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Faith.
What's the Point?
by the Rev. Amber Neuroth
August 12, 2007
1 Samuel 1:1-20
Let's make a deal! All I have to do is have lunch in
downtown DC on a weekday and I sense that deal-making and negotiating
are alive and well in this city. I can feel the wine-and-dine
atmosphere of we'll give this if you give that. If you'll scratch my
back, I'll scratch yours. Many of you are living here in this area
because your jobs brought you here, and your jobs brought you here
because of your excellent and intelligent negotiating skills. So,
what's required in a negotiation? We all know. Two parties have
different priorities and they try to compromise. You give a little, I
give a little. Eventually we come to an agreement, and if we're lucky
we get it signed on the dotted line, we get a contract. A contract then
becomes a binding agreement that holds the parties to the terms they
negotiated. It would be easy to look at Hannah's prayer from today's
scripture reading as a negotiation of a contract. Hannah said, hey God,
I need something, you need something. If you give me a son, I'll give
him back to you as a Nazarite. So if we follow Hannah's example, all we
need to do is use our excellent skills to negotiate well with God and
all of our desires and prayers will be answered, right? Sounds good to
me! We've got the skills for that! WRONG! If we interpret this story
that way, we've read it too quickly and we've missed the point.
So how do we find the point when it looks like Hannah made a deal with
God. Let's look at the bigger picture. As with many Bible stories, one
way to find the meaning is to look at the broader context. The Hebrew
scriptures have lots of meaning in word usage and context (only 15,000
or so ancient Hebrew words, 400,000 English). We use language to create
our meaning, they used story. And Hannah's story is a big one. This
story is the beginning of a new epic for Israel. At this time in their
history, they were struggling. They had been delivered from Egypt, led
through the desert, and been given the promised land! And yet, they
were not content. They had tribal fighting and threats from their
stronger neighboring nations. A king is what they wanted, what they
thought they needed. That would solve it. God give us a king! But God
had rebuffed them- God wanted to be their monarch. God wanted their
devotion and their rule. But still, they persisted, and so God
eventually relented. Hannah's story is the start of their journey to a
king.
Hannah is a woman that God made barren (or so they believed at the
time) Israel was a nation that God made without a son, without a king.
So Hannah prays to God for her son as Israel prayed for its king.
Hannah is Israel and Israel is Hannah. And God heard their pleas, God
had mercy and gave grace. God changed the divine mind. Miraculous! And
God grants Hannah her son that will be the great prophet who will crown
Israel's first king.
So, Hannah has a big role in this divine-human drama. Eugene Peterson,
a biblical scholar says, “she is as significant, both historically and
spiritually, as the three men who follow her in the Samuel narrative.”
Her bargain with God is far from a contract. It is a covenant. Really,
it's a covenant within a covenant. Her story within Israel's story. So
what makes a covenant different than a contract? It seems like we could
just call our wheeling and dealing “covenant making” to smooth it over.
Nope. The difference is love, relationship, and grace. This covenant is
founded in a deep and long-term relationship with God. Hannah comes to
worship with her family regularly. This isn't some one-time selfish
negotiation. This is the context of an ongoing relationship. She says,
“O Lord of hosts, if you look on the misery of your servant, have mercy
and remember me, and you will not forget your servant….” She is
vulnerably pleading in faith, faith in a God who is listening, faith in
God who might change things just out of love for her.
Now, I admit, I have always had a lot of mixed emotions about Hannah's
story. On the one hand you have a woman of clearly strong faith lifted
up in the Bible. There are precious few of those, so we want to
celebrate that. But, on the other hand, you have this poor woman not
feeling worthy just as she is, thinking she has to have a male child to
justify her existence and give her worth. Then, she goes to plead her
case with God and the male priest assumes she's drunk! How insulting!
She can't even pray without people assuming the worst of her. And I
think before we look further at context, it's good to acknowledge these
feelings. It's good to say, we don't believe that. We believe in the
worthiness of each person. Each person deserves to be loved by God.
And then as we look at the story, we start to see that is the very
message of love that is trying to shine through the extreme patriarchal
context in which it arose. First, Hannah's husband models for us loving
her just as she is. That's unheard of for a husband of that time. He
valued her. So already, the author is trying to show Hannah's value to
the context of a patriarchal reading audience. That part in and of
itself is almost revolutionary, but then it continues. Hannah knows
this value deep down and she shows it by going to pray to God on behalf
of herself. She didn't take her husband or go through a priest. She
claimed her prayers and her relationship with God. She faithfully knew
that these were hers! And let me tell you, that at that time, these
rights did not belong to women. In fact, they didn't belong to anybody!
Nobody went to the temple to just pray to God, especially a woman,
without sacrifices, incense, without a priest! Commentators say that
she is the first woman and possibly the first ordinary person in
Israel's recorded history to go and initiate a one-on-one relationship
directly with God. She was a pioneer! It was so unheard of that the
author needing to acknowledge how out of the ordinary it was, so the
priest comes over and can make no other assumption than she is drunk.
But what does Hannah do? She stands firm and she claims her faith, she
claims her rights, she owns her prayers! And she converts the priest to
her cause! Even he sees her faith and acknowledges her, he is forced to
add his blessing to her prayers. Hannah's story of vulnerability with
God and strength of faith laid the groundwork for transition in Israel
eventually away from rituals and sacrifices to “prayers from the heart”
as they were called.
And for this prayer, she is the mother of an epic drama that would lead
her son Samuel to being a true prophet for Israel, who crowned king
Saul and eventually king David, and in David's line would be Jesus
Christ. Hannah risked a great deal to make her request, and so it's
important for us not to take her for granted or misunderstand her
story. She shows us the importance of relationship with God, of going
to God in faith. However God chooses to respond is not our concern
because we are not negotiating a contract, we are acting in covenant.
We have faith that God will show goodness and mercy. Our side is to
know that we are so loved and valued by God that we deserve to share
who we are. And if we do that, we will be changed and the world might
even be changed as it was for Hannah. The faith of this woman became
the faith of a nation.
She had to risk a lot for that faith and that relationship, she had to
go against the religious norms and comfort zones of her day. So, this
week in honor of Hannah, I ask you to think about what this story means
for you. If you were to challenge your own religious status quo to
reach outside of yourself and to be vulnerable, what would that look
like? What would it take? Unlike Hannah, no religious norm is
prohibiting you from praying directly to God, but what else stands in
the way? Are there messages you are holding on to? Do you feel worthy
to pray? Someone once told me that she felt paralyzed to pray because
of a childhood experience in church. She was in Sunday school and was
told to pray. The opposite of Hannah really, forced to pray. And so
this little child said “thank you God for the sky.” A beautiful prayer,
rather than celebrate, everyone laughed. They laughed at her and made
her feel ashamed. That shame has often stood between her and God as
religious rituals stood between Hannah and God. What stands in the way
for you? Hannah used her faith to move past the roadblocks. What do we
do with ours? When we think about our faith, what's the point? What
does it mean to you? How does your faith look to you at the moment?
Faith and relationship are different for everyone. Some people speak to
God as if they are having a conversation, some people journal and
reflect, some people meditate in silence connecting their spirit to the
divine one, some people go for nature walks to commune with God. If
your answer is “I don't know” or “nothing really,” than Hannah and I
have a challenge for you. This week, think about it. What does Hannah's
story mean to you? Faith, what's the point? I can tell you that it's
not to win a contract or negotiate a deal. It's an opportunity to
engage. What is God saying to you through the faith of this woman-
Mother of faith, mother of a nation, example for us all.
Last updated Wednesday, Februrary 29, 2008
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