Jacob's Sons Lie to Jacob

I.

Dr. Martha Edwards, a psychologist, is Director of the Developing Child and Family Program at the Ackerman Institute; she is a specialist in the “favored child syndrome” field and in her practice deals with favored children, un-favored children, parents who make those calls, and the whole family damaged and derailed by parental favoritism of one child over another. When she begins working with a family hurting from the results of this unhealthy syndrome, one of the first facts she attempts to ascertain is why this parent-child behavior pattern has happened. The favored child may be favored by one or both parents in a two-parent household; or, less healthily, each parent may favor a different child. In a two-parent, two-child home, at least each child has someone to favor her or him. If there are more than two children, the problems for the un-favored child or children could be worse. She or he realizes that neither of two possible parents makes her or him the favorite. How did this begin? Why does this continue?

Dr. Edwards says that the most common reason is that the child who becomes the favored child has a temperament easier to deal with than the un-favored child or children, and of course what is easier to deal with varies greatly from one parent to the next. Similarly, the favored child’s natural way of approaching life is more admired by the parent who favors her or him than is the case with the un-favored child or children. For example, a parent may admire the spunk of a child who is a take charge kind of person in the making while not admiring passive people, especially whiney ones, even if one of those people is that parent’s own child; now the parent in this case may be a take charge person who likes that personal trait, or the parent may be one of those passive, whiney types who hates that trait in herself or himself and, rather naturally therefore, in her or his un-favored child or children.

Some other reasons one child might be preferred over her or his siblings is the child’s gender. There have been and remain cultures around the world who, for example, favor male children over female children. This was clearly the case in the Hebrew and Jewish cultures that produced the Hebrew Bible and gave a foundation to the values of Jesus and his earliest followers too.

I was in seminary with a missionary kid whose parents had served on Africa before being brought back to the United States to work in an administrative role at the mission board. The African culture in which he’d been raised favored males, regardless of where they came in the birth order. He was the baby of the family, the third child born after two sisters. How much the family allowed John to be favored wasn’t known outside the family; maybe not at all. Still, there were frequent jokes, at least they sounded like jokes--you know how that works, about the favored son thing in many social gathering with this lovely family.

In China today, infant girls are imperiled. To control population, each married couple is permitted by the government to have one child and one child only. Because a son is of greater value to the family in terms of societal influence and moneymaking potential, parents prefer a son who can make them proud during his growing up years and then take care of them in their old age in a country where there is no social service support for aging parents; if anyone is to take care of them, it will have to be their child. The wealthy aren’t as troubled about care in old age as they are able to save enough money to see that they will be taken care of in their golden years; even so, they prefer a son.

What this has led to, tragically, is the willingness of some families to murder a baby girl at or soon after birth so the parents can try again for a male child. You’re already thinking about the most logical problem with this mentality. Men can produce children on their own; females, if for no other reason, are necessities.

There were some experimental approvals of certain families being allowed to have two children for observation to see if this 30-something year old policy was still functional. The Chinese government decided that it was, so in about 2009 the law was extended at least another decade.

Kids want and need to think of their parents as on their side no matter what, but that’s not always the case. Obese children who suffer ridicule away from home, especially at school, come home to parents who may not ridicule them, but who certainly favor their trim or toned siblings. Small-minded parents may also favor the child with few or no adolescent acne issues over the poor kid who has to struggle with the physical and emotional ravages of acne.

When no obvious reason for favoritism of one child over another is evident, Dr. Brown goes on a search for circumstances of the favored child’s birth. A parent who loses a parent to death shortly before a child is born may favor that child over the others simply because she or he is a reminder of how joy can follow sorrow. A child who is born premature but who survives against the odds may be a favored child from there on out. In exactly the same way, a child who struggles through an illness and makes it, may well be the favored child of one or both parents simply because the parents realize how closely they came to losing that precious child to this world.

A child who is born after the parents thought they couldn’t have children any more, especially if that child comes along a little later than most parents have kids, may be a favored child. And why not, that child is living proof that the father is still kicking in the lovemaking department, and the mother feels a little bit like super woman to be told post-menopause that some feisty little egg went and got herself fertilized after all eggs were supposed to be gone or retired. Those parents may quickly lose those boosts to their vanity after 17 consecutive nights with no all night sleep.

If parents begin having marital problems, Dr. Brown has discovered that the child who is least like the spouse about to be kicked to the curb may quickly, suddenly became the favored of child of the parent who wants to be rid of a spouse who is much more like another child who just as quickly, suddenly becomes un-favored.

When parents play favorites with their children, both the favored and the un-favored children suffer. The un-favored children feel the rejection of being inadequate. She or he isn’t inclined to like self and will frequently, therefore, fall into patterns of low self-esteem and may easily become depressed. A child who doesn’t feel favored by a parent may lose for life the possibility of healthy self-esteem.

Being a favored child may not be a picnic, says Dr. Brown. She or he may feel guilty, knowing that one or both parents favor her or him over the siblings the favored child loves. The favored child also gets the unwritten and unspoken message that in order to stay in that favored slot, and it does have its rewards, there are standards to be upheld. This is to say, once the favored child displays traits or behaviors not on the approved list, she or he can fall from grace faster than the rich lawmakers in this country can come up with yet another reason the poor really should have no rights at all.

The only real way to avoid this pattern is to avoid homogenized approaches to parenting. Each parent must have a special, individualized, and somewhat private relationship with each child so not only are there family activities, but also there are times when a parent spends time with one child at a time, doing that child’s favorite activities and living out undivided attention to that child for this slice of time. If there must be family votes taken from time to time, each child must have a chance to express her or his opinion without interference or ridicule from any other family member. When the vote is taken, the majority must rule. We parents must never pretend to empower children only to yank the power with which we appeared to bless them right out from under their feet.

II.

If you happened to be here last week, or if you read the sermon or listened to the podcast, you know we ended our story of Jacob on a sad as well as an unresolved note. Jacob had lied to his elderly, blind father, Isaac, and gotten by with it, to his financial benefit.

I’m not a karma guy myself, but I will just point out that in today’s story the tables are turned. Not one of Jacob’s sons lie to him, but ten of the twelve lie to their father. Some would say this is the conclusion to the story last week that seemed to have no real conclusion.

Regarding the lying of children, adult children, to their father in a culture where respect of parents was an integral part of religious law, some would say, “Law or no law, he had it coming. He through an elaborate scheme, which his mother helped concoct, took advantage of his father’s age and disability expressly for reasons of greed and selfishness.” Some would say, “What goes around comes around.” Some would say, “Karma’s a witch.” Some would say, “Que sera sera.” Some would say, “There’s only another half an hour left in this Gathering.”

The etiology of the big lie before us today was a favored child dynamic in Jacob’s household. Jacob’s two younger sons, numbers eleven and twelve out of twelve, Joseph and Benjamin, were born to him by his favored wife, Rachel, who died giving birth to baby Benjamin. Both Joseph and Benjamin were favored children because of who their mother was. Benjamin was the baby in the family, and the older brothers understood how the last child often is babied. Joseph was next to last, though, and all he had going for him was his mama. Perhaps the favored treatment of Joseph had begun before Rachel’s death, before Benjamin was born. Maybe Rachel herself had urged it along. Whatever the reason, Joseph was the pomegranate of his father’s eye.

Coddling was one sign of Joseph’s favored status. The division of work responsibilities among the sons was another indication that the older sons simply weren’t held in the same high regard as was Joseph. Then, there was the blatant, unbalanced gift giving. Joseph got the nicer gifts; parents, sensible and fair parents, know very well that there must be great similarity in the value and visual appeal among gifts given to a family of children. Children will notice if one sibling gets a nicer gift.

Interestingly, or oddly, enough, depending on your point of view, the lightening rod for the brotherly hatred of Joseph was a special garment that Jacob bought for Joseph. Some translators along the way misinterpreted what the writer of Genesis was trying to describe. The coat--it was actually an indoors garment, not an outdoor garment for weathering the elements--was taken by translator after translator to have irked the brothers because it was brightly colored and beautiful to look at. In reality, and I notice that Sir Andrew Lloyd Weber has still not changed this in his musical despite my many letters to him. He still calls his musical, “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat.” The garment, alas, was not multicolored; chances are, even nomadic leaning women didn’t wear multicolored garments. If someone in a household were going to wear them, and if the various dyes were available to people on the move or at least ready to be on the move with little notice, they likely would have been used in women’s clothing, not men’s.

The thing about the infamous garment of Jacob’s favored son, Joseph, was its long sleeves. The long sleeves were a blatant, visual reminder that Joseph didn’t do outdoor work. Any tasks assigned to him, if there were any, were inside chores. The older ten brothers had short-sleeved garments, necessities and not gifts at that, showing any observer that they did the outside work. They herded the sheep in the relentless sun. They traveled from huge pasturing area to huge pasturing area to care for the sheep that kept the father wealthy knowing once the money was all divided up at his death it might be nothing to laugh at, but they weren’t going to be wealthy enough to lean back for the rest of their lives and rely on servants to get the work done. Older sons consigned to sweaty, sometimes dangerous, outdoor work; baby Benjamin; and Daddy’s pet in his long-sleeved, indoor only toga.

Because the older sons didn’t make it all the way home for dinner every evening, depending on their herding locales, this didn’t happen every night, but certainly every time they all sat down to a meal together, Joseph, intentionally or not, was pouring salt into open, emotional wounds, always wearing his long-sleeved garment to meals and making sure to call attention to the long sleeves when he was trying to pass one of his brothers the dinner bread. “Reuben, the bread hasn’t made it around to you; let me pass it--OOPS, almost got my sleeve in the olive oil...can’t let that happen, can we, Daddy?” Jacob smiled, and the older ten brothers seethed.

To make matters worse (could they be worse in terms of family dysfunction?), Joseph started having these dreams, and he interpreted them to build himself up and suggest that his brothers just didn’t measure up to him. That is to say, Jacob held him in special esteem because he deserved it. He was, in fact, better than his ten older brothers. It would have been one thing to have the dreams and keep the interpretations to himself or share the interpretations just with his father, but no, no, no. Joseph waited until his brothers had trudged from a long day or a long period of several days of herding sheep, sweaty and exhausted, that Joseph would drone on about his dreams of superiority while his hungry brothers tried to maintain enough of an appetite to take in some much needed nourishment.

There were two dreams Joseph said he dreamed that, when he interpreted them, made his brothers irate at him, which by this point didn’t take much. In the first dream, Joseph and his brothers were in the field binding grain into sheaves. His brothers started dying laughing when Joseph told them this dream. Joseph had never worked outdoors a day in his life. He wouldn’t know a sheaf from a sheik. In any case, when the binding of sheaves was nearing completion, Joseph’s single sheaf--that’s all he’d been able to manage even in his own dream of self-aggrandizement. Each of his brothers had bound several bushels of grain into sheaves. Joseph’s single sheaf, in the dream, stood up, and, lo and behold, all the sheaves his brothers had bound bowed down in honor of Joseph’s sheaf. The obvious interpretation was that the day was coming when he would have dominion over his brothers.

“Stupid dreamer,” they called him. He seemed to be forgetting that there would come a day when Jacob would die, and the law of land would give his firstborn, Reuben, something like half of his estate, dividing up the other half among the eleven younger brothers. Reuben couldn’t wait for that great day. Finally, his rightful superiority over Joseph would be reestablished.

There was another dream, a little more complicated to interpret. In this second dream, the sun, the moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to Joseph. Oh, brother! Joseph’s implications of what this dream promised made even his utterly devoted father angry with him. Jacob, his father, was the sun. The moon was Leah, the mother of several of the other brothers, still living. The eleven brothers were same eleven, including young Benjamin, who had bowed down to the sheaf of Joseph in the first dream.

As dinner was breaking up, and each member of the family going in her or his own direction, some of the brothers began to say to each other, “This is enough. This is WAY more than enough. This kook is over the top by now; he has got to go. We have to find some way to get rid of this pompous dreamer if we ever expect to have any kind of real life again.”

III.

One day when the ten older brothers were a distance from home and couldn’t get back home for nourishment, Father Jacob sent Joseph to take food to them. He seemed happy to have taken on that task, but when the brothers saw him coming, the ten of them were in agreement that this was the perfect opportunity to get rid of him. Several of the ten were so angry they agreed without discussing the matter that the thing to do was to put their kid brother to death; only because of the intervention of Jacob’s firstborn son and Joseph’s oldest brother, Reuben, was Joseph spared from murder at the hands of his own brothers--a group re-creation of the Cain and Abel story. Reuben said, “He’s a jerk, and has worked my last nerve just as he has each of you; but he’s our brother. We can’t kill our brother no matter how much we hate him, no matter how much he gets on our nerves. There’s a pit over there; let’s throw him in the pit and let nature take its course without the shedding of any blood.”

On the surface, leaving someone to broil under the sun’s rays without food or water seems more cruel than instant death, but there’s a hint in the story that Rueben had in mind finding a way to keep Joseph from dying and getting him back roughed up but not harmed to the father who loved him so much.

The one thing all brothers are agreed on is ripping that infernal long-sleeved robe off of him before tossing him in the pit. Then, they sat down to lunch--the lunch, by the way, that they wouldn’t have had if not for Joseph. While eating, they saw a band of Ishmaelite merchants coming their way on camels. The brothers had another idea, a profitable idea, which would keep Joseph alive at least as long as he was in their sight. They sold their brother as a slave to the Ishmaelite merchants.

Reuben seems not to have been in on the sale. He returns from somewhere, maybe a pit stop, to find Joseph, and he rips his garments, which was one sign of mourning or intense regret in their culture.

In the mean time, the other brothers want to get on with their lives without Joseph around to keep them reminded of how un-favored they were in their father’s eyes in comparison to him. This is how the writer of Genesis told the climax to the story:

Then they took Joseph’s robe, slaughtered a goat, and dipped the robe in the blood. They had the long robe with sleeves taken to their father, and they said, “This we have found; see now whether it is your son’s robe or not.” He recognized it, and said, “It is my son’s robe! A wild animal has devoured him; Joseph is without doubt torn to pieces.” Then Jacob tore his garments, and put sackcloth on his loins, and mourned for his son many days. All his sons and all his daughters sought to comfort him; but he refused to be comforted, and said, “No, I shall go down to Sheol to my son, mourning.” Thus his father bewailed him.

The older nine or ten brothers--we’re not sure if Reuben participated in the deception--lie to their father, but they do so indirectly. They dipped the robe they resented so much into goat’s blood, and the way the story is told we have reason to believe that they didn’t take the robe to their father but had that done by some third party. In any case, Jacob draws the only conclusion he can--that Joseph has been torn to pieces by a wild animal, and he braces to carry his heavy grief to his grave and to his shadowy life in the abode of the dead.

The sons are back in time to join their sisters in comforting or trying to comfort their father, but there is no comfort. The lie the brothers had told, either directly or indirectly, ripped out his old heart. We might have wished that being such a good liar himself he would have been able to recognize a lie when someone told him one, but that didn’t happen in this case. The brothers had a chance to relieve their father’s pain, but they played along, Reuben too by now, as if they could not rebut Jacob’s painful conclusion. They didn’t care enough about their father’s pain to stop it so they let the lie live on.

In a list I found on the importance of teaching children honesty, I found this one-line lesson: “Watch out for silent lies. When you know about a lie and keep quiet, the lie lives on.” Maybe we find ourselves in situations where we absolutely have not told a lie, but we keep the truth to ourselves when we see someone suffering as a result of the lie told to her or him. When we keep silent in that kind of situation, we become a part of the lying process, because we let the lie live even though we have the absolute power to replace the lie with truth and have the lie evaporate once and for all. Yet, often we keep silent anyway. That makes us liars too, doesn’t it? Not everyone agrees that it does. Miguel de Unamuno, though, has said eloquently, “At times to be silent is to lie.”

Pastor Martin Niemoeller, the German pastor in the generation of Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, intellectually opposed Hitler long before he did anything about it. In other words, he along with numerous German intellectuals kept silent when they, like Bonhoeffer, should have spoken up to call Hitler’s multiple lies what they were. Bonhoeffer died for refusing to keep silent; he would not pretend to Germany or to the rest of the world that all was well in Hitlerland, and so he was hung just outside one of the barracks of the Flossenburg prison camp where he, with no ethnic attachment to Judaism in any way, was held. A few days later, World War II was officially over, but Bonhoeffer’s friends, colleagues, and admirers were permanently shaken up. Niemoeller at first supported what Hitler seemed to be about and only later was in that group of silent or relatively silent opponents of Hitler’s. When he would no longer keep silent, he too was sent to a concentration camp where he spend seven years, managing to stay alive.

He would later speak to the world this confessional warning since he had learned so painfully that not speaking up when one should--in his case allowing his silence to endorse Hitler’s death crusades--is equivalent to lying:

First they came for the communists,

and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,

and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,

and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for me,

and there was no one left to speak out for me.

I think our story of grief-stricken old Jacob crying his eyes out and ripping his garments because of his sense of pain and loss, thinking that Joseph is dead, while nine or ten of his sons who know that isn’t true lack enough courage and integrity among the lot of them to break the silence and tell Jacob the truth. There was no proof that the slave traders who bought Joseph would treat him well and protect his life; that is to say, had he rebelled against them in any way, they might have killed him in anger. Still, Jacob was entitled to the truth and any hope that left him with.

I was glad this week that some out of work Republicans and some Republicans who are members of unions that participate in collective bargaining finally spoke up to their representatives in the House and Representatives and said, “We have to have jobs, and those of us who are not independently wealthy intend to remain affiliated with those who will go to bat for us management wants to take millions in perks while our children have no health care.” Bravo for those with the guts to speak up, even if the Tea Party revokes their teabags.

My dear friends, if being connected to the Jesus Movement doesn’t require us to speak up for the ostracized or the downtrodden, then it requires nothing of us at all and allows us to become a social club where talking about Jesus is polite and cute and quaint. But let us be sure we understand the penalty for our silence; if we fail or refuse to speak up for those who suffer and struggle, even if we don’t particularly like them, we have no ministry at all and no reason to exist under any umbrella that would cause others mistakenly to associate us with Jesus’ concerns and Jesus’ way of living.

Jacob Lied to Isaac

Chagall Etching: "Jacob Blessed by Isaac"

I.

A New York Magazine article from a couple of years ago started off with these somewhat startling words:

Kids lie early, often, and for all sorts of reasons—to avoid punishment, to bond with friends, to gain a sense of control. But now there’s a singular theory for one way this habit develops: They are just copying their parents.

Beleaguered parents take it on the chin once again. We choose to do the impossible, which seems at first like one act of love that leads to a life of love, and not infrequently much of that is true; but few parents and children move down life’s pathway together able to avoid all bumps in the road. Sometimes those bumps are caused by forces external to the parent/child relationship; at other times, those bumps are caused by an intrapersonal problem in the child/parent relationship itself.

The quote from the New York Magazine said exactly the same thing about lying itself. Sometimes, kids lie for reasons that have nothing to do with their parents, and sometimes they lie because they are merely mimicking their parents. This mimicking parents behavioral pattern is surely one of the most sobering realities parents have to face. Sometimes, when parents have goofed, they may say to their children, “Mommy or Daddy goofed. This is not how I should act, and it’s not how I want you to act.” What it boils down to is a directive to “do as I say, not as I do.” That might work rarely, but it’s not going to work as a weekly bail out.

What kids see as the typical behavior of their parents is what they’re going to mimic, because--as is always the case with younger children--they aren’t able to evaluate parental behavior as correct or incorrect. Older children may well know that some people out there somewhere believe lying is wrong, but because they love their parents they give their parents a pass and develop a rationale for lying that says, “There must be good reasons my parents lie, even to me, so if there’s a good enough reason to lie at home and away from home, including lying to people I love and trust, it must be OK; it must work out alright in the end.” A child being punished for lying by a lying parent has a painfully incongruous experience, destructive to the child’s emotional health and development. It simply does not compute.

One study says that in our culture, children start lying regularly when they’re about four years old. I don’t know who sat behind the two-way glass all those hours, but a number of researchers say that many four year olds lie about every two hours; and by the time they’re six they’re lying about every hour and a half. Mostly the lies they tell are relatively inconsequential unless you as a parent believe that your child must tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth all the time.

Some child psychologists advise parents not to worry about lying kids, saying that the child will grow out of this childish behavior. In reality, however, many children seem to grow up into lying rather than out of it, and, again, this may have something to do with how often they see their parents lying. Children also learn by observation that pure honesty often creates tension and pressure and anxiety while lying may smooth things out or keep the conflict from ever showing up in the first place. Their lying may begin as while lies, but as someone has said, “The one who tells white lies quickly becomes color blind.”

Our children may learn to lie by observing the little lies we tell on a regular basis, or we may pressure them into lying. Here’s an example. They open a Christmas or a birthday gift, and it’s not at all what they wanted. When they express their honest disappointment, their parents jump all over them so the child learns to say that she or he likes any and all gifts ever received. As adults, we may honestly say that we like any gift given to us because by that point in our lives we really have learned that it’s the thought that counts. I couldn't care less what my kids or any other member of my family gets for me as a gift; that they put any effort into thinking about something I might like and investing their hard-earned money in something for me touches me deeply. I don’t care what it is.

Kids, though, can’t go out and buy whatever they want; as a rule, anyway. They only have a shot at getting what they want, what they hope for if someone with money and the means to acquire the item goes out and gets the desired gift for the child. If that doesn’t happen, the child isn’t likely to get what she or he most wants. So, yeah, when the wrapping paper is ripped away to reveal some nice new underwear rather than the latest “must have” piece of technology, the child who is honest isn’t happy about that. Maybe we could help with that particular problem by not giving necessities as gifts. The typical first world kid doesn’t want to open a gift box to find underwear, toothpaste, a toothbrush, or a packet of Kleenex to carry to school on a runny nose day.

It’s a good news/bad news thing, depending on how you look at it. A Canadian child development professor who is an expert on childhood lying, Dr. Victoria Talwar, says her research has shown that the smartest kids are the best liars. Speaking intellectually and not morally, lying is a more advanced skill than telling the truth. The child who quickly becomes an habitual liar, carrying that pattern of behavior beyond childhood can well become savvy and successful in many American professions. It takes some creativity and some hutzpah to lie and to lie well, but the kid with the lowest grades and the least hope of academic success can only tell the truth well.

Dr. Talwar says,

Thrown into elementary school, many kids begin lying to their peers as a coping mechanism, as a way to vent frustration or get attention. Any sudden spate of lying, or dramatic increase in lying, is a danger sign: Something has changed in that child’s life, in a way that troubles him. Lying is a symptom—often of a bigger problem behavior. It’s a strategy to keep the child afloat.

In longitudinal studies, a majority of 6-year-olds who frequently lie have it socialized out of them by age 7. But if lying has become a successful strategy for handling difficult social situations, a child will stick with it. About half of all kids do—and if they’re still lying a lot at 7, then it seems likely to continue for the rest of childhood. They’re hooked.

OK, parents, take your licks, but it’s not all your fault if you have children who become and remain liars, who become addicted to lying. We live in a culture of dishonesty.

Preachers preach theology they don’t believe. Congregants recite creeds, acting as if they take these ancient formulations as truth, when week by week they are saying to themselves on the inside as they recite the creed out loud communally, “That’s a bunch of bunk. Total nonsense.” News reporters lie because they enjoy it and/or because the information put into their hands to read has been approved by the big bosses, and they have no choice but to read what they’ve been given if they want to keep their jobs. Politicians lie, and there are those who say that it is now a necessity for politicians to lie in order to get their goals accomplished. I’d like to cast a vote against lying politicians. I want to vote for political leaders who tell the truth. Descendants of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, please find your way back to Washington, DC. Many, thankfully not all, politicians lie to their constituents, to their colleagues, to members of the opposing party, perhaps to themselves, and most assuredly to the world as a whole.

This is nothing new, but the cumulative effort of political lying in a democracy is that those in the voting pool, the citizens, don’t expect to hear the truth and position themselves to believe lies and half-truths, which are also half-lies, because it takes too much energy to verify truth. By the time our kids are early teens, they’ve had a current events class at school, and they begin to understand political comments their parents make, revealing their tacit acceptance of blatant political lies.

A website called “Ranker” lists the thirty or forty least trusted career politicians in modern US history. I’ll share only the top ten with you here.

Dick Cheney far and away was the politician American citizens trust least.

Sarah Palin

Richard Nixon

Donald Rumsfeld

Bill Clinton

Karl Rove

John McCain

John Boehner

George W. Bush

Barack Obama

II.

One of the lies that kids often tell is a denial lie, “It wasn’t me,” which should be, “It wasn’t I,” though I’ve never heard a kid tell that lie in a grammatically correct manner. Kids who don’t learn to accept responsibility for what they do can become lying adults who are unable to accept responsibility for the errors they make. It’s usually easier on everyone involved if the person who made a mistake or did something wrong admits it. A mark of maturity as well as a mark of morality is owning up to our imperfections.

In one of my seminars on marriage and family counseling, I was introduced to the work of psychotherapist Virginia Satir and her delightful book, Peoplemaking. One of the marks of mental health, according to Satir, is consistently being able and willing to claim who we are, warts and all as some have come to say. I am the sum total of all I think and do--what I’m proud of and what embarrasses me. Until I embrace the parts of me that I like as well as the parts I don’t like so much, I can’t be a healthy, whole person.

Of course, the reason many folks have a problem with admitting to their imperfections is that they have a false self-image they feel they must maintain at all costs; they want so desperately to be the person they portray themselves to be rather than the person they are that they will lie, and usually this process requires a whole series of lies, to try their best to keep other people believing that they are the person they pretend to be, not the person they really are. Sadly, this is often a way of life for someone who really dislikes herself or himself, and instead of working to learn to like the person they see in the mirror every morning, they create what amounts to an alternate identity. I’m not talking about the illness referred to as Dissociative Identity Disorder wherein a person is mentally ill and may develop multiple personalities. What I’m talking about is the simple, very conscious decision by someone free of mental illness who dislikes herself or himself so much that the person tells lies to have others think they aren’t who they appear to be.

When my younger son, Carson, sold New Balance shoes at the Christiana Mall, one of the scenarios he hated most was for a heavy set person--sorry ladies, but it was always a woman in his experience though I’m sure men were doing the same thing somewhere else--to come into the store and ask for a size that was obviously too small and too narrow. I think the salespersons were allowed to suggest very gently that the shoe they were asking for ran a little small so they might have more luck fitting her with something slightly larger. Some of the customers accepted that kind way of saying in code language, “Look, honey, we both know you don’t wear a size 6 narrow; we’ll be lucky to get you into an 8 four E.” Others, and these were Carson’s favorites, irately insisted that they knew their shoe size and had been wearing exactly the same size for years, and if he wanted their business he’d get the size they asked for and get the shoes on their feet instantly. So, he had no choice but to get the tiny size requested, and then try to wrestle a fat foot into a dainty shoe. Every now and then, the customers would concede that in that style only they just might need to go up a bit in size and width, but many of them would stomp out of the store demeaning him and the store and the merchandise as they made their boisterous departure.

He would mention that from time to time, and I’d always think about the story of Cinderella and the Prince going all over the place trying to find the delicate foot that alone would fit into the shoe that had fallen off Cinderella’s foot as she ran to make her pre-midnight coach. Many young women, including Cinderella’s stepsisters, were too willing to try on the shoe even though they knew good and well they were not Cinderella and couldn’t get a big foot into a delicate shoe.

Overall, I’m a fan of the actor, Will Smith, and my favorite among his several films has to be “Six Degrees of Separation,” in which he plays a young man, a New York Street hustler, with an amazing gift for lying--so good in fact, that he could convince people he was the son of Sidney Pointier, trying to produce a revival of the musical “Cats” for all African American actors. On the power of both lies he ended up getting everything from cash to the privilege of extended stays in posh homes of socialites who would love to have the chance to know the great actor in person; befriending his son would surely bring about that opportunity. In reality, the character was so good at lying that he could do so without any of the giveaway clues that criminologists, for example, watch for as verification that a suspect is lying to detectives or to juries. Will Smith’s character gave no intention whatsoever that he was lying, and, thus, he was almost never suspicioned.

“Six Degrees of Separation” was a film adapted from a play by the same title, and it was based on a true story. The real-life con artist who had the name Paul in John Gaure’s play and the film was David Hampton who, in real life conned several people with his schemes, three of the most famous being Melanie Griffith, Gary Sinise, and Calvin Klein.

Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia was the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, the last sovereign of Imperial Russia. She with her whole family was murdered in July 1918 by the Bolshevik secret police. Because two bodies of family members were not found in the mass grave where all bodies of murdered family members were supposed to have been placed, rumors persisted for years that Anastasia and one other sibling escaped the Bolshevik massacre.

Numerous women across the years claimed to be the escaped Anastasia, though some years ago the possibility that Anastasia could have lived was ruled out completely. Still, impersonators lied about who they were and claimed to be the only survivor from Tsar Nicholas’s family. The most famous of these impersonators, because she was most convincing even though the majority of experts who studied the facts said she was lying, was a woman named Anna Anderson.

She explained her survival by claiming that, like other members of her family, she too had been bayoneted, but the bayonet used on her was blunt. She was seriously injured, but not dead. As she told the story, a soldier noticed that she moved after being thought dead. He took her to Romania to recover. There was never consistency in how Anastasia’s relatives responded to Anderson’s identity claims. Some said she was Anastasia; others insisted that she wasn’t. The aunt of Anastasia, Princess Irene, denied it, but her son, Prince Sigismund, who had been Anastasia’s childhood playmate, confirmed it by saying that Anderson knew some details about their times together that only Anastasia would have known.

Anna Anderson was financially supported by those who believed her story. She carried on as a rich brat. She was very demanding of her hosts from whom she expected royal treatment. When things didn’t go her way she might pitch a tantrum, and in the extreme have a kind of nervous breakdown. Her champions explained her erratic behavior by saying that any little girl who had witnessed what Anastasia had witnessed would naturally be emotionally impaired for life.

In 1938, Anna Anderson filed a lawsuit in a German court to prove her identity and claim her inheritance. The case had to have been one of the longest trials in history; it didn’t end until 1970. After all that time, the German court ruled against Anna Anderson and said she had failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she was Grand Duchess Anastasia. Ms. Anderson died in 1984 from complications related to pneumonia. Her body was cremated, but some tissue samples and hair clippings were kept. In 1994, DNA testing was done comparing Anderson’s DNA to the DNA of undisputed members of Tsar Nicholas’s family. Those results, like the court case, cast doubt on Anderson’s claims that she was Anastasia.

III.

We have before us today a story of a majorly dysfunctional family. A son lies to his father, tricks his father into believing that he, the son, is his older brother in order to get more of the family inheritance. The lying son is urged on by his mother, the wife of the man being cheated, and the brother whose money is taken from him through one of the earliest instances of known identity theft is angry and upset, but he ended up years later having a big heart though he wasn’t the sharpest camel in the caravan.

It’s a magnificent story, though disturbing. None of us who are parents want to believe our children lie to us when they are little ones, but the thought that our adult children might lie to us is so painful we can hardly articulate it. Putting away childish things, we want our adult children to be completely trustworthy; we don’t want to be wasting energy trying to decide if what they tell us is true or not.

Carole Bell is a Licensed Professional Counselor and a parent of adult children. The issue of having adult children who lie to their parents, sadly, isn’t an uncommon one. Ms. Bell says that part of the reason some adult children lie to their parents is that their nosy, controlling parents keep asking them about matters which are none of the parents’ business unless the adult child makes it the business of her or his parents. What if you have one of those kids who didn’t leave lying behind when move out of childhood and then out of adolescence? Bell says if that’s the case, and you ever want the problem corrected, you eventually have to make a dreaded announcement to your adult child that should go something like this:

I have repeatedly taken your word for the truth, only to find out later that you were lying. I am to the point now that I question anything that you say to me. I really do not like what that does to our relationship. From now on, I will not try to find out what is true, but will assume that if it benefits you to lie, you will. I just cannot trust you any more. I hope that will change in the future, but for now, that’s how it stands.

“Then,” says Ms. Bell, “let it go. Do not question or lecture. Just be there as a friend, a cautious friend.”

As we age, many of us think about our children being there for us--not so much as caregivers because not many of us really want that, but--as sources of emotional support and reminders of powerful love that have enriched our lives. We don’t want bad blood with our kids in our golden years so some parents will put up with anything their adult children dish out in the hopes that the strong bond we have wanted believe is present really is and will endure.

I haven’t yet been to a happy funeral, but I can tell you that one of the saddest funerals I was ever asked to conduct was for a widowed mother who had one child, a daughter, from whom she was estranged. When Irvaline died, the nursing home kept trying to call her daughter in another state, and when they couldn’t reach the daughter they called us at her church, University Church in Baltimore. We like they had no way to reach the daughter who didn’t want to be reached. If memory serves, the daughter never responded to the nursing home. Evidently, when Irvaline moved into the nursing home she gave her daughter’s name and number as next of kin and emergency contact. This left the nursing home with the responsibility of working out final arrangements.

As if all of that isn’t sad enough, the day of the funeral was a bitter cold Baltimore day, as gloomy and gray as could be, with a bit of icy rain falling. The weather didn’t help this, but there were three of us at Irvaline Hargatt’s funeral. The funeral director who also had driven the hearse, an administrator from the nursing home, and me, her pastor. Even the grave diggers weren’t there that they because they would do no burials in that kind of weather; perhaps, too, under the muddy layer of ground the dirt might have been frozen so that a grave couldn’t have been dug.

So there we were, three of us alive and one deceased. The casket would have to be taken back to the funeral home until burial could be arranged so the funeral director opened the hearse and pulled the casket out as far as the rolling supports would allow, and the three of us stood there while I conducted a brief memorial service in front of an undertaker who didn’t know her at all and a kindhearted nursing home administrator who knew her only in passing.

My boys were little then, but I remember thinking to myself, “Whatever it takes I will never cause, allow, create such estrangement from my sons that they wouldn’t even show up for my funeral.” So that is why some parents put up with lying and other unacceptable behavior on the parts of their children.

Back to the biblical world where Isaac knew that his days on earth were coming to an end; he would soon be going to the abode of the dead, Sheol. Isaac and his contemporaries had no idea of heaven as Christians later defined it. He thought he was going to dwell where all people, the good and the bad, went to dwell when earthly life had passed.

Though it was the law that the first born son received a greater share of his father’s money and property than any younger sons, evidently there was still a ritual where the aging or dying father would speak words of blessing to his sons as he confirmed the transfer of his earthly goods into their possession. Isaac felt the time was right to pass the blessing. He asked Esau, who was a hunter, to go a kill a wild animal, which would be the main dish at a meal they would share together before the blessing was officially pronounced. While Esau was out hunting, Jacob, fully encouraged by his mother Rebekah, concocted and carried out a plan whereby Jacob fooled his blind, dying father into believing that he, Jacob, was his older brother, Esau. Jacob had already tricked his brother into agreeing that Jacob and not Esau would get the greater amount of the inheritance when Isaac was gone.

Esau was a hairy man; Jacob was smooth skinned so Jacob donned some of Esau’s clothing and put animal skins over his arms before he went in to pretend to be Esau and ask for the inheritance and his father’s blessing. This is the first known case of identity theft in history.

Isaac was surprised that Esau was back so soon, but Jacob, pretending to be Esau, said that God had provided the meat for their meal almost as soon as the hunt had begun. They ate a meal together, and then based purely on lies and deceit Jacob received what was rightfully his brother’s regardless of what Esau had said in a stressful situation.

When Isaac found out that he’d been tricked, he couldn’t change the material part of the inheritance, but he could amend the blessing; and he did so. He said that though Jacob might very well prosper, he would still be a servant to his older brother. When Esau found out that Jacob had followed through on the promise he, Esau, had made to reverse the recipient of the larger inheritance, he was irate, and he told his brother that he’d better enjoy his money right away because he’d be dead soon. Esau vowed to kill Jacob.

This part of the story comes to an end with Jacob being on the run from his brother; this fear of Esau and a life of running from the threat of fratricide dominated Jacob’s life for the next several years. The tension between the brothers becomes the focus of the story from there on out. Isaac's addendum to his blessing is recalled from time to time, but the offense, the serious offense, of lying to one's parent for monetary gain and a move up of one rung on the social ladder fades from the narrative. It shouldn't; it's a pivotal, stunning, and revolting part of the story--lying to a parent, a dying one no less for financial gain. It should shake us up and disappoint us.

What could be more disrespectful than that? What could have broken a dying father's heart more than leaving this world knowing that one of his sons thought more his father's money than he thought of his father and was willing to deceive and lie to manipulate the now helpless man who had participated in giving him life and who had, from the son's birth on, been involved in providing for that son. There is no way to find a happy ending for this story. There is no clever quote or moral of the story to carry home with you for the week. What Jacob did to his dying father was despicable at every level, and the fact that his mother encouraged him to do what he did makes the story that much worse. Hopefully, Isaac never knew that his beloved wife, Rebekah, had helped their son deceive him for financial gain; that would have made his dying all the more painful. Isaac whose name meant laughter and who had brought laughter and joy to many left this world in tears, rather than in joyous thanksgiving for his rich life, because of a lying son.

Sarah Lied to God

Chagall, "Why Did You Laugh?"

I.

On December 10, 2008, the sons of Bernard Madoff, Mark and Andrew, told authorities their father had confessed to them that the asset management unit of his powerful Wall Street investment firm was a massive Ponzi scheme and quoted him as describing it as "one big lie.” He received the maximum prison term allowable for his many years of defrauding clients, which is 150 years. At the age of 72, it is not likely that he will get to enjoy all those years behind bars.

There isn’t daily news about Madoff these days as was the case when the story first broke, but occasionally additional details about the case do come to the attention of the press; and related stories are reported. Most recently, Madoff told reporters that numerous banks had to be involved in the Ponzi scheme in order for it to have worked so well for so long. When charges were brought against Madoff, all banks played innocent, but safely behind bars where bank thugs can’t hurt him, he is saying without hesitation that the banks knew. He called their position “willful blindness” and acted in such a way as to make it clear that if he were doing something wrong and they were complicit, they--the banks--didn’t want to know. But he insists that they knew and, in fact, had to know.

According to Janet Tavakoli:

JPMorgan allegedly was Madoff’s primary banker for more than twenty years. It might be argued that given JPMorgan’s position of leadership in the business and failure to disclose red flags that it alone knew, the bank lent sponsorship and credibility to Madoff allowing him to enjoy a “halo effect.”

JPMorgan had a responsibility to hold itself to a high standard of ethical conduct, due diligence, and disclosure with respect to Madoff’s fund. Yet, allegedly JPMorgan failed to take appropriate action such as investigating suspicious money transfers, investigation of concerns about structured products expressed by its employees, investigations of allegations that the fund was a Ponzi scheme, and terminating its business relationship with Madoff when Madoff declined to allow JPMorgan to perform due diligence on him.

I’d never heard of a Ponzi scheme until this story was splattered all over newspapers a couple of years ago. I had to find out to understand the story, which reminded me of all the study I had to do to understand the Enron scandal. A Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that involves the payment of alleged returns to existing investors from funds contributed by new investors. In reality, the new investors aren’t investing in anything; their monies are paying off the longer standing investors, and down the road newer investors will do the same for those whose money is now used to make older investors think they are being paid off well for their investments. In the process, fraudsters like Bernie Madoff can take any amount of the money handed over to their firms since no one seems to be watching.

The eldest son, Mark, though never convicted of any wrong doing himself, faltered under the pressure of ongoing investigations and the disgrace that fell upon his father when Bernie Madoff was condemned as the most successful thief in American history and the person to have taken more life savings from modest income individuals and families than any other American crook. Mark Madoff tragically committed suicide, using a dog’s leash to hang himself, just before this past Christmas while his little two year old son slept in a nearby room.

Bernie Madoff is now in a federal penitentiary in North Carolina. Of course, he misses his family and his freedom. He didn’t seek permission to attend his son’s funeral. Does he feel remorse for what he did? When one reporter asked him that question, his reply was: “Bleep my victims.” I guess that’s a no, no remorse. That’s honest, though. I mean, how could someone steal consistently from those who trusted him for sixteen or twenty years or more and have remorse? It would not have been possible to propagate the lie for such a long time if she or he had remorse, and the way long-term lying works is that it gets easier all the time.

A few years ago, the BBC did a multipart series on ethics, and lying was one of its key topics. Early in the study the question was raised, “Why is lying wrong?” Here are the answers given by the BBC reporting team:

• Most people in most cultures, we rather widely believe, think lying is bad because a world where truth generally prevails is a good thing. If our physicians, clergypersons, bankers, newscasters, and significant others lie to us, what can we count on?
• A lie, once it is discovered to be a lie, diminishes trust between human beings, those with whom we must share life during our sojourn in this realm of living.
• Some moral philosophers who deal heavily with the use of language as reflective of right living--even though the philosopher probably wouldn’t use the phrase “right living”--say that lying is bad because language is essential to human societies and carries the obligation to be used honestly. An unwritten contract in oral communication is that the speakers will not use language deceitfully.
• Lying treats those who are lied to as things, as parts of a liar’s means to an end, not as persons of value as they are uninvolved in the lying chain.
• Some people, many people, after all, are unwitting liars. They lie only because they have been lied to by people whom they trusted. Many of you newbies, and I’m so glad we have so many newbies around Silverside these days, will not know that the Pastor Relations Committee before it became the Pastor/Staff Relations Committee or the Staff/Pastor Relations Committee--there is widespread difference of opinion about what the proper name of the Committee became when it evolved to include attention to staff members other than the pastor--flattered me by collecting and publishing a group of my sermons, and the title they selected was the one proposed by my older son, Jarrett, “Lies My Sunday School Teacher Told Me.” As the booklet circulated beyond Wilmington, friends and non-friends began to see it and react. One of my most beloved friends, as I’ve told many of you before, was offended by the title because he said that those who had taught him in his growing up years in the rural church in which he was raised were doing the best they knew how. I saw his point and still do, but my response was that just because someone is well-intentioned and gullible in passing along untruths does not make her or him any less the liar if the information being passed along is untrue; there may be intentional and unintentional liars in the world, but if they haven’t verified for themselves the information they are passing on to others who trust them then, if the information is false, they are lying.
• Back to the BBC. Lying is bad because the person lied to cannot make an informed decision about the matter concerned and how to move ahead. In other words, lies put many well-meaning people in the position of making decisions based on false information. A Ponzi scheme is the perfect example of this.
• Lying is bad because according to any of the widely held and respected systems of morality held up around the world as a strong foundation for living, lying is wrong. Good people don’t lie, and we need good people to keep the world as safe and functional as possible.
• Lying is bad because lying as a way of life corrupts the liar, and as with Madoff and coconspirators, the more lies that are told the easier it is to keep on telling them.

A little caveat. The BBC people remind us that an untrusting world, one made up of people who have been burned time and time again by lies, and a world made up of those who just give in and lie like so many others around them are bad worlds for liars since lying isn’t very effective if everyone’s doing it.

A pragmatic word. The highly respected and long remembered Greek rhetorician, Quintillian, said, “A liar had better have a good memory.”

II.

Your perception of who God is and what God is will have a lot to do with how our story about Sarah today has an impact on you. If you have a highly anthropomorphized, humanized view of God, then when I tell you that Sarah lied to God, you picture someone lying bold-faced to the family patriarch or matriarch, as your imagination provides. It’s an awful, virtually unforgivable act.

If, in contrast, God is spirit who dwells throughout the cosmos including inside you, then lying to God isn’t exactly this, but is closely akin to lying to oneself. That may or may not seem like a major offense to you, but it can have damaging consequences nonetheless.

Then, there may be some deists among us, spiritually akin to many of the founders of this nation and framers of our constitution, who don’t think it’s possible to lie to God since God, after having created the world and put it into motion, took a break and has never come back. In this case, there still may be all sorts of powerful symbolic meanings in the story that make it worth our awareness and our study.

Those are the major perspectives on God I can think of, and yet I’m quite sure that there are other perspectives represented in this congregation that I haven’t thought of and have, thus, left off my list so to you I say: I look forward to our discussion in sermon talk back or our email exchange later in the day.

In our story about Sarah and God, primarily, her husband, Sarah’s husband, Abraham has an important role and to a lesser degree so do some messengers whom God sent to give the sweet old couple the news of their lives, and it had nothing to do with any lottery or the Publishers’ Clearing House. In our story, laughter and lying are interwoven, and laughing at God’s message is the real laughter on which the story turns. The funniest part of the story is not when one of the characters laughs, but rather when that character lies to God about her behavior. That is funny; at least on the surface it’s funny. Those who believe in an omniscient God, and I’m not sure to what degree that was the case when this section of the book of Genesis was written, believe that the Creator God knows all; thus it’s funny to them to think that someone would out and out lie to God, denying behavior that God knew for a fact she had done. She laughed at God’s message. Then later on when God asked why she laughed, she denied laughing all together. Let’s outline our story this way:

1. News
2. Laughter
3. News Repeated and Clarified
4. Laughter Unheard and Out of Sight
5. God’s Question
6. Sarah’s Lie
7. God’s Response

Now let’s flesh out this story, which is one of the most wonderful and insightful stories in the Hebrew Bible.

I. News

There are seven turns or twists to this story as I have outlined it for you, and the first of the seven is “News.” Here’s the news.

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.”

Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him,

“As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you...”

So, this is pretty important news. It came from God Godself--not from a messenger, which was the most frequent way God got news out to God’s people.

Abram, soon to be renamed Abraham, was 99 years old when God came to him with life-changing--indeed, world-changing news, and he was still agile enough to fall on his face before God, the sign of absolute and total respect for the one before whom the person bowing bowed. The news is that Abraham will be fruitful--that is, the father of many children and grandchildren. With his face in the hot dust, the old guy is thinking that he may need to take off his turban, that God has the wrong guy. At 99 years of age, he has only managed to have one child--and that child, a son, not through his wife, but through her maid. Certainly, Abraham loved the son he did have regardless of who the boy’s mother had been, but, naturally in his culture, he had longed most of his life to have a child with his wife. Those hopes had faded with menopause and with his own loss of sexual capabilities as age took its toll. Sex, now, was for birthdays and anniversaries when possible, but things didn’t always happen as planned or hoped for on those special days.

Abraham is thinking that if what God says is true and the news really is for him and not for his neighbor in the next tent down the path, Ishmael, his only son, was going to have to get busy--albeit in an enjoyable way. There were worse pressures to place on one’s son to be sure.

There was more to the news, however. Something Abraham couldn’t have come up with in his wildest dreams. God continues sharing this news.

“...as for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.”

OK, that was it! No more putting off being tested for hearing aids. He thought God had said he, a 100 year old man, and his 90 year old wife, Sarai--soon to be Sarah--were going to have a child of their own. He must have sat up for a moment to try to figure out what actually had been said. What news had God delivered?

II. Laughter

Twist two: laughter. Abraham was rethinking all he thought God said to him.

Then Abraham fell on his face [again] and laughed, and said to himself, “Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?”

Now, he isn’t face down in the sand. He’s rolling around in the sand, laughing his old backside off. This had to have been the funniest information he’d ever heard in his life. Robust, old man laughter. Laughter, joyous yet suspicious, that had built up for a life time. Notice that he says nothing to God about his glee or his doubt; he speaks only to himself. Of course, we will soon find out that God knows what people are thinking and doing even if they don’t know that God knows.

III. News Repeated and Clarified

Now, the news is repeated and clarified. Maybe Abraham doubted it more than he believed it and put it out of his mind, or maybe it was too much to hope for so he just didn’t let himself hope. Whatever the case, one day he is sitting at the opening of the tent he shared with Sarah when three men walk toward him, and we aren’t told how; but he recognizes them as God’s messengers. I can’t figure this out at all, but he refers to them collectively with the singular “lord.”

Abraham pled for the opportunity to show hospitality to the three messengers. He wanted to have their feet washed. He wanted to give them a bite of bread, and if they could stay around long enough, he wanted Sarah to prepare a fancy full meal for them. All of that panned out so while Sarah was in the tent getting the feast going--remember that she’s 90 or so and didn’t move around the kitchen as quickly as she once had--she couldn’t help hearing the conversation going on outside the tent.

The messengers tell Abraham that by the same time the next year, there would be a baby to tend to--not their grandchild or their great grandchild, but their very own son.

IV. Laughter Unheard and Out of Sight

Sarah nearly dropped her Martha Stewart mixing bowl. They say, you know they do, that a couple who lives together for a long time act alike and may even begin to look a little alike. She had exactly the same reaction her husband had when he first heard the news on another occasion. The writer of Genesis tells this brief, but vital part of the story in this way:

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 have pleasure?”

I have shared before when we have come upon this passage what the great writer and preacher, Frederick Buechner, had to say about it, and I can’t pass up the opportunity to share it again. Abraham and Sarah “are laughing at the idea of a baby’s being born in the geriatric ward, and Medicare’s picking up the tab.”

III.

The last three parts of the story as outlined happen very rapidly, but they are very important to the story. We can’t let ourselves miss them if we want to take in the meaning of the story as a whole; indeed, what they story has been leading up to.

V. God’s Question

With Sarah standing right there, fully able to answer for herself, God Godself asked Abraham or the trio of messengers asked Abraham on God’s behalf, “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."

VI. Sarah’s Lie

Sarah knew for sure that she had not laughed out loud, and the questions she asked she asked herself silently. No way any one could have heard any of that, but she was fearful she would offend God or make God angry so she lied. Speaking for herself even though the question had been directed to Abraham about her, Sarah speaks up and lies to God, “I didn’t laugh.” Not all lies are Madoff lies; not all lies wound others. Not all lies are told just to be devious and deceptive.

VII. God’s Response

God’s response was stunningly direct and simple, “Oh yes you did laugh.” It’s bad enough to lie to God and have to carry the seriousness of that misjudgment with you for the rest of your life. It’s something else entirely to have God call you a liar right on the spot. “Yes, Sarah, you did laugh.”

What can we make of this powerful story punctuated with laughter? So, yes, even though she hadn’t laughed out loud, she had laughed in her heart for her own reasons; probably, she couldn’t help her laughter. It just came. She was quiet about it and never thought she’d have to explain something that no human but she knew about.

She was 90, and she didn’t remember every little thing. Maybe she forgot for the moment that she had laughed, or at least she forgot why she laughed so that in retrospect it didn’t seem like a lie at all to deny to God or to anyone else that she had laughed.

God’s response to Sarah’s lie may be much more important to the story than the fact that Sarah lied. It is my guess that many who hear this story expect God to jump all over Sarah for lying about her laughter. That is not what God does, though; nothing at all like that. God doesn’t criticize her. God doesn’t chastise her. God doesn’t demand her repentance and an apology. God doesn’t call down any curses on her head. God simply corrects her. The God of Genesis 18 will not let Sarah lie to herself. After a lifetime of disappointment over this barrenness thing, she thought that chapter of her life was closed. After preplanning her funeral a few years earlier, she simply wasn’t prepared to be sketching out the way she wanted the tent rearranged when the baby came, stocking up on diapers and swaddling clothes, having a servant build the safest possible infant seat to affix to a camel’s hump, and getting advice from women a fourth of her age on how to breast feed with the fewest complications. Her whole life had been turned around by this divine promise to Abraham, and Abraham couldn’t make it happen all by himself; he had to have Sarah in on this one.

Perhaps the answer God was looking for was, “You bet I did. God can do great things, but this is too wonderful for me to believe. Many people have witnessed the overt blessings of God in their lives year after year, but I haven’t. My life has been largely a sad life, and I don’t know how to take it all in so deep down in the silence of my soul where all the sadness resides, I laughed a laugh of someone who knows how to carry sadness, but who doesn’t know how to carry joy. I didn’t expect to laugh. I didn’t mean to laugh, but I did laugh.”

When God corrected Sarah by saying, “Oh yes you did laugh,” God was saying, “Yes you did. I know you did. It’s wonderful that you could, and there’s no need to lie to me about it.” It was a simple divine correction for Sarah’s well being, not thunderous condemnation and threats of death for daring to lie to Almighty God.

I know many people who seem to be able to make a very clear distinction between what they believe God is saying to them and what they are saying to themselves, between what God wants them to do and what they themselves want to do with God on board or not. I think the line between those two voices, if there should be a line at all, is much thinner than many are willing to admit. In reality, Sarah was lying to herself about her laughter because she was afraid of offending God and afraid to believe that her greatest life dream was now about to come true, and what the writer attributes to God as a corrective may also have been Sarah’s own inner voice calling her to honesty about her true feelings.

Hanging around seminaries as much as I have over the years, I’ve heard a lot of talk about calling into ministry. Some students have experiences with God almost as dramatic as Paul’s conversion, falling from a horse by the force of bolt of lightening so bright he was nearly blind for the rest of his life. Other students keep seeing themselves in the pulpit every time they hear someone else preach. Religious experiences including a sense of God are so widely divergent and nearly unique that it’s tough to say one person’s experience should be very nearly like the experience of someone else. Regarding calling to ministry or any other vocation, my very wise doctoral supervisor used to speak of inner consent. He didn’t play down the dramatic experiences that many claimed to have had, but he used to say to me it isn’t as complicated as many want to make it. What it takes is inner consent.

Sarah needed inner consent to take in the gift that was coming her way, and as the story is told, God’s correcting her lie was a way for the story teller to say God wouldn’t tolerate anything that kept Sarah believing that she was unblessed and that life was designed to be mostly one sadness after another. God’s corrective was God’s voice or Sarah’s inner self saying, “Love every minute of this joy that is coming to you, girl! God, as it turns out, wants to share the festivities with you so don’t pretend that laughter deep down in those sad spaces escaped you. Don’t do that to yourself.”

The story is for all persons and all institutions who have ever believed that they are old, washed up, and passe--with nothing left to offer a world in which they have struggled too hard and carried sadness too far. Some bright promise suddenly gleams in your eye, and you get all excited deep down inside like you did when you fell in love or held your precious baby only minutes out of the womb. Then in the face of that gleam in your eye because you were more accustomed to disappointment than delight, you tried to cap that little bit of laughter, which had already begun to check the sadness welled up and walled up down in there.

Then God asks, “Did you laugh?”

You say, “No. It couldn’t have been me. I forgot how to laugh long, long ago.”

God says, “Yes you did. You laughed, and there’s much more laughter where that came from. Don’t stop. Don’t ever stop!”

Never forget when you hear or think about the story of Abraham and Sarah and the ER nurse who is trying to page psychiatric services to help out the old gal who thinks she’s having a baby, that when she finally saw her child of promise, she and Papa Abraham knew there was only one name for the little boy, “Isaac,” which meant laughter.

Amen.