Saturday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time
I don’t know about you, but I am quite certain that I won’t be going tent camping in my 90s. Honestly, it would be a huge stretch for me to do that even in my 60s. Sleeping on the ground in a sleeping bag, with hard uneven ground beneath me, no toilet nearby, and humid air all around—that would be a recipe for very little sleep (any?) and one cranky Sue at breakfast.
So, I find this story of Abraham and Sarah hosting unexpected guests just outside their tent stretches credulity to the breaking point. Perhaps some avid campers can imagine such an evening in their 90s. But let’s remember that these two have been on a long journey and now somehow they’ve got a steer nearby ready to be butchered as well as some way to cook the whole thing (have to or it will spoil fast). On top of all that, Sarah is baking bread with no oven.
And that’s not the half of it. Abraham and Sarah’s visitors have brought a message for them. And it’s a doozy. God has decided that Sarah, after years of trying to get pregnant and being unable to do so, is soon to become a mother. And this won’t happen by way of adoption or finding an abandoned baby in a basket or arranging nightly visits from a concubine for Abraham. Incredibly, the word from God is that Sarah will become pregnant, will carry her baby to term, and deliver it into the world.
Seriously?
As the text makes clear, Sarah hasn’t been capable of getting pregnant for decades. And that’s a good thing. To God’s great credit, God figured out that no woman of a certain age should become pregnant and gave them the gift (that doesn’t always feel like a gift for a woman going through it) of menopause. Getting pregnant at 25 was dangerous enough in Sarah’s day; at 90, it would surely be deadly.
In response to this preposterous news, Sarah has a fitting reaction. She breaks out laughing. She knows very well that these so-called messengers must be complete idiots to think she could have a baby at any time in the years ahead—never mind within the year.
Now, of course, God knows all of this very well. I can even imagine God laughing with Sarah at the absurd message she has received. But that is not what God does. Instead, God reminds Sarah and Abraham and us too that all things are possible with God.
There are no limits to what God can do. This point could not be more clearly made than it is in this story, in which God even transgresses limits that God set. God won’t be bound by what we think is reasonable, or by our expectations, or what we know to be true, or anything else.
This story and its wisdom about the nature of God is worth keeping in mind and even praying about. When I think I know what God can and cannot do, will and will not do, thinks and doesn’t think, I should remember that, just like Sarah, I don’t know. And before I go spouting off about what I “know” about what God can and cannot do, I should stop and pray.
Thank you, Lord, for teaching us through this story and others like it about our deeply human character that has real limits, on the one hand, and your endless power and possibilities, on the other. May we have eyes to see, ears to hear, and a willingness to embrace all of the possibilities and, perhaps even more, the impossibilities that you put before us. Whether we act on them or not, may we at the very least attend to them and, in so doing, encounter you in the here and now. Amen.
-Susan Trollinger