When Hope is Lost - Gen 18: 1-15

There is a woman in Melbourne, Australia with an amazing story. Cerceda was in her early 80s when I met her. Her passion in life was to educate children about God’s love for them – and she took her message to the neighborhood with the second highest crime rate in the state. She decided to love kids who others said were impossible to love. When she couldn’t get anyone to support her cost of her ministry, specifically buying a building for the children to gather in and to make into a safe space, she returned to work as a doctor in order to fund it herself. She continues to work, even though the building is paid for, in order to purchase a bus to pick the kids up in each Wednesday. Cerceda knew through the strength of God she could do what others thought were impossible.

While working at Hershey Medical Center this summer, I have seen time after time Cerecda’s experience of a God who doesn’t take human “can’ts” for a reason to give up or give in. Over the past few weeks I have heard so many stories of God working despite the medical professionals’ diagnoses. I’ve held babies who were not supposed to have been able to be conceive, who supposedly died in the womb, babies who weren’t supposed to be able to survive, but were able to go home to live with their parents and grow like any other child. I’ve seen people in the Medical Intensive Care Unit who were thought to be as good as dead, walk out of the hospital months later. I prayed with a woman who’s water broke three months early, but whose body continued to make amniotic fluid – nothing short of a miracle – and I was able to see her beautiful son after he was born.

If anything I have learned that the times that people want to put God into a box, tell God what can be done and what is just impossible, those are the times that God intervenes in extrandonariy ways.

Abraham was a happy man. He had two wives, one whose beauty was famed the other who was fertile and had bore him the son he always wanted – the son who could carry on his name and inherit his wealth. Sure, God had said that Ishmael wouldn’t be the one to inherit the covenant, but Abraham thought he had taken care of that little issue by circumcising this son – it was the mark of the covenant wasn’t it?

And yet.

And yet, when God appeared to Abraham under the oaks of Mamre declaring that he would return “in due season when your wife Sarah will have a son” Abraham was silent. He didn’t laugh as before, falling on his face asking “Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?” Maybe Abraham was just too tired to laugh, too tired to believe. He had been hearing this same promise for over a quarter of his lifetime. Why would God be fulfilling it now?

Sarah, however, had the opposite reaction. Sarah laughed. She said to herself, “after I have grown old and my husband is old shall I have pleasure?” Here is a woman who had desired a child for so many years, had wanted a baby so badly that she had given her husband her slave girl to procreate with. And everything and nothing changed in that moment. She saw how her husband looked at Hagar, his eyes wild with desire. And she saw how her relationship with Hagar changed when she became pregnant – with Hagar’s glances of sympathy mixed with her pregnant glow. And yet. And yet, Sarah still remained childless. Yes, technically Ishmael was her son by law, but in the eyes of society she was still a woman cursed with infertility. A woman who could not give her husband the one thing he wanted so badly, a child. And now here was a man showing up, a stranger, declaring that she was going to have a child. Didn’t he know anything about biology? Didn’t he know how many years she had tried and failed? Didn’t he see how much the very thought of a child pained her soul and marked her afresh with shame? And Sarah was saddened so deeply that she scoffingly laughed to herself.

Sometimes we have to laugh to keep from crying. When all hope is gone, what right do we have to wish and pray for a miracle? And what reaction would we have if that miracle actually came? The Lord asked Sarah, “Is anything to wonderful for the Lord?” And as much as Sarah might have wanted to answer ‘yes’, all she could say was that she didn’t laugh. She denied her very response rooted in years of doubts, regrets, and painful memories. If nothing is too wonderful for God, why is he choosing to acct now instead of earlier?

How different Abraham and Sarah’s response are from when they first opened their homes to the strangers – Abraham ran to meet them, bowed down, and asked, well begged really, for them to stay and be refreshed. And Sarah made cakes as Abraham fashioned a feast. In contrast to all of the quick movements of their gracious hospitality, this news seemed to cause time to stand still.

What are the moments in your life when time has stood still? When your head might know that nothing is too great for God, but your heart cries out that this situation might just be too much. Unexpected diagnoses. Word of an untimely death. Families splitting up after years of marriage. Unsuccessful treatments. Or successful treatments only to die at the side effects of the treatment. Broken friendships. Broken dreams. Those moments when you cry out in anguish to God, or worse the moments when you have given up on all hope that God will intervene.

And yet.

And yet, some of those moments when you scoff at God for the unexpected tragedies embedded in your life, God is still asking “is anything too wonderful for the Lord?”. And each time this question asks, hope arises again like the bud of a flower.

Who do you know in your life that has given up on hope? Those people who can only scoff at God because they are grieving the pains of life? How can we bring a message of hope to a world that can only manage to muster some scoffing laughter that God is doing something new in their lives?

It is our task to have hope for others, when they can no longer find it on their own. And we know that when our hope runs out, that God will continue to hope and dream and move forward for us. What a powerful message. Even when Abraham ceased to believe and Sarah gave up all hope, God still acted and moved in a powerful way. We worship a God who brings hope even when our faith wavers.

So may we go to the Sarah’s in our lives –those people have given up on hope to the point where they laugh at the idea that God could ever be doing a new thing in their life. May we go to the Abraham’s – those who rely on logic and move ahead in life as if God did not communicate God’s loving plan to them. May we go to these people and be a presence of hope – not necessarily through words, but through hold hands, sharing tears, and listening to stories. For we know that there is a hope in God. A hope that surpasses all logic and understanding, and who’s timing doesn’t always make sense to us. A hope that isn’t blocked by our ideas of impossibility or muttering of “can’t”, for “can’t” is often a cover up for “don’t want to believe”. And if our own hope ever should falter, we know that God will continue to work for our best interest, for “is anything too wonderful for the Lord?”