Hebrews 11.1-3,8-16, Luke 12.32-40
The Eighth Sunday after Trinity, 10 August 2025, Austwick, Keasden
You know that I like quoting the great philosopher Ken Dodd. When approaching 80 he said, ‘Age doesn’t matter, unless you are a cheese.’ … ‘Time is a great healer,’ he went on, ‘but a terrible beautician.’ [1]
When God told Abraham, who was a hundred at the time, that at the age of ninety his wife Sarah was finally going to have a baby, Abraham came close to knocking himself out. He ‘fell on his face and laughed,’ Genesis says. Meanwhile, Sarah is hiding behind the door eavesdropping, and she herself nearly splits her sides – although when God asks her about it afterwards, she denies it. ‘No, but you did laugh,’ God says, thus having the last word as well as the first.
But God doesn’t seem to hold their outbursts against them. On the contrary, he tells them the baby’s going to be a boy and that he wants them to name him Isaac. Isaac in Hebrew means ‘laughter’. [2] Now that, my friends, is tattyfilarious.
Why did the two old crocks laugh? They laughed because they knew only a fool would believe that a woman with one foot in the grave would soon have her other foot in the maternity ward. They laughed because God expected them to believe it anyway. They laughed because God seemed to believe it. They laughed because they half-believed it themselves. They laughed because laughing felt better than crying. They laughed because if by some crazy chance it happened to come true, they would really have something to laugh about, and in the meantime it helped keep them going. [3]
As it happened, as we know, it did come true: and as the writer of Hebrews said, “By faith Abraham received the power of procreation, even though he was too old – and Sarah herself was barren – because he considered him faithful who had promised.” Therefore from one person, a person as good as dead, descendants were born, ‘as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.’ [4]
Faith is ‘the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,’ says the Epistle to the Hebrews. Faith is considering faithful the God who makes promises. Faith is laughter at the promise of a child called ‘laughter’.
Faith is better understood as a verb than as a noun, as a process than as a possession. It is on-again-off-again rather than once-and-for-all. Faith is not knowing whether to laugh or cry. Faith is not being sure where you’re going, but going anyway. A journey without maps. Sometimes faith is like standing at a crossroads wondering which way to turn.
Paul Tillich said that doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. [5] This is really important because sometimes we think that to be a genuine Christian we have to be certain about what we believe in. This is not true. Our doubts raise honest questions about life and God and faith: and God is happy to hear our questions, to walk alongside us as we search for the answers, and in that way we grow in confidence in God and in his promises.
Ultimately, believers and unbelievers all have to put their faith in one conviction or another. You can spend all your time saying ‘There must be a God because…’ but at the end of the day almost nothing that makes any real difference can be proved. I can prove the law of gravity by dropping a shoe out of the window. I can prove that the world is round if I’m clever at that sort of thing. I can’t prove that life is better than death or love is better than hate. I can’t prove the beauty of the beautiful. I can’t even prove my own free will. As Frederick Buechner puts it, ‘Faith can’t prove a damned thing. Or a blessed thing either.’ [6]
But proof isn’t the point of faith. Life is the point. The important thing about faith is how it makes us live. That’s why the writer of Hebrews wrote a list of people whose faith made their lives remarkable – Abraham and Sarah who laughed with God deciding to make a barren old couple the father and mother of a great nation; Abel who offered the work of his hands to God, Enoch whose life was pleasing to God, Noah who listened to God’s warnings and saved himself and others…
‘God is not ashamed to be called their God’, Hebrews tells us. What a lovely tribute to people of faith, something we would love to have said about ourselves. ‘God is not ashamed to be called our God’ – because we chose to live life, to the full, in response to a God who loves and laughs and cries along with us, in equal measure. A God we consider faithful in the promises he makes to us.
Someone once asked Ken Dodd if he thought that God had a sense of humour, and he said, ‘The best kind of laughter is when you make somebody else happy and make somebody else’s life a bit better. And surely that is God’s work. God doesn’t want us to be miserable.’ [7]
Ken Dodd was a man of faith, a lifelong attender of St John’s Church, Knotty Ash. He was also a student of the psychology of humour in the writings of many philosophers and scholars. He once told an interviewer, ‘I think I’ve found the answer to the secret of comedy. It’s about seeing things from a different point of view. It is the perception of the incongruity.’ [8]
I’ve quoted this before: the perception of the incongruity. Realising the wonderful daftness of it all. That’s what made Abraham fall over laughing, and was behind Sarah’s secret splitting-of-her sides.
The perception of the incongruity is what makes Jesus’ beatitudes speak with such force. We perceive how incongruous they sound in our congruous, calculating, world. By faith we smile when we hear the promise that the poor are the blessed ones, that the earth’s destiny is in the hands of the meek and the merciful and the peacemakers. By faith we delight to find God not on the side of the victor, but of the vanquished; suffering alongside the suffering ones; sharing with the struggling. [9]
Faith helps us consider to be faithful the One who makes us these promises. And if God is faithful we can be hopeful not despairing; if God is faithful we can be peaceful rather than fearful, peaceable rather than hostile; if God is faithful we can find strength to live, even at our weakest.
We can train ourselves prayerfully to do this. Don’t you think it’s incongruous, Jesus once half-joked, that you can read the clouds to know when the rain is coming, and you can deduce from the wind when it’s going to warm up, but you can’t read the signs of the times? [10] By faith we can read the signs of the times through the peculiar vision of God’s kingdom.
The perception of the incongruity is a way of talking about laughter. And it’s a way of talking about faith. When we decide to let faith determine our life’s journey, we will smile seeing things from a different point of view. And we will laugh to find that God is not ashamed to be called our God.
Notes
Borrowing heavily from Faith, in Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, a Seeker’s ABC, this is a version of Crying and laughing: faith, the perception of the incongruity, preached in Yorkshire 2019, Faith is not knowing whether to laugh or cry, Somerset, 2016, and Luke 12 – On faith and overcoming unbelief, Croxteth, 2010.
[1] Brian Beacom, Ken Dodd on comedy heroes, Glasgow and the philosophy of humour, Glasgow Herald, 11 June 2016; Ken Dodd: 17 of his funniest one-liners, BBC, 12 March 2018.
[2] Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, a Seeker’s ABC, p.29.
[3] Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, a Seeker’s ABC, p.29.
[4] Hebrews 11.11-12.
[5] Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, a Seeker’s ABC, p.29-30.
[6] Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, a Seeker’s ABC, p.30-31.
[7] Quoted in Frankie Mulgrew, Does God LOL?
[8] Brian Beacom, Ken Dodd on comedy heroes, Glasgow and the philosophy of humour, Glasgow Herald, 11 June 2016.
[9] Matthew 5.1-11; Luke 6.20-26.
[10] Luke 12.56.
