that are dependent upon a good God.

That's where nothing is too hard for God becomes good news for us.

Becomes good news for us when we own our own limits.

Last thing, Genesis 21, 6 through 7.

This is this time next year, when he promised they would have the child.

And Sarah said, by the way, they named their son, as they were told to by God, Isaac.

Isaac means son of laughter.

And this is what Sarah says.

God has made laughter for me.

Everyone who hears will laugh over me.

Is that a laughter of joy or cynicism?

Joy.

Everyone who hears will laugh over me.

And she said, Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children?

Yet I have borne him a son in his own age.

Her laughter originally said, There is a limit that not even God can cross.

And it's based on me.

God gives her the son and says, There is a limit that you can't cross.

That's true.

But there are no limits that I can't cross.

Which means the heart of your reality is learning how to relate to your creator.

That's where we understand the world, is in that relationship.

There's so much more to be said about this, but I should wrap up.

There's a whole Jesus bit that needs to be said.

You know, the the Creator, because how much more does the creator then relate to us?

He takes on our flesh so that this transcendent creator can be known by us.

He takes on our punishment so that we can come to him clean.

He takes on all of our limits so that we can experience him in joyful worship as the unlimited one.

This is the heart of God's grace towards us.

It is the foundation of reality.

Okay.

Now, I'll start preaching again if we keep going.

Let's take a question, if there are any.

No questions today, Your Honor.

Okay.

And let's pray.

Father, I pray that you would give us wisdom to hear this word.

Lord, that we would be able to live with hearts that trust because we trust you, and that own our limits because we trust you with them.

Father, turn our hearts outward.

Help us understand the world that we're in.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.