Scripture: Genesis 21:1-7; 1 Kings 19:11-13; John 9:1-7; Matthew 11:28-30 Series: 2021
Part of the ‘Songs of the Bible’ series, this sermon centers on the birth of Isaac (Genesis 21:1-7), the miracle child named ‘laughter’ born to aged Abraham and Sarah. Pruitt frames the Abrahamic covenant as a second act of creation and reflects on a lullaby he wrote (‘Go to sleep, Isaac’), arguing that miracles have an ordinary aspect and that God’s love is found not only in mountaintop moments and great leaps of faith but in the still small voice (1 Kings 19) and the tender rest of a child. The call is to trust like Abraham and Sarah, to receive faith as a gift rather than possess or earn it, and to rest in Christ whose yoke is easy and burden light.
Illustrations: lullaby-with-an-agenda, father-abraham-seven-sons, ten-men-for-a-synagogue, kierkegaard-swimmer-harness, blind-man-gets-a-job, faith-not-a-leaf-blower, swim-across-lake-travis
June 20
Go to sleep, Isaac, go to sleep dear.
The Lord was attentive to Sarah just as he had said, and the Lord carried out just what he had promised her. She became pregnant and gave birth to a son for Abraham when he was old, at the very time God had told him. Abraham named his son—the one Sarah bore him—Isaac. Abraham circumcised his son Isaac when he was eight days old just as God had commanded him. Abraham was 100 years old when his son Isaac was born. Sarah said, “God has given me laughter. Everyone who hears about it will laugh with me.” She said, “Who could have told Abraham that Sarah would nurse sons? But now I’ve given birth to a son when he was old!” Genesis 21:1-7
Abram had given up on being a dad. There wasn’t a father’s day in ancient Mesopotamia. Abram had moved on from that expectation. He had a nephew, Lot, whom he expected would be his heir. He was wealthy, with à number of cattle and sheep and servants, but he didn’t expect to be a dad. Then he receives a word from God. “Abram, I want to you to go from this place, take your family, go. For, I will make you the father of many. Look at the stars, your descendants will be greater than these. We don’t know what Abram was thinking when he looked out at the stars of the sky, maybe he thought that seems nice, or that seems like a lot of work. Maybe he thought he didn’t need all the stars in the sky, maybe just one or two would be nice. My brothers and sisters, we are continuing our series on songs of the Bible that looks through the scriptures in a way guided and retold in music. There are a lot of explicit songs in the Bible, but it all can be turned into song. For God’s love for us is so great that we cannot help but sing. Today, Go to sleep, Isaac.
There aren’t many songs about Abraham. There’s a song called Father Abraham had seven sons, seven sons had father Abraham. But that’s not in the Bible. He didn’t have seven sons. He had two, which is different than seven. He’s not really talked about in Children’s bibles. We usually move from Noah to Joseph and his brothers at the end of Genesis. There are not many songs about the sacrifice of Isaac, not many songs about Abraham’s relationship with Hagar, his slave. These aren’t the stories that work well in a VBS. but there’s no “rest of the story” without Abraham, Abraham and God’s covenant with Abraham is more central to the identity of the Hebrew people than Adam and Eve or Noah. Basically everything that comes before this, including creation and the Garden of Eden and Cain and Abel and Noah and Babel and all of that up until Genesis 12 is a prelude. Right here, when God makes covenant with Abraham: this is a second act of creation. With Abraham, God is creating God’s people. God is creating God’s chosen people from this one man and one woman. When God comes to Moses, God does not say, “I am the God of Adam and Noah, but I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The covenantal relationship starts here.
I honestly don’t know if Abraham ever wanted to be a dad. Abraham doesn’t show a lot of his emotion in the Bible. Abraham is merciful when the angel of the Lord is threatening to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham says, if there are only 10 righteous people, Lord, then you should not destroy it. This is actually one of the reasons why, for there to be a synagogue in Judaism, there must be 10 men. If there are only nine, it doesn’t count. Abraham is also kinda clever and tricky. He tells Pharaoh that Sarah is his sister. So that Pharaoh won’t kill him and just take her as his wife. And now there’s, I think there’s some ways of interpreting it, that Sarah was his sister in a way, but still, in all of it, there are some virtues that we can find. And, in Abraham, there are qualities he has that we can look up to. As well, there are qualities that we should not look up to. When we read the Bible. The point is not to replicate every action of the people in depicted. There is a lot of bad behavior, or more specifically, there is a lot of human behavior. We read the scriptures to see Jesus and to see God revealed in these places.
We can see ourselves in surprising places. We can see ourselves as Isaac, a child of blessing. Buy how do you respond to the unexpected? Like the radically unexpected. 95 year old women do not give birth. 99 year old men do not father them. Abraham and Sarah had lived full lives but God was not done with them.
They named their child laughter. Sarah and Abraham named their child laughter because of the joy he brought. It was a new joy, a surprising joy, an unexpected joy. The joy was not just found in the child but in the promise of God fulfilled in the child. Isaac. Laughter.
Isaac didn’t laugh all his life. He probably cried a lot. I wrote this song thinking of those moments of tears. Thinking of the moments when I wished a child would just sleep.
Lullabies are songs with agendas. The goal of it is to make someone fall asleep. When you have ever been around a newborn infant who is struggling to fall asleep, gosh, it’d be great with just sleep. What if I sang this song once? What if I sing this song 6,000 times, that if you’ve ever rocked an infant child in your arms, you’d probably sung the same song. What feels like 6,000 times. The lullaby has an agenda. It is trying to do something, go to sleep, go to sleep. People have been trying to help babies sleep as long as there have been babies. Before the baby bjorn and white noise, there were lullabies.
Go to sleep Isaac, go to sleep, dear, you’re our miracle baby, you’re an answer to prayer.
Even answers to prayer need to sleep. Miracles have an ordinary aspect to them. God chooses to use ordinary means. The man born blind in John 9 had to get a job now that he could see. Maybe his dad was a shepherd and he was able to look after the sheep. The lepers outside the city that Jesus healed were able to see there family again and went on living. Miracles don’t stop at the end of stories.
Laughing, crying, sleeping, playing, all these things we do as kids and we watch others do, takes place in the lives of the miraculous. God’s miraculous love is not just offered to us in burning bushes but and earthquakes.
We see this in the prophet Elijah. Elijah was running from wicked king Ahab and he didn’t know where to go, so an angel comes and gives him this message, we pick up at 1 kings 19:11
The Lord said, “Go out and stand at the mountain before the Lord. The Lord is passing by.” A very strong wind tore through the mountains and broke apart the stones before the Lord. But the Lord wasn’t in the wind. After the wind, there was an earthquake. But the Lord wasn’t in the earthquake. 12 After the earthquake, there was a fire. But the Lord wasn’t in the fire. After the fire, there was a sound. Thin. Quiet. 13 When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his coat. He went out and stood at the cave’s entrance. A voice came to him and said, “Why are you here, Elijah?”
Sometimes this is translated as ‘still, small voice.’ God is not just in the earthquake and the storm and the mountaintop apparition. God is found and speaks to us in the still moments of life. In the moments between moments, but we have to listen. We have to pay attention. We have to trust.
Abraham and Sarah too, they trusted in God and so can you.
This is the heart of it. Abraham and Sarah trusted in God. In the very same way, we can trust in God today. You can trust like them. Trust in God is a willingness to be used for love in this world. And our desires and God’s desires may not overlap. Honestly, Sarah may not have been too excited to go through pregnancy as a 99 year old. I bet there were some complications.
We can imagine what they thought, but we can’t know it. Just like we can imagine what someone thinks when they take a step of faith like Abram and Sarai leaving their home to go to the promised land, but we don’t quite know.
We can each receive the new life God offers to us, but it may look different and feel different because each of us must take that next step. We can be taught facts about the faith, we can study up on Wikipedia, but at some point we need to live it and
I can describe the movement of faith, but i cannot make it for you. In learning to go through the motions of swimming, one can be suspended from the ceiling a harness and then presumably describe the movements, but one is not swimming. (Kierkegaard)
We can pray for our kids and teach them to swim. But someday, they have to do it on their own.
New life in God is not a possession. It is new life. We cannot possess faith as we can a car or a calculator. We can give faith like a new leaf blower on Father’s Day. We can, instead, receive it like a song of love, even a lullaby. We can respond in ways that are to the world surprising. God’s love isn’t always about the next thing. Some times it may just be about going to sleep. We don’t have to swim across Lake Travis to prove God’s love. We don’t have to volunteer for all the things (though that might be nice). We don’t have to prove ourselves to God. Sometimes, the first movement of faith is to first rest in love before we do anything else. That is Grace offered freely.
God’s love is found not just on the mountaintops or the great moments and leaps of faith, but in the tender touch of a child or the tender silence of a prayer.
You are loved by God. You are the answer to a prayer of Jesus. You have been called by name to this place. You have been called from wherever you are from to here for a reason.
Christ calls us to rest in him. Christ calls us to lay our burdens down. We don’t need to hold the weight of the world. We don’t need to always imagine ourselves as Isaac or Sarah. No matter how old we are, we can be Isaac. We can receive the affection of God. We can rest in the arms of God. There will be time to stand up. There will be time to face the challenges of this world. There will be time, but you can also rest in the amazing reality that you are loved. You are forgiven.
Rest in Jesus. His yoke is easy, and his burden is light.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.