Unstoppable

 1 Samuel 1:4-20

24^th Sunday after Pentecost

November 19, 2006

 Paul Simpson Duke

First Baptist Church, Ann Arbor

          A few moments ago, as we listened to the story of Hannah, not one of us gasped, or said, “Wow!” or “What a woman!” or “Dang!”  And why should we?  Her world is so alien to ours that we don’t even know what’s going on here.  Plus it’s just a Bible story, which for many of us is something like a fairy tale.  How pertinent can it be to reality as we know it?

But there are major surprises in this story. It might be more pertinent than we think.  Listen again to the story of Hannah.

She lives with her husband and his other wife.  Not good.  For a man to have more than one wife was a status symbol for him.  “Look how many I can have and afford to support.”  And it multiplied his chances to father children, hopefully male children.  When Hannah’s husband Elkanah took two wives, it wasn’t to say, “I’ve got too much love not to spread it around.”  It was probably to say, “I can afford two; and from one or both I want sons.”

One wife gave him sons and daughters too.  Her name was Penninah, which actually means “fertile.”  Hannah was childless and terribly grieved.  In that culture any woman like her would have grieved.  Children, especially sons, established a woman’s identity and status.  And sons were economic security; if you were widowed, they could support you.  Maybe these things were on Hannah’s mind; maybe also she just wanted a child to love.  But there was none.  To make things worse, the other wife, with her little darlings in tow, would smile and sniff and say “Hannah, what a blessing, these children!  Too bad, you’re not so blessed!”

Once a year the whole family packed up and went to a place called Shiloh, where the Ark of the Covenant was kept – this was before the movie.  There was a Tabernacle or temple there.  People would make pilgrimage to offer sacrifices and be blessed.  For Hannah it was awful – so much praise and talk of blessing while her life was miserable.  She couldn’t eat.  She cried.

We’re told her husband loved her, and that when she cried he said, “Why do you weep?  Why don’t you eat?  Am I not more to you than ten sons?”  This is very kind of him in a way.  In a time and place where women were valued on the basis of motherhood, this man tells his wife, “It doesn’t matter; I love you for who you are.”  That’s nice.

On the other hand the man is an idiot.  She wants a baby.  He says, “Am I not more to you than ten babies?”  As if this were about him and his value, not about her and her grief?  As if having his kind of love could replace her need for another kind of love.  And he’s already got children – what presumption to tell her she doesn’t need one.  Could we be like him – thinking that we act or speak in love, when in fact we’re blindly insensitive to the real need of the other?  He tries to talk her out of her feelings; and the questions he poses to her, she doesn’t bother to answer.  She knows he’ll never get it.

So this is what she does.  By herself she goes to the place of worship, and to God she pours out her soul.  “Remember me! Give me a child, a little boy.”  She’s brash enough to bargain: “Give him to me; I’ll give him to you.”

Something truly remarkable is happening here.  She has done a whole new thing; something nobody did in those times.  A tabernacle or temple was a place for incense and animal sacrifice; prayer was liturgical, mostly from the priest.  The House of the Lord wasn’t yet the House of Prayer, not prayer of the heart from ordinary individuals.  This is the first account of anyone doing this. In her need Hannah breaks through into a radically new thing.  She stands there without intermediary, subverting hierarchy, names her need, stakes her own claim directly to God.1

She doesn’t make a sound, but she is so intense and fiercely focused that her mouth is moving, her lips forming words that are too deep for sound.  And someone saw her.  Eli, the reverend, the professional keeper of the House of the Lord -- he sees this woman talking to herself and he takes her for a bag lady,2 calls her a wino, tells her to stop making a spectacle.

Do you begin to see a pattern?  Here’s a woman in grief, and what does she get?  Culture denies her status, co-wife mocks her, husband shrugs off her need, and a priest shames her.  That’s four ways of saying: You’re nobody; four ways of saying: Shut up.

We’d love to think that in this story we play the part of Hannah.  But what if we’re really in the role of her culture, her husband, her priest – unwittingly perhaps, but actually colluding to silence those who have had no voice.  What if our lives – our assumptions, our preoccupations – have been delivering this message to the oppressed: Keep quiet!

Hannah won’t.  All these efforts to stop her, and she is unstoppable.  She stands up to the priest.  “I am not drunk!  I am in grief!  I’m pouring out my soul!  I am not worthless!”  The Talmud makes her words even sharper.  There she tells him, “You are no person of authority in this matter, and the Spirit of Holiness is not upon you . . . . since you have presumed me guilty instead of innocent.  Are you not aware that I am a woman in anguish?”3

She got his attention.  He didn’t know what she’d prayed for, but she had broke through, even to him, and he says, “Go in peace; may the God of Israel grant you what you have asked.”

And God did.  Hannah’s prayer had begun, “Remember me!” – and God “is a powerful rememberer,”4 especially of hard-pressed people and those who, against obstacles, keep stubbornly naming their need.  So many external voices – society, cultural norms, peer pressure, institutions, money, religion, even family and friends – can be saying No to who you are and what you need to become.  Your own internal voices of insecurity, fear, embarrassment, or shame may be screaming No to you as well.  But doesn’t something in you want to push past all of this, to name your deepest longing and pursue it?  Have we forgotten what it means to desire the very best for us and for the future we might help to make, and to risk ourselves for it?

Hannah pursues it with God.  She cannot make the future she wants, so she goes to the One who holds the future.  With the clamorous noise in her ears of all those people and pressures saying No, she takes her stand on holy ground, and her lips in silence shape her word: Yes.  And God whispered back to her: Yes.

She gave birth to a child and named him Samuel; she said it meant, “I asked God for him.”  And she dedicated the child to God.  It’s what the wise will always do: what we are given, giving back.

The story of Hannah is read each year in the synagogue on the first day of Rosh Hashanah.  It is in celebrating a new year that she is remembered.  It’s fitting, for her story is all about new beginnings.  She had been called “barren,” for nothing new had come through her.  But she took new steps, showed new defiance, prayed a new kind of prayer.  And God gave an answering newness, newness to her and through her to the world.

God is still the giver of newness.  Where old and deadly ways have a choke-hold on us and on our world, we can break through as God breaks through to astonishing gifts of newness.

When we last see her, Hannah is back at the temple, and she breaks into joyous and revolutionary song.  Centuries later, when a girl named Mary learned of the newness conceived in her, she too broke into song, and when she did – did you know this? – she repeated the very words of the song of Hannah.  We’ll soon be celebrating that other birth, joining Mary in her song.  But in large measure we’ll be echoing the more ancient praise that Hannah sang.  We who need so much that is new may in hope lay claim to it.  When we do, we’ll find great reason, in our own time, to take up Hannah’s music.