Sarah Laughed

2023 06 18 Church of the Holy Wisdom

Lectionary: Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7, Matthew 9:35-10:8

Sources consulted: Juliana Rowe tells of Sarah’s laugh.
2018 Sermon at TUMC which explores the complexities of laughter in scripture.

As the words of scripture sit with us and within us, we pray you, gracious God, set a spark to our heart, mind, and soul, bringing to light the Word you have placed within us, bringing illumination to our assembly this day. Amen.

I should begin with a confession. I like to laugh. I like to tell jokes, and play games, and have fun, and I like to laugh. I especially like to laugh and smile with people who speak a different language to me, because it means we are communicating. It means we are together. People sometimes laugh because they are nervous. Sometimes when a child does not understand something, they will laugh, or daybed when they are startled. Laughter is our natural, instinctive, God-given response to a sudden realisation that something is different to what you thought. That’s how a well-told joke works, that sudden moment of realisation. And I enjoy laughing.

What a time to be alive!

What a time to be alive!

2019 04 21 Easter Sunday, TUMC. Hear the recording here.
John 20:1-18
Isaiah 65:17-25

Christ is risen! Any questions? (Of course there are questions)

I’m going to be talking about crucifixion, meaning state violence, torture, and death. I’m going to reference sexual violence, and I’ll talk about blindness both as fact and metaphor. I’m drawing upon insights and work of Seamus Heaney in his play ‘The Cure at Troy’, Richard Bauckham’s The Bible in Politics, and the #MeToo movement begun by Tarana Burke.

Human beings suffer. They torture one another.
They get hurt, and get hard. No poem or prayer or song,
Can fully right a wrong inflicted and endured.

The prisoners in gaols beat on their bars together
The hunger striker’s father stands in the graveyard, dumb
The police widow in veils faints at the funeral home.

History says, don’t hope on this side of the grave,
But then, once in a life time, the longed for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge.
Believe a farther shore is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles, and cures, and healing wells.

Call the miracle ‘self-healing’, the utter self-revealing
Double-take of feeling. If there’s fire on the mountain,
and lightning, and storm, and a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry, the birth cry, of new life at its term.

Do you believe that things can change?
Do you believe that the way things are today does not need to be the way things are tomorrow?
Can you hope that things can change even here, even now, even in your lifetime, even before your very eyes?