Sunday Sermon - June 14, 2026

Scripture Readings:

Genesis 18:1-15; 21:1-7

Romans 5:1-8

Learn more about St. John Lutheran Church at stjohnchurchmars.org or follow us on Facebook.

Scripture quotations from the COMMON ENGLISH BIBLE. © Copyright 2011 COMMON ENGLISH BIBLE. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

A reading from Genesis. 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. 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. He said, My Lord, if I find favor with you, do not pass by your servant. Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. 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, and Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah and said, Make ready quickly three measures of choice flour, meat it, and make cakes. Abraham ran to the herd and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to the servant, who hastened to prepare it. 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. They said to him, Where is your wife Sarah? And he said, There in the tent. 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. Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age. It had ceased to be with Sarah, after the manner of women. So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, After I have grown old and my husband is old, shall I be fruitful? The Lord said to Abraham, Why did Sarah laugh and say, Shall I indeed bear child, now that I am old? Is there anything too wonderful for the Lord? At the set time I will return to you in due season, and Sarah shall have a son. But Sarah denied, saying, I did not laugh, for she was afraid. He said, Yes, you did laugh. The Lord dealt with Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah as he had promised. Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the time of which God had spoken to him. Abraham gave the name Isaac to his son, whom Sarah bore him, and Abraham circumcised his son Isaac when he was eight days old, as God had commanded him. Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him. Now Sarah said, God has brought laughter for me, everyone who hears will laugh with me. And she said, Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

SPEAKER_01 2:56

So last week we started our journey with Abram. And I called Abram the epitome of faithfulness as God said, go, and he just packed up everything he had and went with no questions asked, right? And I he was the epitome of faithfulness. He was the epitome of trust in God. And now that was, I think it was what, chapter 12 last week, and now we're in chapter 18, which means six chapters have happened. And I gotta be honest with you, in those six chapters, Abram or Abraham doesn't always have that whole epitome of faith thing down pat. Um it's a wild story if you've got time to read it. Uh at one point Abraham lies about his relationship with Sarah, um, and she gets um basically sold, and then he gets her back because things happen. Uh so check it out. But throughout it all, basically, let it be said that in those six chapters, Abram was told to go to the promised land, and I will make a great nation of you. And he says, Okay, cool. And then that doesn't happen. And they have years and years of saying, Well, we need to figure out how to make this happen, because God said it should happen, and it's not happening, so let's figure this out and make this happen. And so they try over and over again, and nothing seems to be working. There's years of fear and disappointment and hopelessness. Abraham is told that he's going to be the father, and he says, I can't, because I'm old, and Sarah's old. And so at some point they come up with a scheme, and they say, Well, we've got this slave, Hagar, she can have a kid, and he can be your kid, and that happens, and we'll get to his story later. But years, years and years and years of them having heard a promise of a future, a promise of a life, a promise of all this good news that's coming to them, and nothing. They get nothing other than just the promise that this is coming. And so imagine Sarah for a second. We're actually gonna stick with Sarah for today. Imagine Sarah. She is in a society where a woman's primary purpose is to be a mother, and she is 90 years old, and she has never born a kid, she has no offspring, there is no way for Abraham's line to continue through her, and so she is crushed, she is lost, she is beyond hopeless. It feels like there's just nothing left for her. She's empty. And so she's continually trying to remain faithful, but all sense of hope as you read her story seems to have gone from her. Because for years, for years, not just since God promised anything, but from years before that, she had hoped that she would be a mom. She had hoped that she would live into the expectations. She had hoped for that job of being mother. She had hoped for the way she thought life would turn out. And she'd been crushed, disappointed, and made hopeless by the end of it. So by the time we get to her in today's story, Sarah, I imagine at least, is just utterly depressed. Because what else does she have to look forward to at this point? And I keep harping on Paul because that phrase, Abraham was as good as dead. But I think that phrase might have felt real to Sarah. Because what purpose did she have, what life did she have left at that point? And I imagine also many of us, maybe not to that extent, but many of us had had various points in our life where we are kind of at the end of our rope, where it feels like we cannot catch a break, where it feels like life just is not what we expected, life is not what we planned. Whether it is through challenges with infertility, whether it is challenges with illness and chronic illness of mind, body, or soul, whether it is employment struggles, housing struggles, broken relationships, or even just the sense that you can't seem to have a single day where nothing in the house breaks. At some point, I feel many, if not all of us, have had a point where we're just like, we're just like, I don't, I don't even know how to take the next step forward. There is a lostness, a hopelessness. And then when we're told, you know, a platitude of something along the lines of, this too shall pass, you sometimes do one of those little, sure it will. And I imagine that's Sarah's laughter at the first part of the story. She overhears, because she's off in the tent, doesn't say how far, but she's off in the tent, and she hears these three visitors explaining to Abraham that not only is Abraham going to have descendants, but they're going to come through Sarah. Sarah, who is crushed and lost, hopeless and depressed. And so she just kind of does one of those, sure. And then the visitors look at her and said, Well, why'd you laugh? And then Sarah, in all honesty, just is afraid of, like, oh, well, I didn't laugh because there's something about these visitors that says that they are not just random passers by. These are divine. This is a divine presence among them. And so Sarah is not about to admit to the divine presence that she laughed at the idea of hope. She is not about to admit and say that she thought they were out of their minds when they said that she would yet have a kid. And I always find it interesting because sometimes we give her a hard time for laughing at that point. But the divine, the messengers, they don't step in and scold her. They don't tell her you should not have laughed at all, but rather they simply speak the truth. And they say, But you did. And in that sentence, I hear these divine messengers stepping into Sarah's disbelief, stepping into Sarah's disappointment and brokenheartedness, and saying, you did laugh. And it made sense. Because this idea of there being hope in life for you now, it's hard to believe. And so in that moment, the divine meets Sarah where she is in that wry laughter, in that disappointment and hopelessness. And as the divine messengers step into that space, they declare that there is no suffering that can place a sufferer beyond the power of God's love. There is no level of disappointment, hopelessness, or crushedness that is outside of the reach of God's love. For when the good news of life and hope and joy and promise seems laughable, seems absolutely ludicrous, the Holy Spirit is already there. God is already there sitting alongside us and saying, Yes, I hear your laughter. Just wait. Because then, several chapters later, we jump into Sarah's story again, and she laughs again. But this is a very different laughter now, because now she is laughing in pure joy and life. And Isaac, the name actually is related to the word laughter. And so what God has given her is not a child specifically, but what God has given her back is laughter. God gave Sarah the ability to laugh in joy again. After years, decades of hopelessness, disappointment, feeling crushed and lost. After all of that, God stepped in, met Sarah where she was in her wry laughter, and gave Sarah back joyful laughter. The R-O-F-L, tears streaming down your face, pure joy, laughter. That's what God gave her. That's the promise God had for her was that laughter would return back into her heart. God broke the grip of death and hopelessness in that laughter Sarah had at the birth of Isaac. Laughter was the end to sorrow and weeping for Sarah. Now, it's not the permanent end, as you all know. You laugh and then sometimes you cry afterwards. But laughter comes back. Laughter, joy, life is always the promised ending of the story. And we too can stand in that grace. We too are washed and in and fed by God's grace. We too are offered the promise that no matter how lost, disappointed, crushed, or hopeless we might feel, there is no suffering that can separate us from the love of God, that can separate us from the grace of God. As it says in Romans, God pours love into our hearts until it is overflowing by the Holy Spirit. God pours that hope, that love, that joy into us. And that hope becomes not just the end result, but becomes the map that defines our entire existence as we hear in Romans. Because in Romans we hear that suffering and affliction produces endurance, endurance produces character. And sometimes that gets heard as a saying to, you should be grateful to suffering. It's making character. You know, suffering's good. Suffering is not good. No, I mean, it's just not. That's kind of why it's called suffering. It's bad, it's painful, it's uncomfortable. But when we know that hope is present through it all, even in the midst of suffering, we have God's grace. We know God's grace and love and presence. And then in that suffering, we have endurance to get through it. And in that endurance, our character builds, and in that we come full circle back to realizing the hope that has been promised us all along, the hope that is promised us in those waters and fed to us in this meal. Sarah's hope. She had lost it at one point. But God brought it back. And so too for us. When it feels like we have lost sight of the hope, and that suffering just feels like suffering. We can come back. We can come back to these waters, back to this table, and be reminded again that God's grace, God's love is poured into us until it is overflowing. And God meets us with our wry laughter, our sarcastic laughter, our yeah, right, God, this is gonna get better. Laughter. God meets us there and says, Yes, you are laughing in that way now. I see that, I understand that. But God also tells us, I will still yet give you the laughter of joy, the laughter of pure hope, the laughter of knowing God's love fully and completely. Because the hope that we have in God will never put us to shame, will never disappoint us. That hope will help carry us through whatever disappointments life brings. That hope will carry us until we can share with Sarah the joyful laughter as she felt a new identity in God, as she felt God's presence in a new way. And that hope, that hope that does not disappoint, does not shame. It can help us to carry our head high so that we can boast in the glory of Christ forever, even as we experience hopelessness, disappointment, and brokenheartedness. Because laughter's coming. Laughter of joy, laughter of life, laughter of God. Amen.