Saw this on TV: four professionals in suits and ties riding in a carpool—three passengers and the driver. Lively conversation among the passengers reaches a lull, and the driver breaks in: “Hey guys, why is six afraid of seven?” Passengers exchange puzzled looks and shrug shoulders. “I don’t know. Why is six afraid of seven?” Driver says, “‘Cause seven ate nine!” Passengers bust out laughing, much more boisterously than the joke deserves. One slaps the driver on the shoulder. “Good one, boss!”
You don’t always laugh just because something tickles your funny bone. Sometimes, in fact, you laugh ‘cause it hurts. I remember one kid from grade school. He laughed while the bullies pushed him around on the playground, even though he was the butt of the joke. He laughed because if he didn’t, he’d be left out. The morning after my grandfather died, my parents sat us kids down on the living room couch to explain why they’d gone to the hospital at three a.m. My sister, age thirteen, started laughing uncontrollably. “Why am I laughing?” she asked. She laughed because she didn’t know how else to react.
Our mother Sarah, the wife of Father Abraham, the mother of many nations, laughed that way for ninety years. She laughed as one by one the girls she grew up with patted their pregnant bellies and nine months later beamed with their bundles of joy swaddled in their arms. She laughed as year after year those mothers called her over to see their kids do a somersault or dress up for a first dance. She laughed as those same ladies braced their wrinkling hands to receive running hugs from grandchildren. Sarah laughed because her neck never felt the nuzzle of little noses and the flutter of butterfly kisses. She laughed because her house never echoed with the pitter-patter of toddler steps. She laughed because her hands never adjusted the veil or the bowtie moments before the wedding. Sarah laughed because it was the only way to keep from being left out. She laughed because she didn’t know what else to do.
With all that she’d had to go through, it was either learn to laugh or die crying. She may have laughed when her husband, still named just Abram, started packing their bags because God told him they had to move. She may have laughed when he took her outside and pointed up at the stars, the same stars that hadn’t changed for ninety years, but insisted, “God told me we’re going to have this many babies!” She must have laughed when they got to Canaan, the territory God had bequeathed to their as-yet non-existent children, and they saw that several peoples had already set up camp there. She probably laughed when her servant Hagar grew plump with Abram’s child, the one she could never conjure up. And she had to laugh when Abraham, with knife in hand, explained that the sign of their special connection to God was going to be circumcision, and then headed behind a convenient bush.
So that’s what she’s remembered for: laughing. Which one is our mother Sarah? The one who laughed. The Lord appeared to Abraham in the form of three visitors near the great trees of Mamre. He said, “I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife will have a son.” Abraham and Sarah were already old and well advanced in years, and Sarah was past the age of childbearing. So Sarah laughed to herself as she thought, “After I am worn out and my master is old, will I now have this pleasure?”
In this fallen, sinful world we live in, there is a laughter born only out of the most profound sadness. Proverbs 14:13: “Even in laughter the heart may ache, and joy may end in grief.” There’s a laughter that sends cruel echoes throughout the hollows of empty hearts and empty arms. More than one married couple I know can’t help but laugh at the evening news every so often. They laugh when the anchor reports with straight face and monotone voice another story of parents aborting or abandoning or abusing their child. The couples I know, they laugh in disbelief and contempt. They laugh it off because if they don’t, they’ll reach right through the television screen and strangle those parents for not being worthy of such a precious blessing as a child. They laugh it off because if they don’t, they’ll crumple to the ground in tears right then and there, remembering how many negative pregnancy tests they have thrown across the room, remembering how often they held each other after the doctors said, “I’m sorry,” remembering how long they waited for the call that never came from the adoption agency.
There are evenings when mothers and fathers you know have answered the door in their pajamas and just laughed, laughed uncontrollably, laughed as the highlights of a son’s life, a daughter’s life flashes before them, because the man in the uniform is holding up a picture and asking, “Is this your child?” There are funerals where your friend who has just lost his mother laughs at the small consolation of a well-meaning pastor who strides up to him, puts his arm around him, and says, “You’ll see her again in heaven.” There are mornings when your neighbor, the widowed one, has to laugh at herself, because for a moment there, before she was fully awake, she was sure she felt him in bed beside her.
Sometimes an ironic chuckle is all you’ve got left in you. Sometimes in this life it’s the only way to compensate for your own emptiness—your empty hands, your empty heart. So you laugh, to forget it for just a moment. You laugh, to remember ever so briefly what it’s like to be happy and fulfilled. You laugh, to feel not-left-out. You laugh the laugh we all learned from our mother Sarah. It’s the last line of self-defense. But it’s forced. It’s fake. It doesn’t work. And we know it. That’s why we laugh. Sometimes we laugh because, like Sarah, we give up.
Then there’s a laughter that is born only of God, the God who became human, the God of the Bible. Contrary to popular belief, God does have a sense of humor. He knows how to laugh. In fact, no one does more laughing in the Bible than God. Psalm 2:4: “The One enthroned in heaven laughs.” God loves a good practical joke. It was His idea to construct a floating zoo in the middle of desert nowhere. He thought a Disney-like parade would be a great way to intimidate the fortified city of Jericho. He turned back the armies of Midian with cookware and Christmas lights. He recruited a lanky schoolboy named David to duel a hulking monster named Goliath. And while they were tying Jesus up naked to a tree, He was saying, “I’m the King of the world!” Yes, there is a time to weep; but with God, there is a time to laugh. So says Jesus Himself: “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.”
And He’s the God who made mother Sarah laugh again. She laughed, not to hold back her sorrow, but because she could not hold back her joy. She laughed, and God laughed with her. He waited until she was ninety years old so that He could laugh with her. The midwife said, “It’s a boy!” and handed Sarah her very own son, ten little fingers wrapping around hers, licking at the air and looking up at mama, filling up the arms and the heart that had been empty for so long. And Sarah laughed, scrunching up every wrinkle on her weathered face, wobbling every curl of her whitened hair. She laughed until her jaw ached, her eyes squeezed out tears, and her lungs begged for oxygen. She laughed because only God could have orchestrated so grand a comedy, and God’s laughter is contagious. Genesis 21:6: Sarah said, “God has brought me laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me.” And she added, “Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.”
It takes an act of God to evoke this kind of laughter, the newborn-baby-in-the-arms, kids-running-and-hugging kind of laughter. He’s the one who invented it. God blessed Adam and Eve and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply!” He’s the one who perfected this kind of laughter. “People were carrying their little ones to Jesus so that he could hold them, but the disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this, he got angry and said, ‘Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for of such is the kingdom of God. Truly, I tell you, anyone who does not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will not enter it at all.’ And he wrapped his arms around the little ones, laid his hands upon them, and blessed them.”
God has devoted His whole existence to making sure you know that kind of laughing joy. “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; cry, and you cry alone;” but not so with God. He became the mortal Jesus Christ to learn your crying so that you might learn His laughter. From the cross upon which He died, Jesus stretched out His arms as wide as they would go. “Father,” He said, “I want them all to be My little children. I want to enfold and cradle them all in My arms.” By giving His body and His blood for you, He was saying, “Let all the little children come to Me, and don’t let anything hold them back.” That includes you. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Jesus pulled the greatest practical joke of all on sin and death. He surrendered to them only to overthrow them three days later. Cry, and the Lord cries with you; laugh, and you laugh with God.
We were privileged to have a birth in our congregation years ago. Once again we got to share the joy and laughter of a mother and father cuddling their baby boy for the first time. In a few more weeks, though, even that laughter gave way to a better kind. It was these pastor’s arms holding this baby and saying, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” And it will be the Heavenly Father’s arms taking up that child and rocking back and forth with laughter like our mother Sarah did. All of you who are already baptized get to wake up to that laughter every day. For every morning you are children of the Heavenly Father all over again, climbing up into His lap, safely in His bosom gathering, lying like infants in His arms. You are His Isaac, His laughter. Even when your arms are empty, His aren’t. May this thought bring you laughter from God, just like your mother Sarah, for ninety years and more. Amen.