Abraham sits 1"at the door of his tent in the heat of the day," the hour when a sensible man does nothing at all. He looks up and finds three men standing there, and he does not wait to learn who they are. He runs. He bows. Then he undersells himself, offering a little water and a morsel of bread. What arrives is nothing like a morsel. Three seahs of fine flour will feed a small crowd, and a calf is meat that nobody in that economy killed for an ordinary afternoon. Abraham stands by while they eat. The chapter has already told us who the visitor is, in its first line, but Abraham learns it slowly, from the conversation.
The guest asks, 9"Where is Sarah your wife?" He knows where she is, the way "Where are you?" once knew where Adam was hiding. 10"I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife shall have a son." Then the narrator states plainly what the promise is up against, since Abraham and Sarah were old. From behind the tent flap, unseen, Sarah laughs to herself. 12"After I am worn out, and my lord is old, shall I have pleasure?" It is the laugh of a woman who stopped expecting this a long time ago and was caught off guard by a promise she had already grieved.
She kept the laugh private, or thought she did. The voice outside answers it anyway. He repeats her own hidden words back to her, then asks the question the whole chapter has been leaning toward. 14"Is anything too hard for the LORD?" The Hebrew behind "too hard" comes from the word family of wonder, the kind of thing that sits past the far edge of what anyone can picture happening. That is exactly where Sarah has been standing for years.
Caught, she does what most of us do when we are caught doubting God, even silently. She denies it. 15"I did not laugh," she says, "for she was afraid." The LORD corrects her without condemning her. 15"No, but you did laugh." That is the whole exchange, the plain truth set next to hers, gently and without apology.
Centuries later another messenger stands before another woman with another impossible announcement, and he reaches for nearly the same words: "nothing will be impossible with God" (Luke 1:37). Mary is young and has no long history of disappointed hope, but the shape of the promise is identical. It is answered with a claim about who God is, with no argument about what a body can do. Sarah's son would carry a name that remembered this scene. When Isaac is finally born she says, "God has made laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh over me" (Genesis 21:6). The laugh she was afraid to admit becomes a laugh she says aloud for anyone to hear. The fear runs out before the promise does.
Where is your silent laugh today? Name it to him, because he has already heard it.
Prayer
Father, we have our own version of Sarah's laugh, the doubt we say easily to ourselves and never to your face, about the marriage we stopped believing could heal, the prayer we quietly filed under no, the years that wore us out. Find us as you found her, and ask us the same question. Give us belief that answers it, and thank you that your word does what it says. In Jesus' name, amen.