Sermon for the Third Sunday after Pentecost, Year A (6-14-26)

Sarah laughs.

I've always appreciated that the Bible leaves that detail in. If I were writing the story, I might be tempted to clean it up a little and to Sarah look more faithful. But Scripture rarely does that. The people God tends to call are usually presented exactly as they are —with all their doubts, and fears, and failures on display.

And so, Sarah laughs.

The important thing to remember is that her laughter doesn't come at the beginning of the story. By the time we arrive at Genesis 18, Abraham and Sarah have already been journeying with God for decades. They left behind everything familiar and followed God into an uncertain future. And over the years they wandered through foreign lands, endured famine, made mistakes, and experienced both triumphs and disappointments.

Yet through it all, one promise remained at the center of their story: that God would somehow give them a family, descendants as numerous as the stars. The problem was that the years kept passing. By the time we reach today's reading Abraham is ninety-nine and Sarah is nearly ninety. They've spent almost a quarter century waiting for God to do the very thing God had promised to do.

Considering that has the potential to change the way we hear Sarah's laughter. This isn't the reaction of someone hearing an outrageous promise for the first time. It's the response of someone who has lived with disappointment for a very long time; the laughter of someone who's learned not to get her hopes up.

She knows her own story. She knows her own body. She knows all the reasons this promise cannot possibly come true. So, when God announces that Sarah will have a son within the year — she laughs.

Honestly, who wouldn't?

Most of us know something about that kind of laughter. Most of us can admit that — at times — hope has gradually given way to resignation. Not because we've stopped believing in God, but because we've stopped expecting much to change. We learn to live with old wounds, unanswered prayers, strained relationships, and disappointments that seem permanent. And in a way we become experts in our own limitations.

Sarah certainly had by this point.

What strikes me, though, is that God doesn't seem particularly bothered by her laughter. There's no lecture. No condemnation. No withdrawal of the promise. Instead, God asks a simple question:

"Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?"

This question shifts the focus away from Sarah's limitations and back to God's faithfulness. It's brilliant. Turns out God is super smart! Because the real issue was never whether Sarah was capable of bearing a child. Everyone already knew the answer to that question. The deeper question was whether God's future would be determined by Sarah's limitations. Or said another way: would God's promise be constrained by what Sarah could imagine for herself?

The answer, of course, is no. God's promise will not be constrained.

In many ways, that single truth runs through all of today's readings. Paul reminds us in Romans that "while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly." Notice where Paul begins—not with human strength, but with human weakness. Because remember this, and remember it well, friends: the Gospel is not the Good News that people can become worthy of God's love.

It's the Good News that God's love is poured out at great expense to reach and transform people who have no possibility to become truly worthy no matter how hard we try.

Because again and again, God begins where human possibility ends.

Abraham and Sarah could not create the future God promised them. Humanity cannot heal its own brokenness. The disciples Jesus called were hardly the obvious candidates for changing the world. Yet, throughout Scripture God consistently works through people who know their own inadequacy.

The story of salvation is not a celebration of human capability. It is a testimony to God's faithfulness which becomes especially clear in our Gospel reading. Matthew tells us that Jesus looked upon the crowds and had compassion for them because they were "harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd."

Jesus sees their confusion, their weariness, and their suffering. Yet where others might have seen only problems, Jesus sees a harvest. Then he does something remarkable. He sends a ragtag group of disciples into that harvest.

Fishermen, and tax collectors, and a bunch of other ordinary people with more questions than answers are then entrusted with the work of proclaiming God's kingdom. The same God who chose Abraham and Sarah now chooses them. The same God who brought life out of Sarah's barrenness now sends ordinary people — just like you and me — to participate in extraordinary things.

Another consistent theme throughout Scripture is that God sees differently than we do. We humans tend to focus on limitations, and failures, and dead ends. While God seems remarkably drawn to precisely those places where possibility appears — let's say — wanting. And again and again, God brings new beginnings out of situations everyone else has already written off.

Perhaps that's why Sarah's laughter remains so important. Before she became the mother of Isaac, perhaps she was simply a woman struggling to believe that God still had a future for her.

I suspect some here know what that feels like. Not because you're expecting children in your nineties, but because you know what it's like to assume that certain chapters have closed, or certain opportunities have passed, or that the most important parts of your story are behind you.

Thankfully, Sarah's story reminds us that God's faithfulness is not bound by the limits of our imagination. The God of Abraham and Sarah is still creating futures that we cannot yet see. The God revealed in Jesus Christ is still bringing life out of barren places, and hope out of despair, and squeezing grace out of situations that appear beyond redemption.

Perhaps, then, the invitation today is not to manufacture more faith or suppress our doubts. Perhaps it's simply to bring our honest selves before God—our disappointments, our fears, our laughter, and all the assumptions we've accumulated about what is and is not possible. And then to hear once more the question that echoes from Abraham's tent all the way to the empty tomb and to this place today:

"Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?"

The clear answer of the Gospel is that there is not.

And because there is not there is always more hope than we can see, more grace than we deserve, and more future than we can imagine.



Amen.