God Makes Plans, We Laugh
Sermon — June 14, 2026
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings
You’ve probably heard the saying, “We make plans, and God laughs.” I don’t always love this phrase. It does a good job of expressing the unpredictability of a world in which our best-laid plans so often go awry. But I think it makes God sound a little too mean-spirited. A few years ago, for example, I was training to run in the Bunker Hill Day road race. I was all ready to prove once and for all that I was the fastest priest in Charlestown. And then, a couple weeks before the race, we went on a trip to New York to visit my in-laws and I cut my shin on a broken toy teapot, so badly that I ended up needing nine stitches. “We make plans, God laughs…” I’m not sure I like that sense of humor.
Other times though, I can see the appeal. Sometimes, God is laughing with us; or at least, laughing because God knows what a beautiful mess is about to happen. To take another example, six years ago, I accepted the call to serve St. John’s as Rector part-time, planning to fill in my other 40% with some of the church-related computer programming I’d been doing. Alice was finishing her master’s degree, and Murray was just about old enough to start school, and I was going to have all this time for both parish ministry and creative work. Until it turned out that school was a disaster for my beloved child, and I’ve ended up spending that 40% of the rest of my time teaching history and math at home, spending a couple days a week in a way I never would’ve planned for but which is more wonderful (and much harder) than I ever could’ve imagined. Sometimes the disintegration of our plans can be the greatest gift. What a relief, after all the family tears involved in Murray’s early school experiences, to spend my days like Sarah instead. “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.” We make plans, and God laughs, and sometimes we laugh too.
Of course, in the story of Sarah today, it’s more like “God makes plans, and we laugh,” isn’t it? Sarah certainly does. God appears to Abraham, we are told, by the oaks of Mamre. As he sits by his tent in the heat of the day, he sees three men. (Gen. 18:1ff.) And, in accordance with the customs of hospitality in his day, he rushes out and goes to meet them: “Please, don’t pass by.” Stop and rest a little while. Take a little water and let us wash your feet in the shade. “Let me offer you some bread! Sarah, quick! Make these men some bread! Take three measures of flour, and knead it, and make cakes.” And he goes and gathers the rest of the feast.
When Abraham returns and serves these three strangers their meal, they ask him, “Where’s your wife Sarah?” (18:9) Does this strike Abraham as strange? Does he ask, “How do you know my wife is named Sarah?” Nope. “Oh,” he says, “she’s there in the tent.”
And all of a sudden, it seems as though these passersby, who have sat down in the shade and let the servants wash their feet and are now enjoying some curds and milk and the calf and the bread—were not just passing by. Because not only do they know Sarah’s name; one of them begins to speak in the voice of God: “I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah will have a son.” (18:10)
And Sarah, who’s standing just on the other side of the flap, begins to laugh. She’s 89 years old, after all. But the Lord says to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh?” (18:13)
Now, if I were Sarah I’d say that this is called “laughing so we don’t cry.” If I were Sarah, I’d be laughing because my husband of seventy years still thinks he needs to give me the recipe for bread—but his dough doesn’t include any salt, or water. (“Take three measures of flour, and knead it!”) If I were Sarah, I’d be laughing because you’re asking him why I laughed, but I don’t let my husband speak for me any more; not since we went down to Egypt years ago, and he was so afraid that they would try to kill him and steal me, that he said I was his sister and he married me off to Pharaoh for a while. (Gen. 12) If I were Sarah, I’d be laughing because twenty-five years ago, you told us, God, that we would have a child; and as the years went by, I began to fear that we’d misunderstood, and so I did something I now regret: I took my servant Hagar, whom we had enslaved in Egypt, and I told him to have a son with her. (Gen. 16) If I were Sarah, I’d be laughing so I didn’t cry.
But she’s afraid, and so she doesn’t say any of that. She says, instead, “I didn’t laugh.”
And God—the God of Abram, God who reigns enthroned above, Ancient of everlasting days and God of love, the Lord, the great I AM—says, “Oh yes, you did laugh.” (Gen. 18:15)
And, cut. That’s the end of the scene. But God doesn’t seem to hold a grudge about the laugh. Rather, as, Genesis says, “the Lord dealt with Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah as he had promised.” She gave birth to a son, and Abraham named him Isaac, which means, “He will laugh.”
In this morning’s Gospel, Jesus tells the disciples not to go to the Gentiles or the Samaritans, but to “go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (Matt. 9:6) In other words, he tells them not to go and spread the good news to all the people of the world—not yet—but to go to their own imperfect people, to their friends and neighbors, and to tell them… what? Not how to pray, or that they should repent, but that “the kingdom of heaven has come near.” (9:7)
In other words, God comes to lost sheep, to imperfect people like us—to people like Abraham and Sarah, whose lives have been messy at best—and simply tells them, “I’ve come near.” Sometimes we don’t believe it. Sometimes we laugh. God cares for us like a shepherd looking for lost sheep. God cares for us although and maybe even because we are lost sheep. “For while we were still weak,” Paul writes, “at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” This is the nature of God’s love for us, for Paul: that “while we were still sinners Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:7-8) Paul doesn’t say this in finger-pointing mode. “Us” really means “us.” Paul spent his early career actively persecuting the Christians, and still he found that God’s grace and love were greater than anything he had done. “While we were still sinners,” he says—before we had any idea of what love really meant—God had already proved his love for us.
This is the good news that Paul wants to share: that “since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God.” (Rom. 5:1) That God has transformed our relationship with God from one of judgment to one of grace. That God has seen all the ways we try to justify ourselves; God has considered all our plans to prove we’re good enough, and God has laughed, because we don’t need to prove anything to God. And so we can laugh too. We can laugh, like Sarah does at the absurdity of our lives, at the absurdity of our God. We can take the good news of God’s grace seriously, which sets us free to take ourselves not very seriously at all.
This is Michael’s last Sunday with us here, before he heads off to Colorado. I think he’s heard me give that advice before as one of the most important principles of ministry: take God seriously; don’t take yourself seriously at all. (I actually don’t think he needed to hear it that badly.) But this isn’t just for priests, this is true for all of us. God has given us the gift of laughter. And the more we can let go of things beyond our control—the more that we can laugh with God at our own plans—the easier it becomes to accept the grace of God, and to know that, whatever’s gone awry with our plans to be good enough, our lives are still enough, for “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” (Romans 5:5)
