Scripture Genesis 18:1-15
The Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. He looked up and saw three men standing near him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent entrance to meet them and bowed down to the ground. He said, “My lord, if I find favor with you, do not pass by your servant. Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. Let me bring a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on—since you have come to your servant.” So they said, “Do as you have said.” And Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah and said, “Make ready quickly three measures of choice flour, knead it, and make cakes.” Abraham ran to the herd and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to the servant, who hastened to prepare it. Then he took curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared and set it before them, and he stood by them under the tree while they ate.
They said to him, “Where is your wife Sarah?” And he said, “There, in the tent.” Then one said, “I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son.” And Sarah was listening at the tent entrance behind him. Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age; it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women. So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, “After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I be fruitful?” The Lord said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?’ Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? At the set time I will return to you, in due season, and Sarah shall have a son.” But Sarah denied, saying, “I did not laugh,” for she was afraid. He said, “Yes, you did laugh.”
Sermon
Elaine was one of my best friends in college. Brilliant, funny, hospitable—she threw a dinner party in our sophomore year that still rates as one of my favorite memories. But Elaine, brilliant as she was, struggled with her studies. Instead of writing the papers her professors required, Elaine typed papers for her friends. Instead of showing up for her classes, Elaine helped build sets for upcoming plays in the theater department. Instead of trying to figure out how she could catch up as she fell behind, Elaine threw fantastic dinner parties, and fell behind even more. By the end of that sophomore year, she had to leave college.
Elaine was stuck. She was stuck in this place where she couldn’t get herself to do the things she needed to do in order to succeed. A part of her wouldn’t allow her to. This didn’t make sense to me until Elaine told me what had happened during the spring of her senior year in high school.
That spring, Elaine’s parents split up. They had lived in a big house on Cape Cod. Elaine’s dad rented an apartment for himself and Elaine’s older brother. Her mother had rented an apartment for herself and Elaine’s two younger sisters. They sold the house to a family with young children, and told Elaine that part of the deal was that she would stay in the house—moving from her bedroom to the basement—and take care of the children that summer, as an au pair. Elaine’s parents split up, and made no room for her in their lives. Instead, they left her as an unpaid helper in the basement of the house in which she grew up.
As the years passed, I came to understand that Elaine had been stuck in a liminal space. At a time when she was supposed to take a big step in growth and experience—going to college—the foundations of her life collapsed and disappeared. She was no longer a high school student, but she also never seemed to feel as if she deserved to thrive in college. Instead, she made herself everyone else’s unpaid helper, from typing papers to building stage platforms to cooking and serving food. She was stuck there, for quite a few years.
What could a brilliant but troubled college kid possibly have to do with Abraham and Sarah? We meet Sarah and Abraham in a liminal space today. Nearly twenty-five years have passed since God commanded (invited?) Abraham to get up and go, taking his wife Sarah, and trusting in God’s promise to do three things: to bring them to a new land that would be theirs; to make them a great nation (in other words, to make them patriarch and matriarch of a great people); and to bless them, so that they would be blessings to the whole world. So far, God had fulfilled only the first of these three promises, which has left this aging couple in an in-between space. They are not where they were in the beginning of their story; they are in a new land. But neither are they in the place—family, blessings—that they are supposed to be. They’re somewhere in between, in a kind of threshold space. This is what “liminal” means. Not where you were, but also, not where you are going—in every sense of the word.
And this story emphasizes the liminality of their existence by having Abraham and Sarah, at different times as the story unfolds, standing at the entrance to their tent. Tent entrances, doorways, arches—these are all symbolic of liminal spaces.
Liminal spaces aren’t bad, necessarily. They are neutral. How they feel depends upon the circumstances of the people who are living there. I have to believe, though, that, at least for Sarah, this twenty-four-year-plus time of “not yet” has been excruciating. She is so desperate for God’s promise of children to be fulfilled, she has taken matters into her own hands, encouraging Abraham to impregnate Hagar, an enslaved Egyptian woman. The story is filled with pain, for both women—for Sarah, whose self-esteem plummets as the pregnancy advances, and for Hagar, whom Sarah starts abusing emotionally and probably physically. She treats Hagar so harshly that the woman runs away. At God’s encouragement Hagar returns, but their story ends with Hagar and her son, Ishmael, being cast out of the family.
Another a strange and disturbing thing happens to Sarah, not once, but twice. When she and Abraham are traveling through certain lands, for his protection, Abraham tells the rulers of those lands that Sarah is his sister. Those rulers then take Sarah into their harems, and pay Abraham lots of flocks and riches as a dowry. Eventually, the rulers figure out that Sarah doesn’t belong there, because God sends all kinds of curses their way. Sarah is released, but—it is hard to imagine any of this was good for either her self-esteem or her relationship with her husband.
It already sounds like a rough twenty-four years, even before we discuss the cultural response to married women not conceiving and giving birth. This was an era when women were blamed for infertility. If there were no babies, it was her womb that had failed—it was assumed to be inhospitable terrain. It was as if her husband were trying to plant a flowerbed in in a pile of rocks. It just didn’t take, and it was her fault.
But liminal spaces can be wondrous places, and starting with today’s story, the wonder of it all begins to be shown. We read that “The Lord appeared to Abraham… as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day.” “The Lord” seems to be three men. When he sees them, it’s not at all clear that Abraham knows who they are. But what is clear is the powerful, universal Ancient Near Eastern custom of extraordinary hospitality. Abraham springs into action, asking the men to come, to sit beneath a tree, to rest, to let themselves be refreshed, to let Abraham and Sarah serve them “a morsel”—which ends up being a fatted calf, three loaves of bread, milk and curds, and, of course, water. This is what hospitality looks like in a place where the climate can be deadly. Everyone gives hospitality because everyone knows that they may be the ones in need of hospitality next time.
Liminal spaces can be places of possibility, and energy, and hope. Liminal spaces can be places of transition, even transformation. I imagine the excitement of Abraham and Sarah as they prepare food for these guests—and I imagine them not exactly being sure as to why they are so excited. The wonder grows, as one of the men makes an astounding statement. After asking for Sarah—she is now standing in the entrance of the tent, but in such a way that the men can’t see her—the man tells Abraham that he will return in “due season,” and that Sarah will have a baby.
The story is interrupted by the narrator, who takes some pains to remind the reader that Sarah and Abraham are old. Really old. And the final flourish of this reminder is the statement that Sarah is no longer experiencing something to do with the “manner of women,” which is to say, a menstrual cycle. This is a preface to what happens next: Sarah laughs. She laughs and asks herself, a rhetorical question: “At Abraham’s age, and my age, will I be fruitful?” That’s what our translation says. In the Hebrew, it reads, “At our age, will I know pleasure?”
Sarah laughs, and it’s clear that the eerily wise strangers/ the Lord/ the men hear and disapprove. But Sarah will have the last laugh because she will indeed give birth to Isaac within the next year. And Abraham, perhaps in delighted recollection of Sarah giggling at the thought, will name the child “Yitzach,” Isaac, which is Hebrew for “laughter.”
We all have the experience of being in liminal spaces, sooner or later. Waiting for the call to see if you got the job. Waiting for the results of the tests, or the diagnosis, or the surgery. Waiting for “normal life” to begin after college, or a divorce, or a move. You could say that the Church of Jesus Christ throughout much of the world is in a liminal space right now. Following three years of a pandemic ever with us, we have one foot in what was, the church of “before,” and another foot suspended in the air, wondering whether this is where we put it down, asking ourselves, Are we there yet?
But if we are in transition, that means we are also poised for transformation. Liminal spaces are wondrous spaces. They can be places of possibility, and energy, and hope. For Sarah and Abraham, their liminal space led to the fulfillment of God’s promise to them. For us, they may lead to other paths than the ones we started out on; but on all these paths, in every one of these spaces, God walks alongside us.
My prayer for us is not only that we will see God’s promises to us fulfilled; but that, like Sarah, we will throw back our heads and laugh, and know the deep joy of transformations and new life, wherever our path is taking us.
A reading from the book of Genesis, beginning at chapter 21, verse 1.
The Lord dealt with Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah as he had promised. Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the time of which God had spoken to him. Abraham gave the name Isaac to his son whom Sarah bore him. And Abraham circumcised his son Isaac when he was eight days old, as God had commanded him. Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him. Now Sarah said, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.” And she said, “Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.”
Thanks be to God. Amen.