Hebrews 11.1-3,8-16, Luke 12.32-40
The Eleventh Sunday after Trinity, 7 August 2016
Corton Denham w. Sutton Montis
Here’s a throwaway line from the epic comedian Ken Dodd about becoming old: ‘Time is a great healer,' he says, 'but a terrible beautician.’ [1]
When God told Abraham, who was a hundred at the time, that at the age of ninety his wife Sarah was finally going to have a baby, Abraham came close to knocking himself out. He 'fell on his face and laughed,' as Genesis 17 puts it. In another version of the story (in Genesis 18), Sarah is hiding behind the door eavesdropping, and here it's Sarah herself who nearly splits her sides - although when God asks her about it afterwards, she denies it. 'No, but you did laugh,' God says, thus having the last word as well as the first.
God doesn't seem to hold their outbursts against them, however. On the contrary, he tells them the baby's going to be a boy and that he wants them to name him Isaac. Isaac in Hebrew means ‘laughter’. [2]
Now that, my friends, is tattyfilarious.
Why did the two old crocks laugh? They laughed because they knew only a fool would believe that a woman with one foot in the grave was soon going to have her other foot in the maternity ward. They laughed because God expected them to believe it anyway. They laughed because God seemed to believe it. They laughed because they half-believed it themselves. They laughed because laughing felt better than crying. They laughed because if by some crazy chance it just happened to come true, they would really have something to laugh about, and in the meanwhile it helped keep them going. [3]
As it happened, as we know, it did come true: and as the writer of Hebrews said,
By faith Abraham received the 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.' [4]
Faith is 'the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,' says the Epistle to the Hebrews (11:1). Faith is considering faithful the God who makes promises. Faith is laughter at the promise of a child called ‘laughter’.
If someone had come up to Jesus when he was on the cross and asked him if it hurt, he might have answered, like the man in the old joke, 'Only when I laugh.' But he wouldn't have been joking. Faith dies, as it lives, laughing.
Faith is better understood as a verb than as a noun, as a process than as a possession. It is on-again-off-again rather than once-and-for-all. Faith is not knowing whether to laugh or cry. Faith is not being sure where you're going, but going anyway. A journey without maps. Tillich said that doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. [5]This is really important because sometimes we think that to be a genuine Christian we have to be certain about what we believe in. This is not true. 'Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith': our doubts raise honest questions about life and God and faith - and God is happy to hear our questions, to help us find the answers, and in that way we grow in confidence in the God who makes us promises.
Think of it this way:
I have faith that my friend is my friend. It is possible that all his motives are ulterior. It is possible that what he is secretly drawn to is not me, but my wife or my money. But there's something about the way I feel when he's around, about the way he looks me in the eye, about the way we can talk to each other without pretence and be silent together without embarrassment, that makes me willing to put my life in his hands as I do each time I call him friend.
I can't prove the friendship of my friend. When I experience it, I don't need to prove it. When I don't experience it, no proof will do. If I tried to put his friendship to the test somehow, that could threaten or compromise the friendship I was testing: I wouldn't want to do that. So it is with the God-ness of God. [6]
St. Thomas Aquinas coined what he called ‘Five Proofs for the Existence of God’, and they’re worth looking up if you’re keen to explore this further. They are philosophical arguments to do with the cause of creation: because we are in motion and the world is in motion then there must be a prime mover. Popular unbelievers like Richard Dawkins sell lots of books which argue with Thomas Aquinas, and other people have been selling other books which argue with Richard Dawkins.
But the five so-called proofs for the existence of God will never prove to unbelievers that God exists. They are merely five ways of describing the existence of the God you have faith in already.
Ultimately the believers and the unbelievers all have to put their faith in one conviction or another. You can spend all your time saying ‘There must be a God because…’ but at the end of the day almost nothing that makes any real difference can be proved. I can prove the law of gravity by dropping a shoe out of the window. I can prove that the world is round if I'm clever at that sort of thing; that the radio works, that light travels faster than sound. I can't prove that life is better than death or love better than hate. I can't prove the greatness of the great or the beauty of the beautiful. I can't even prove my own free will.As the writer Frederick Buechner puts it,
‘Faith can't prove a damned thing. Or a blessed thing either.’ [7]
But proof isn't the point of faith. Life is the point. The important thing about faith is how it makes us live. That's why the writer of Hebrews wrote a list of people whose faith made their lives remarkable - Abraham and Sarah who laughed with God at the way he'd decided to make a barren old couple the father and mother of a great nation; Abel who offered the work of his hands to God, Enoch whose life was pleasing to God, Noah who listened to God's warnings and saved himself and others...
'God is not ashamed to be called their God', Hebrews tells us. What a lovely tribute to people of faith, something we would love to have people saying about ourselves. 'God is not ashamed to be called our God’ - because we chose to live life, to the full, in response to a God who loves and laughs and cries along with us, in equal measure. A God we consider faithful in the promises he makes to us.
The comedy legend Ken Dodd once answered a question about God’s sense of humour by saying,
‘The best kind of laughter is when you make somebody else happy and make somebody else’s life a bit better. And surely that is God’s work. God doesn’t want us to be miserable.’ [8]
Preparing this sermon got me thinking about one of my favourite-ever men of faith, perhaps the most side-splittingly funny preacher I’ve ever heard - and also, correspondingly, one of the profoundest and inspirational, Mike Yaconelli. Yaconelli was the pastor of a small church in Yreka, California - 'the slowest growing church in America' as he called it. He trained Christian youth leaders, edited a satirical magazine called The Wittenburg Door, and was an international Christian conference speaker. [9]
He said some interesting things about faith. He once said,
We'd like to have it all neat and orderly. We want to be able to measure it and control it, but the reality is that Jesus is a mystery. The Christian faith is a mystery. The disciples spent their entire time following him going, ‘Uhh, what the heck are you doing? We don't understand what you're doing and we don't know why you're doing it.’ And when he would explain why he was doing it, they still didn't get it. [10]
And another time Yaconelli said,
I am beginning to understand that faith is not the way around pain, it is the way through pain. Faith doesn't get rid of the opposition, it invites it over for dinner. Faith doesn't give you the winning point at the last second, it ties the game and sends you into overtime. Faith doesn't give you the solution, it forces you to find it. [11]
In one of Yaconelli’s books, characteristically titled, ‘Dangerous Wonder: The Adventure of Childlike Faith’, he wrote,
'I want a lifetime of holy moments. Every day I want to be in dangerous proximity to Jesus. I long for a life that explodes with meaning and is filled with adventure, wonder, risk, and danger. I long for a faith that is gloriously treacherous. I want to be with Jesus, not knowing whether to cry or laugh.' [12]
That’s what all these great people of faith did. They lived life to the full because their companion in everything they did was God. Mike Yaconelli died in 2003, tragically, in a road accident at the age of 61. A couple of years before that he had addressed a conference audience with these words which were widely quoted after his death:
‘If I were to have a heart attack right at this moment, I hope I would have just enough air in my lungs and just enough strength in me to utter one last sentence as I fell to the floor: 'What a ride!' My life has been up and down, careening left then right, full of mistakes and bad decisions, and if I died right now, even though I would love to live longer, I could say from the depths of my soul, 'What a ride!’’ [13]
Back to supreme comedian Ken Dodd. He has been called ‘a crusader in search of the secret of the gag’, the owner of about 10,000 books on the subject of laughter, humour and jokes, a student of the psychology of humour who has looked for answers in the writings of Sigmund Freud and the philosophers Bergson and Schopenhauer.
He once told an interviewer, 'I think I’ve found the answer to the secret of comedy. I won’t go into too much detail for you but it’s about seeing things from a different point of view. It is the perception of the incongruity.’ [14]
The perception of the incongruity. That’s what made Abraham fall over laughing, that’s what was behind Sarah’s secret splitting-of-her sides.
The perception of the incongruity. It’s a way of talking about laughter. It’s a way of talking about faith. It’s a way of enlightenment for those who decide to let faith determine the journey they will take.
Notes
This sermon owes an enormous amount to Frederick Buechner’s section on Faith, in Wishful Thinking, a Seeker's ABC. An earlier version of it was preached at the Good Shepherd, Liverpool, 8/8/2010 with the title, Luke 12 - On faith and overcoming unbelief.
[1] Brian Beacom, Ken Dodd on comedy heroes, Glasgow and the philosophy of humour, Glasgow Herald, 11 Jun 2016.
[2] Buechner, Wishful Thinking, Faith, p.29.
[3] Buechner, Wishful Thinking, Faith, p.29.
[4] Hebrews 11.11-12
[5] Buechner, Wishful Thinking, Faith, p.29-30.
[6] Buechner, Wishful Thinking, Faith, p.30.
[7] Buechner, Wishful Thinking, Faith, p.30-31.
[8] Quoted in Frankie Mulgrew, Does God LOL?
[9] Wikipedia: Mike Yaconelli.
[10] Mike Yaconelli, Words from Mike, mikeyaconelli.org.
[11] Mike Yaconelli in The Door (Sept./Oct. 1994). Quoted in Words from Mike, mikeyaconelli.org.
[12] Mike Yaconelli, Dangerous Wonder: The Adventure of Childlike Faith, p.23.
[13] Mike Yaconelli, Words from Mike, mikeyaconelli.org.
[14] Brian Beacom, Ken Dodd on comedy heroes, Glasgow and the philosophy of humour, Glasgow Herald, 11 Jun 2016.
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