Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, ‘After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?’”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, September 17, 2023
by Madison Johnston, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: God will deliver on God’s promises—even the promises that make us laugh at first.
An interesting twist in this story from Genesis Chapters 18 and 21 is that God appears in the form of multiple people all at once—the text mentions three men. It is unclear to us as readers how this breakdown works. Is one of the three men actually God and the other two are somehow along for the ride? Did God split God’s self into three, distinct beings? And if that’s the case, what would God use to differentiate those beings? What would be the benefit of drawing divisions? Would the message God is carrying mean more to Abraham coming from a group of people instead of just one? Is Abraham losing his mind and seeing people who aren’t there? Or is he perfectly in tune with reality? Just a handful of sentences in this passage bring many more questions than they do answers.
Similarly, God speaks to multiple people all at once in this story. Did you notice the layering in God’s prophesying here? It’s clear that God’s questions and promises are intended for Sarah. But he relays them to Abraham even though he gives us readers a few hints that he knows Sarah is listening. At the end, he even addresses Sarah directly.
What is the significance of God appearing and communicating in this multifaceted way? If this passage is a testament to something God is continuing to do in our lives today, then what might it mean for us?
Our secondary text from Mark implies that our promise today revolves around the limitlessness of God—the idea that, for God and according to God, nothing is truly impossible. A helpful way to interpret the Genesis story through this lens might be to say that God will meet us with things better and more absurd than we can imagine in more than one way, more than one time, drawing on many more people than just us, until that time when we internalize those good and absurd things—until we realize that they are coming true.
Doesn’t it make sense that something impossible might need to present itself to us in a few different forms before we can begin to imagine it for ourselves? Doesn’t it stand to reason that if something reality-defying presented itself to us on a few different occasions we might begin to anticipate it? To expect it, even?
God will give us chance after chance after chance to hear what is interesting in the mundane; what is true in the noise; what is needed without us even necessarily knowing it. In fact, God embodiedthese chances in the person of Jesus. In God, something divine took the form of something divine. In God, salvation for the whole world took the form of one man’s eclectic journey. Teaching. Preaching. Healing. Walking from city to city. Washing feet. God makes the impossible, possible by putting things into our lives—into our terms—again and again and again.
