Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
Genesis 18:17–32; Psalm 138 (sung); Luke 11:1–13
Church of Scotland, Geneva, Auditoire de Calvin, July 27 2025
“You can’t put a price on a child’s laughter.” That’s how the commercial starts.
I like to listen to music on Spotify: anything from Bach to the Beatles, Genevan Psalms to Joan Baez, Judy Collins, or Joni Mitchell. (Now you know what decade I grew up in.) I’m too much of a cheapskate to pay a subscription, so from time to time my music is interrupted by advertisements. This is one of them.
“You can’t put a price on a child’s laughter.
But your donation can be part of building a future.
For over a hundred years, we’ve stood up for children’s rights.
Save the children. Unmute a laugh.”
I like Save the Children. Sometimes, I even give them money. But I find this commercial almost unbearably painful. It reminds me that today tens of thousands of children in Gaza will never have a future, because they are dead. Even now, every day children there are dying of starvation because of a famine made in Israel. They are not being saved. Their laughter, now, will never be unmuted.
*
The God we believe in is the author of everything that is and, in particular, the principal author of the Bible. But sometimes in our Bibles, God appears as a character in God’s own story.
Genesis kicks off with the claim (1:26-27) that we are all of us, male and female, made in the image and likeness of God. But when God appears as a character in Genesis, as in this morning’s reading, God the character is all too often made in our image and likeness.
To distinguish between the real God and this God as character, I’m going to call the character “the Lord” – which is, indeed, what our reading calls him. As we can see, “the Lord” is capable of behaving in quite unattractive human ways, and then the righteous man Abraham has to remind “the Lord” who the real God is and what this God is like.
In our Bibles, the ancient Near Eastern cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are a by-word for human wickedness: arrogant, hostile towards strangers, indifferent to human need.[1]
“The Lord” proposes to put an end to the wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah by overthrowing them: by raining fire and brimstone “on those cities and all the plain and all the inhabitants of the cities and what grew on the ground” (Genesis 19:24–25); and Abraham has to talk him down.
So Abraham does what anyone from the Near East would do: he bargains with “the Lord”. He haggles, “like barter in a Near Eastern bazaar”.[2] First, he gets “the Lord” to agree that it would be wrong to destroy the righteous along with the wicked, the just alongside the unjust. And then he barters “the Lord” down from 50 righteous to 10. It is, in its way, a form of prayer.
But the haggling is not really the point. In this story, “the Lord” is operating according to a classic Near Eastern pattern of thought – also to be found in our own world – where good people prosper and evil people suffer and die, and that is how it should be. Says Walter Brueggemann, this theology of reward and retribution is “the simplistic premise of much wisdom teaching in the ancient world.” He adds that it is “the ground for blood-thirsty revenge in contemporary society,” where we arrogate to ourselves the right to say who is good and who is evil and should therefore be sent to hell in a handcart.[3]
But Abraham reminds “the Lord” that the one true God in whom we believe is a God of righteousness and justice. God’s justice is not punitive, but restorative. God’s righteousness does not consist in retribution. God is just, not by raining down fire and brimstone, but by saving us from sin and restoring justice to the earth.
John Calvin says that in this passage Abraham is moved by a “sense of humanity.”[4] Abraham shows this sense by asking “the Lord” to have a sense of divinity. And if “the Lord” sticks around long enough to read the story the New Testament tells, he will see there a just and righteous God who sends his only Son to save the world and to reconcile us to God.
*
José Antonio Pagola has not one, but a whole series of short homilies on the threefold instruction of Jesus in Luke 11 that forms my sermon title: “ask, seek, knock”. Let me quote just one passage:
“Before the Father, we must live as poor people asking for what we need to live, as lost people searching for a path we don’t know well, as helpless people knocking at God’s door… We must ask God for what we cannot give ourselves: the breath of life, forgiveness, inner peace, salvation. ‘Seeking’ is not just asking. It is also taking steps to obtain what is beyond our reach. Thus, we must seek above all the kingdom of God and God’s justice: a more humane and dignified world for all. ‘Knocking’ is knocking on the door, insisting, crying out to God when we feel God is far away.”[5]
*
The digital clock clicks on a second, from 5:59 to 6:00, and Phil Connors wakes up in his bed & breakfast room to the sound of Sonny and Cher singing “I got you babe”.
Yesterday, the cynical, self-absorbed weatherman played by Bill Murray travelled to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, with his cameraman Larry and his producer, the rather pretty Rita, to do a remote broadcast about his namesake, the groundhog Punxsutawney Phil, who every year informs the United States whether it will have six more weeks of winter.
They get snowed in.
Which is why he wakes up the next day in a Punxsutawney bed & breakfast. Except that it’s not the next day. It’s the same day. Turns out Phil is trapped in a time loop, where he seems condemned to relive Groundhog Day until the end of time.
Groundhog Day is “one of the most beloved comedy films ever made”. It’s also a story of redemption, in which what begins as a flirtation with Rita turns into liking and then love, and in which Phil turns from “tantrums, demands, surliness and general lack of couth” into a man that Rita, who begins by despising him, can in her turn love.[6]
The digital clock clicks on a second, from 5:59 to 6:00, and Phil Connors wakes up in his bed & breakfast room – to the sound of silence. No Sonny and Cher. No annoying voices on the radio. No crowds massing in the streets outside. It’s the day after Groundhog Day; and beside him in the bed, where they have both fallen asleep fully clothed, is the woman he loves, the woman who loves him.
*
Halfway through the film, when Phil is just getting into his courtship of Rita, he learns that she always drinks to world peace. So the next day, which is still the same day, when she buys him a drink, he knows what to say – “I like to say a prayer and drink to world peace” – and we like to think that one day he will really mean it.
When I taught confirmation classes back in my three village churches in Scotland 40 years ago, I used to tell the teenagers, don’t pray for the big things like world peace, global justice, or the protection of our threatened planet. At least, don’t start there. Don’t pray for what you think you should pray for. Start by praying for what you really want, even if it seems small or trivial. If, as Jesus asks us to, you persist in the practice of prayer, then you’ll find that this will transform you, and eventually, praying for world peace, global justice, and the protection of the planet will become things you want to pray for.
I’m not going to give you that advice this morning.
Sometimes – and this is one of those times – we really do need to pray for the big things. Sometimes, we need to ask the one true God to give us world peace, global justice, and a secure and safeguarded planet. Sometimes, we need to cry out to heaven for an end to the wickedness we see all around us – not just in the Gaza genocide, although most clearly there, but on every side.
And sometimes, it is not enough to ask, and seek, and kick God’s door in.
Sometimes, we have to put our bodies where our lips are. We have to put our lives behind our words.
[1] See Walter Brueggemann, Genesis: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1982).
[2] Brueggemann, Genesis, 172
[3] Brueggemann, Genesis, 166
[4] John Calvin, Commentary on Genesis, at 18:22.
[5] José Antonio Pagola, “17 Tiempo ordinario (C)”. Pagola is the Spanish author of a fine book on Jesus – Jesús. Aproximación Histórica, (Madrid: PPC, 2007); ET Jesus: An Historical Approximation (Convivium Press, revised edition, 2014)
[6] Wikipedia, “Groundhog Day (film)”; Roger Ebert “Groundhog Day”, February 12 1993