In good company. A message for Pride Sunday (2026)

Genesis 18:1-15

...so Sarah laughed. 18:12

This weekend, we are starting a new summer series called Anything but Ordinary. It’s a spin off of what we call Ordinary Time in the church: the time of the liturgical year between our fancy high seasons of Christmas and Easter.  

Ordinary time.
Everyday time.  

Over the course of the summer, we’ll take a closer look at our assigned bible passages from the Hebrew Bible. Our first story is one of Abraham and Sarah.  I’m going to get to Sarah, but I want to take a moment and start with Abraham.  

I appreciate Abraham because I have to.  He is a key player in the old story. But he has some solidly cringy moments in his bio.  There’s the couple of times he tries to pass his wife off as his sister, then there’s the times he pawns her off to sleep with a couple of powerful men and gets a bunch of livestock and servants in exchange. 

Abraham fathers a child with an enslaved woman named Hagar in his household, and then stands by while his wife abuses Hagar until she flees with their son to die in the desert; then there was that whole incident with Isaac bound on the altar with a knife overhead. 

Abraham is something…

He decides to circumcise himself at the tender age of 99—and then also decided to do the same to his tween son. 

But in this same man, with all these questionable attributes, watch what he does in today’s story:  he falls over himself to extravagantly welcome these three strangers who turn out to be divine.  Right after this, he argues with God to save a city full of strangers.  

So, Abraham is capable of greatness. He’s just also really faulted-- especially when I look at him from the 21st century.

Abraham is hard to categorize as great or as terrible. To be honest,  it’s puzzling why God chose Abraham to be the father of all these descendants--of all these faith traditions. It doesn’t really seem like God chooses him for his greatness.  I also don’t know if this is one of those 
stories where we say “look, God chose Abraham even though he was a faulted, dumb human.” 

I wonder if it’s something else that Abraham has. And it’s something I see in Sarah, his wife, too. 

In our story today, after Sarah and Abraham have rolled out the dazzling red carpet  and popped the champagne for these three mystery visitors, after they feasted and acknowledged that that the three travelers are not actually dusty strangers in the desert  but the brilliant presence of God--after all this, Abraham and God settle down together for some man talk. (There’s a scholar, Rachel Rend, who calls it that—man-talk.  I’m leaning on her work here in this part).  Sarah hangs back in the tent which was the realm of women. The field was the realm of men, the tent the realm of women. Everyone in their place.

Now God and Abe are shooting the breeze when God mentions that by this time next year, “your wife will have a son.” Now Sarah, there in her proper place, was listening in and when she hears this bit about the son, she laughs and says, “now that I am old (or withered) am I to have pleasure with my husband being so old?”  

We sanitize this a little in English, but the Hebrew is pretty clear as to what she’s talking about.(1) Sarah laughs. She’s there at the threshold between spaces—the tent and the field.  She’s there, hearing what she wasn’t supposed to hear,  laughing at what she wasn’t supposed to find funny.

Sarah is longing for something—for desire? For a child?  For something and it pulls her into this space between the tent and the field

“why did you laugh?” God asks her. “why did you laugh and say ‘shall I in truth bear a child’?”  Sarah’s busted. God heard her laugh.

We’re not totally sure why God interrogated her. Maybe God misheard her (unlikely).  Maybe God is scolding her for laughing. (yeah, that has been a convenient interpretation over the generations—Get back in your place, Sarah--I doubt this too).  Maybe God is giving her an opening.and inviting her  into this conversation between men so she can say out loud what she means—

Suddenly, Sarah’s not fully in “her place” in the tent, and she’s not fully in the field with the men. She’s between spaces, between categories, between where she was assigned to be and where she was told to stand. And that’s not a problem,  in that in between space.  That’s exactly where God finds her. 

*************
Let me draw a line back to Abraham for a second.  

Why was he chosen to receive this extravagant blessing from God?  (your descendants will out number the stars in the sky)
  
Why was he launched on this journey “to the land that I will show you?” 

There’s a Jewish Scholar named Avivah Zornberg, she’s Scottish.  And she says Abraham’s got something worth paying attention to:  

Abraham is okay being unsettled.

This guy is willing to leave it all and drag his belongings behind a camel through the desert.  He’s willing to set off for unknown places. To walk even when he’s not sure where he’s going. Into the place Zorenberg calls “the waste space between clarities” (2) Abraham is willing to pull up the tent stakes.  To step outside the circle of familiar porch light. To put not just his phone on roam but his life on roam and trust God’s signal is still gonna find him. (3) Abraham isn’t credentialed. He’s just willing to be unsettled. To wander in the space between clear categories. And Sarah is cut from the same cloth. We see it in today’s story when her laugh burst her into this place between the tent and the field. Between what she was assigned and who she was.  She steps into the unknown.

This in-between space has something going for it.  Zorenburg calls it fertile.   Here’s what that looks like to me:

An ecotone is a place where 2 ecosystems meet. Eco is from comes from the Greek word for house. Tone is from the Greek word for tension. (4) It’s a place of tension between two houses:

The edge of the woods and meadow.
Between the tropical jungle and the high altitude mountains,  (the cloud forests where coffee is farmed!).  
Between the ocean and the land.

You’d think that in this in-between spot, life would fade out but it’s the exact opposite.  Ecotones have one of the highest concentrations of biodiversity on the planet—they have more life than either house on its own—because they hold the species of both, plus the ones that live no where but in their edge.  They are amazingly creative spaces.  Think, for example, of a tide pool.  

Twice a day without exception, everything changes: The pool is flooded with chilly ocean water and then it’s left still in the hot sun. The water evaporates concentrating the salt levels and then the rain dilutes it.  The waves crash with this force that would send most tiny things flying 

The tidepool is the most unstable little piece of real estate you can find on the shore.   And it’s crowded with life.  Anemones that open like gorgeous flowers under water and close to nothing when the waves rush out.  Hermit crabs that carry their little houses around and can pop their fragile bodies inside in a snap.

These are creatures that have become cool with change. 

All of this water rushing in and out, the sun, the waves—this middle space made them  into these, responsive and resilient little critters. 

The edge isn’t a problem for them, it’s their home. It’s the space where they have evolved to be fabulously creative.  There is something in this space between two houses:

Between Ur (where Abraham came from) and the Promised Land, 
between the tent and the field. 
Between the ocean and land.

There’s something about this threshold where life erupts with laughter, where God notices and delights and draws us out—There’s something about living between the categories that other people drew.  Between the box you were handed and the one you who were warned from.  There’s something holy in that in-between space.

*********

Clean categories are comfortable:
This is right. This is wrong. 
This is safe. This is dangerous. 
This is faithful. This is a foolish.
You’re the helper.  You’re the one being helped.

But what if you’re the helper who organizes the Free Little Pantry, and your soul aches and hungers for something that food can’t fix? What if you’re the one  who needed a box of pasta from the shelf, but you also happen to be really good at listening and supporting and caring?

These categories are never settled. That creative space is one of great life:

The ecotone, 

the tide pool, 
the doorway of the tent, 
the wandering in the desert.  

God keeps calling us from these settled spaces and into the space between, the space of growth and delight.  Some of us in the room have lived there all along—not by choice, not as a problem, but as a gift to the world. 

************

I was recently talking about tide pools with one of you who grew up near the ocean—near Laguna beach.  And you pointed out that some of these pools—these fragile in between zones of life—have turned into a ghost of what they were.  Fair.   The edge is a fertile place, but It’s not safe on it’s own. Nowhere is. We all depend on each other for safety. There are tide pools that are healthy on that pacific coast. And they’re protected. They’re pools where nothing gets trampled or destroyed. Pools where everyone in the water looks after the water.

*********

The life God calls us to was never ordinary in the first place. It’s anything but. And as you wander in let me introduce you to the good company you’re wandering with: 

Welcome to the company of Sarah, who laughed at the wrong moment in the wrong place and got her name in scripture anyway. 

Welcome to the company of Queen Esther who lifted her chin and walked uninvited into a room that could have killed her and stayed there until her people were safe.. 

Welcome to the company of woman at the well who no one wanted let alone believed.

Welcome to the company of Nicodemus who stepped out of the porch light, took his big questions between the categories and found life. 

Welcome to the company of Jesus who, everyone knows, was not supposed to be washing any feet that night.

Welcome to the company of the Ethiopian Eunuch who didn’t cleanly fit into the law’s categories, found water in the desert, and realized nothing prevented him from being baptized. 

Welcome to the company of the brave little girl, Miriam who floated her little brother in a basket down the Nile river in the space between.

And welcome to the company the brave little girl, Ruby Bridges who lifted her chin and walked up the stairs into the William Frantz Elementary school in New Orleans in 1960

Welcome to the company of Marsha P. Johnson who stood up at stonewall and never stopped

And to Ruth and Rahab and Hagar.  
And Larry, and Dieter and Dixie

The saints upon saints who wander
And the God who goes to the edge to find us.

(1) the Hebrew word is Edna which is specifically sexual pleasure

(2) Zorenberg, Avivah. (1995) The Beginings of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, Chapter: Lekh Lekha: Travails of faith

(3) She discusses this entire concept in depth in Zorenberg, Avivah  (2011) The Murmerings of the Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious, Chapter 5, In the Vale of Soul Making,: Abraham's journey. 

(4) Adrienne Marie Brown explores Ecotones (and other ideas) in her book, Emergent Strategy (2017)