Have you ever had a time in which you simply could not stop laughing?  Maybe a time when the harder you tried to stop laughing the worse it got?  I have had those times, and unfortunately some of them have been at times when it has been inappropriate to laugh, say like at a funeral.  Have you ever get tickled at a funeral and couldn’t stop laughing, even though what ever you were laughing at was really not all that funny?  It has happened to me more than once, and the more you try to hold the laughter in, the worse it gets.  It isn’t long in this scenario until you start to make funny squeaking sounds and the whole pew begins to violently shake. You noticed that crying and grieved people are looking around and staring at you like you are the rudest person on the planet.  You then begin to look down and cover much of your face as possible and just maybe they will think that you are crying.  If you are sitting next to a friend or relative, they may jab you in the side, or if they are a co-conspirator in crime, you dare not look at them as it will exacerbate another spasm of frivolity.  It is a miserable feeling, as you are totally out of control as you sit helplessly horrified that people will think you are a big jerk. 

            I can remember attending an event where a 10 year old boy who was in some way developmentally challenged was asked to sing the National Anthem before the event. I can tell you that bless his little heart, it was the worse bit of singing that I have ever heard.  He was a terrible singer, and furthermore began to make up words to the national anthem not very far into it.  People all around were saying things like, “isn’t he wonderful, isn’t he brave, isn’t he cute, isn’t he special,” and I was laughing for the next 30 minutes.  Several in my party reminded me that it wasn’t funny and that I was being insensitive.  Sorry.

            Just this past week I attended the Methodist Annual Conference to see a friend become commissioned, and it was a very highbrow occasion.  It was a nice service, but near the end I got tickled over something called “passing the mantle.”  The person next to me made some kind of fireplace joke, and I kept looking for something other than the stole that was passed around from one guy to one guy to one guy.  I looked to my friend and said what was that about, and he said, I don’t know but that last guy got a double portion of whatever it was, and I lost it.  Dianna kept elbowing me to cut it out and I could not. I know, it doesn’t sound funny, you had to be there.

            And then there was the time I was sitting on a platform in a prominent position in front of a large church funeral and began laughing at the son-in-laws eulogy, which was the dumbest thing I had ever heard–not good.  Or when I have been in important corporate or board meetings or some other such austere occasion.  It seems like it happens to me all the time.  The worse is in one-on-one counseling sessions where someone is sharing something significant and you find something stupid or silly about what they are saying.  That is a tough one.  OK, maybe I am insensitive!  But you have to laugh, right?

            But at the same time this can be a miserable and embarrassing predicament.  So if this has ever happened to you, fear not, I have found a solution.  There is an article on the internet about how to stop laughing at inappropriate times, in just 15 easy steps.  So get ready, here they are:

1. Understand when it is inappropriate to laugh. They say that “laughter is the best medicine,” but if the occasion is very serious, others may not appreciate your laughter. If you go into a situation knowing that it’s not laughable, it’ll help you maintain a more serious demeanor.

2. Check to see if others are laughing or at least smiling a lot. If they aren’t, then remind yourself not to laugh unless they do. Or, if you see someone else laughing inappropriately (and everyone else giving that person dirty looks) then get away from them as quickly as possible, because inopportune laughter can be infectious.

3. Think of something very sad and depressing. If you need inspiration, the daily news is usually full of unfortunate events that will suffice to calm you down. Think about something that makes you want to cry. Although this can be unpleasant, it usually takes care of the uncontrollable urge to laugh.

4. Try pinching yourself or causing some other strong physical sensation, such as biting your inner cheek or your tongue (don’t bite too hard!). Bite each side of your mouth together, so that the edges of your lips aren’t rising up to make you smile or laugh. Hold your breath when you are about to laugh. This can act as a distraction, helping you beat the urge to laugh out loud. If you still squeeze out a smile which other people tend to notice, press your lips together so it doesn’t look like you’re smiling.(sometimes when you hold your breath though, it just squeezes the laugh out even louder or you laugh at yourself, so be cautious.)

5. Disguise a smile or laugh with a coughing fit. If a grin or chuckle slips through, quickly cover it up by putting your hand over your mouth and coughing. Move away from the crowd, even if it means stepping out of the room or going to the restrooms. If they see you are coughing, they will understand.

6. Force yourself to turn your laugh into a cry if the occasion is something sad such as a funeral. Some people sound like they are laughing before they cry.

7. Try exhaling as much of the air as possible from your lungs. This removal of the air will not allow the laugh to continue and make it stop. This usually works best when combined with the coughing technique mentioned above. A combination of techniques is often the best!

8. If it gets really bad, hold your nose and cover your mouth with that hand. Then people can’t see your grin, and you can laugh as hard as you wish inside yourself. You may start shaking, but that’s OK, it can be covered as crying. Try not to let any sound out, but if you do ease up by accident it sounds much like a sneeze or a strange snort.

9. If none of the above work, then get away to a private area (e.g. a restroom) and let it out. Return to what you were doing after you’re done.

10. Open your mouth wide and let the laughter out silently without smiling, this may look odd but it works.

11. Pretend to pick your teeth. Open your mouth wide and pretend to pick away at something stuck. Not only does it totally hide your smile, you also clean your teeth at the same time! Be careful though because the face made is funny enough to make others start laughing when they see what you’re up to.

12. Use reverse psychology on yourself. By telling yourself something like, “This is funny! Laugh some more!” you end up finding what ever you were laughing at not funny any more.

13. Count backwards from 10 to 1. If this doesn’t work, try again. Even forward counting can help.

14. Try biting down on one side of your lower lip. Then laugh all you want without opening your mouth. People will think you are crying and trying to hold it back. But after you are done, don’t just stop. Inhale a few times as if you are hyperventilating.

15. Push your tongue against the top of your mouth, and at the same time pushing your mouth shut slightly

         It is of course always OK to laugh in our church and to laugh at my sermons, even when they are not funny.  I take it as a compliment if I can make you laugh a little, we laugh far too little as adults.  And besides, it is good for you as all kinds of helpful and healthful endorphins are released.

         In our lectionary text for today I am in Genesis for the third week in a row, so go ahead and laugh if you want to.  I always preach from the gospels, but it is a nice respite to look at something I don’t know anything about.  OK, that’s supposed to be funny, you are not laughing!  I hope you are not thinking that most weeks I speak about things I don’t know anything about! But I do believe that there are some powerful lessons for us in these stories, and you know me, the story is the thing.

         Well, this is a famous if not unusual story about Abraham and Sarah, who may be guilty of the quintessential inappropriate laugh.  It seems that Abraham had three visitors, and even though they were strangers he immediately knew that they were important in some way.  In fact, we are led to believe that they are angels, divine beings, or even God himself.  So we have a very human manifestation of something otherworldly and Abraham has a good visit with the three.  Now I am not one who believes that because there were three of them that this is proof of the Trinity, God in three persons.  That would require us to stretch the details of this story way too much, and requires a lot of Christianizing of a decidedly Jewish story.   Besides, the Holy Spirit incarnate?  How about a prior incarnation of an incarnate, pre-incarnate Christ?  Think about it.  But that aside, we obviously have an encounter with the divine here, and Abraham gives them some vittles and they fellowship a bit.  The visitors evidently are pleased with his hospitality and they cut to the chase and speak of why they are really there to see him.  They said that they would come back around in a year and at that time Abraham would have a little bundle of joy to show off.  Sarah was listening from behind the door of the tent and realized that these three guys just said that she would get pregnant at the ripe old age of 99, and she would begin the work of the covenant of parenting a great nation.  She evidently thought it to be the most ridiculous thing that she had ever heard, so she sarcastically said how ludicrous the prospect was, and she did so laughing.  And evidently she was not very discreet with her joviality and did not know those 15 things to keep from laughing inappropriately.  This is probably because they didn’t have internet service out there, so she was confronted with her insensitivity. The person must have said what gives, that nothing was too hard for the Lord.  Sarah then lied and said she did not laugh, and the man said, “Oh, yes, it was laughter alright – not a sneeze or a cough, you should have bit your lip a little harder.”

         So Sarah laughed, and if we heard similar news we would laugh as well or at least demonstrate some other lack of faith in such a promise.  Now maybe Sarah didn’t recognize these three folk as being God, and that is the problem and an understandable one.  But they directly confronted her disbelief with the rhetorical question, “is anything too hard for the Lord?”  And while the inquisitors expected a “no” answer, and essentially got one with Sarah’s denial, it none-the-less strikes me as a good question this morning.

         Is there anything too hard for the Lord?  Of course not you say.  God is all powerful, all knowing, all wise and all loving.  He can in fact make a mountain that he cannot move; we just would not understand the answer even if we knew it to that question.  Well, if nothing is too hard for the Lord, then why doesn’t he do something about so many of our problems? It seems then that if nothing is too hard for him, then there must be some things that he simply doesn’t want to do.  What would have been the big deal in cutting a few boy scouts a little slack in Iowa this past week?  What a heartbreaking tragedy. Or for that matter, all those losses that have resulted in serious flooding in downtown Des Moines?  Or what about all those folks in China and Myanmar?  Was it too hard for God to have intervened in these tragedies?  of course not you say, God’s purposes were just something else, which brings us back to either he is not all wise or all good or he simply has a deaf ear to our cries and is not all loving. 

         Is there anything too hard for the Lord?  Well, we certainly pray like there is not.  We pray very specific itinerary style prayers for God to fix this thing or that thing.  We pray to pass a big exam, we pray that gasoline won’t cost us any more; we pray that the old clunker we drive will make it one more month.  We pray for the sick and we pray for relief from the messes we find ourselves in.  And we believe that nothing is too hard for the Lord.  Yet we really don’t expect God to end world hunger just on the whim of a prayer do we?  We don’t really believe that the war in Iraq will stop today because we prayed for it to do so, now do we?  We don’t think that there will be a jackpot of money for all those hit by high gas prices, surely?

         When I went to Memphis in March to attend the prayer service for my friend Eve, the young lady with Cancer you have heard me talk about, we all lay on the floor face down and prayed very boldly for a miracle in her life. The senior minister said in advance that if there was anyone of us with any doubts about the whole thing, then he understood.  We were to simply excuse ourselves so as those praying would be of one heart and mind.  I wanted so desperately for Eve to be healed, I lay on the floor, was the first one to pray as audaciously as I knew how for God to quit monkeying around and send a cure for Eve.  After the prayer was over, Eve said thank you, and joked that a friend thought she should go immediately to the hospital to get her scans to see the results of the miracle.  And that prospect seemed ludicrous to me—does it happen just that quick?  If God heals her, is it right now, right after our prayer?  God did not for the record, but on the other hand she is stable now, her cancer is not growing but not shrinking either.  She does well most days but lives with serious fatigue and some pretty powerful pain.  Is there anything too hard for the Lord?  Who the heck knows! Our supernatural theistic view of God says “heck no,” God is God and God does whatever God wants to.  Shoot, this God spit the entire universe out in seven days.  And while it is reassuring to have a God that big, it seems to me that it leaves us with more questions than answers, at least on some occasions.

         Is there anything to hard for the Lord?  Well, no, at least not as far as Sarah was concerned.  We all know she gave birth as promised to Isaac, and the nation of Israel was born.  But there is more here as well.  I always read the text from a variety of translations, and if I find rhetorical differences in the translator’s interpretations I dig a little deeper to get behind what they are saying.  Some versions such as the New Revised Standard Version render this passage “Is there anything to wonderful for the Lord,” and that to me has a different message, one that is not trying to solve the problem of evil.  The word for “hard” here is found 71 times in the Old Testament and it is only translated “hard” five times.  The rest of the renderings are along the lines of wonderful or marvelous.  The Hebrew word palá means to be wondrous, marvelous, to be surpassing and extraordinary as in doing a very hard thing in a surprisingly wonderful manner.  In other words, it often means something to the effect of our cliché, “to good to be true.”   Maybe something along the lines of “With God is there really such a thing as too good to be true?”

         You see what Sarah would find out and what we need to know is that God is in the business of surprising us in the most extraordinary ways.  We are quick to wonder where God was in Iowa, in fact we refer to catastrophes legally as “acts of God” but we are slow to think that the good that comes our way in life also might be from God. When we have God moments, we are often shaken to our core, and we are almost always surprised. And if we blame our ill fortune on God, we ought to blame our good fortune on God as well.

         You see the truth is we are surprised when we are recipients of grace in any way shape or form.  We have a hard time accepting that God wants good or wonderful things for us because we basically have come from religious traditions that have emphasized our worthlessness in order to accentuate God’s greatness by contrast.  We often feel so undeserving because we have heard that message over and over again.  We are not worth it we are taught.  We deserve eternal punishment because we are far from perfect we preach.  We have a low corporate self-esteem as a people, we are never good enough.  So why would God do anything good for us?  We are always surprised to realize that God has indeed shown up at the door of the tent.  Always.  God doesn’t work that way we think.  We live life every single day like there are many things too hard for the Lord. 

         While there are many people out there who tell us to the letter what God can do, there are as many who at least indirectly tell us what we cannot do.  Women cannot preach or even minister some say.  I have two young women in my summer college course, and both are very talented and have great potential for ministry.  One is starting Southwestern Seminary in the fall, a decision that is based on some important family concerns, but a difficult one in light of her gifts for ministry and Southwestern’s stance on gender roles.  I am trying to tell her that no one can define God’s call for her or her role other than God.  To say what God cannot do in her calling is to limit God.  I ask you, is anything too wonderful for the Lord?  God calls whomever he chooses, even 99 year old women to birth a nation.

         Anytime that we receive the love and grace of God it is nothing less than wonderful.  James says in his epistle that every good gift that comes down from heaven is from God. Jesus said that if we ask for a loaf of bread to feed our hungry bellies there is no way that God would give us a snake.  How much more does our father in heaven want to give us good gifts, wonderful gifts?  It is as the old song says:

“Sometimes a light surprises The Christian while he sings; It is the Lord Who rises With healing in His wings: When comforts are declining, He grants the soul again A season of clear shining, To cheer it after the rain.”

         I am here today to boldly say that nothing is too wonderful for the Lord. That God visits us on a regular basis through all kinds of people with all kinds of faces in all kinds of places, everyday if we look around.  And especially when we don’t expect to see God, He is there. You see the truth is that we encounter God in the everyday, and truly just when we need God the most he is there.  God always seems to send people in my life at just the right time to bless me.  And he comes to us with the same intent that he came to Abraham and Sarah: to bless us and to bless others through us.   And that is no laughing matter.  And when we realize it, it seems too good to be true, for it is indeed Good News!  Thanks be to God. Amen.