The Laughter of Faith

(This sermon is adapted from a 2005 message preached by Rev. Margaret Manning at the Community Church at Tellico Village)

Genesis 18:1-15

A lectionary sermon on the laugh of faith? That’s ridiculous! But wait. Don’t laugh!

Did you know that faith can make you laugh? This laugh of faith shows up in the story of Sarah and Abraham. Sarah’s laughter teaches us about trusting God. Some people say faith is not a laughing matter. But it IS! Really!

Researchers who actually study laughter for a living — and yes, that’s a real job, which tells you something about how far academia has come — have developed what they call the incongruity theory of laughter. The idea is simple: we laugh when things don’t go the way we expected. Our minds anticipate one outcome, life delivers another, and something in us responds with laughter. Not because it’s necessarily funny, but because it’s incongruous — two realities that don’t fit together, held in tension at the same time.

What if faith works the same way?

Sarah Laughed

Sarah laughed. That’s the moment in our Genesis text that everybody notices and most people misread. When three mysterious visitors show up at Abraham’s tent and announce that Sarah, who is well past ninety years old, will have a child by this time next year — Sarah laughs.

And the common interpretation is that she laughed instead of believing. That her laughter was a failure of faith. Like saying, “Yeah, right!”

But I want to suggest something different. I want to suggest that her laughter WAS the faith. It was the laugh of faith.

Here’s what you have to understand about Sarah’s situation. She and Abraham had been waiting on this promise for twenty-five years. Twenty-five years! That’s longer than some of you have been married. long enough that you’d start wondering if maybe God meant a different Abraham. Sarah had experienced five separate moments where God renewed this promise of birthing a child — and still, nothing. She had tried to solve the problem herself through Hagar, which created its own complications. And now, at ninety-something years old, three strangers at the tent door are telling Sarah that this time next year she’ll be holding a baby.

Sarah laughed. And honestly, who wouldn’t?

But her laughter wasn’t purely scornful. Listen carefully to what’s in it: twenty-five years of waiting, yes. Doubt, yes. Exhaustion, yes. But also — and this is what I don’t want you to miss — a tiny, persistent, impossible-to-kill flicker of “what if?”

Sarah laughed the way you laugh when something is so far beyond what you thought possible that your only options are laughter or tears. She laughed from the gap between what her experience told her was true and what God was still stubbornly promising.

That gap — that tension — is exactly where faith lives. And so Sarah laughs the laugh of faith.

Counted Among the Faithful

The writer of Hebrews doesn’t let us forget this. In that great “Hall of Faith” in chapter eleven, Sarah is listed among the faithful — not despite her laughter, but as one who “received the ability to conceive by faith, even beyond the proper time of life, since she considered God faithful who had promised.”

She considered God faithful. Not certain. Not proven. Considered.

That’s faith. Not the absence of doubt, but the decision to lean toward trust anyway — especially when the circumstances give you every reasonable excuse not to.

C.S. Lewis put his finger on this in The Screwtape Letters when he described real faith as the moment when a person, “no longer desiring, but still intending to follow God, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of God seems to have vanished, and asks why she has been forsaken, and still obeys.”

Still obeys. Still leans forward. Still — somehow — trusts.

Our Own Twenty-Five-Year Wait

This matters for us because most of us have our own version of the twenty-five-year wait.

Maybe it’s a marriage you’ve prayed for that hasn’t come. A child you’ve lifted to God year after year. A diagnosis that rewrote the story you thought your life was telling. A prayer that felt like it bounced off the ceiling.

And if faith requires certainty — if faith means you’re never allowed to laugh at the incongruity of what God is promising versus what your experience is showing you — then most of us are in trouble. Most of us are faithless.

But that’s not the biblical picture. The biblical picture is Abraham and Sarah, who believed God and doubted God and argued with God and laughed at God — and were still counted among the faithful. Because faith isn’t a feeling of certainty. Faith is the long act of continuing to trust a God who has proven trustworthy, even when the evidence is temporarily hidden.

God Gets the Last Laugh

Paul, in our Romans text, wants to make sure we don’t miss the main point of the whole story. He writes — and I love how The Message puts it — that the promise “was not given because of something they did or didn’t do… it was based on God’s decision to put everything together for them. As we throw open our doors to God, we discover at the same moment that God has already thrown open the door for us.”

The faithfulness isn’t finally ours. It’s God’s.

Sure enough, Isaac is born. And do you know what Isaac means? It means one who laughs.

Sarah says at his birth: “God has made laughter for me. Everyone who hears will laugh with me.”

The laughter that started as incongruity — as the tension between what was promised and what seemed possible — became the name of the promise fulfilled.

May we laugh that laugh of faith this morning. The laugh of people who are still waiting, still trusting, still holding together doubt and hope — confident that the God who made the promise will, in God’s own time and way, have the last laugh.

Amen.