Great Anxiety and Vexation: 1 Samuel 1:4-20
Ordinary Time
On the day when Elkanah sacrificed, he would give
portions to his wife Peninnah and to all her sons and daughters; 5 but
to Hannah he gave a double portion, because he loved her, though
the Lord had closed her womb. 6 Her rival
used to provoke her severely, to irritate her, because the Lord had
closed her womb. 7 So it went on year by year; as
often as she went up to the house of the Lord, she used to provoke her.
Therefore Hannah wept and would not eat. 8 Her
husband Elkanah said to her, “Hannah, why do you weep? Why do you not eat? Why
is your heart sad? Am I not more to you than ten sons?”
9 After they had eaten
and drunk at Shiloh, Hannah rose and presented herself before
the Lord. Now Eli the priest was sitting on the seat beside the
doorpost of the temple of the Lord. 10 She was
deeply distressed and prayed to the Lord, and wept bitterly. 11 She
made this vow: “O Lord of hosts, if only you will look on the misery
of your servant, and remember me, and not forget your servant, but will give to
your servant a male child, then I will set him before you as a
nazirite until the day of his death. He shall drink neither wine nor
intoxicants, and no razor shall touch his head.”
12 As she continued
praying before the Lord, Eli observed her mouth. 13 Hannah
was praying silently; only her lips moved, but her voice was not heard;
therefore Eli thought she was drunk. 14 So Eli said
to her, “How long will you make a drunken spectacle of
yourself? Put away your wine.” 15 But Hannah
answered, “No, my lord, I am a woman deeply troubled; I have drunk neither wine
nor strong drink, but I have been pouring out my soul before
the Lord. 16 Do not regard your servant as a worthless
woman, for I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation all this
time.” 17 Then Eli answered, “Go in peace; the
God of Israel grant the petition you have made to him.” 18 And
she said, “Let your servant find favor in your sight.” Then the woman went to
her quarters, ate and drank with her husband, and her countenance was
sad no longer.
19 They rose early in
the morning and worshiped before the Lord; then they went back to their
house at Ramah. Elkanah knew his wife Hannah, and the Lord remembered
her. 20 In due time Hannah conceived and bore a
son. She named him Samuel, for she said, “I have asked him of the Lord.”
(NRSV)
There is talk
of postponing General Conference yet again.
For those just
joining us United Methodists in our pandemic programming, or for those United
Methodists who have tuned all the way out of denominational politicking in
favor of focusing on literally anything else, the UMC is and has been battling
with the concept of how we run this boat and where we’re trying to go for quite
a few years. Things came to a head in
2019 as we realized that there are several fundamentally different factions
within the organization who have incompatible theological viewpoints. We were set to gather in 2020 and discuss the
possibility of splitting.
Then, COVID—a
phrase that is a sentence unto itself.
So we reset
General Conference—a global body of several thousand delegates that makes the
highest level of changes to our rules and regulations—for the spring of
2021. That, too, was pushed back as yet
another wave of COVID rolled through amidst the hope of the first rounds of
vaccines and the frustration of uneven vaccine distribution around the
world. The conference was set for the
fall of 2022—and we are now in a place of deciding whether that will or will
not happen.
Before you
tune out for the morning to think about whether you’re rooting for the Chiefs
or the Raiders in tonight’s NFL game or whether you have all the right
invitations for in-person or Zoom Thanksgiving sent out, know that this isn’t
just bureaucratic paper maneuvering. In
the current tension of a divided denomination, there are bishops who are
serving far more than their original appointment because we cannot elect new
bishops to replace those who retire; there are couples who are leaving the
denomination because we cannot definitely tell them whether they are welcome or
not; there are congregations asking, quietly and not so quietly, to
disaffiliate so they can minister to their communities without the national
stress of the UMC hanging over them; and there are financial considerations
about the global ministries we support whose connection is as uncertain as
everything else. As with any
organization, the UMC was meant to have check-in meetings about the business of
doing business and this kind of limbo is not sustainable.
So we do what
we can; this past week, the North Central Jurisdiction of the UMC—a geographic
area roughly mapping onto the midwestern United States—met virtually to discuss
where we are and where we feel God is calling us. Some 250 delegates “elected by their
respective annual conferences created and overwhelmingly approved a covenant
naming their commitment to anti-racism work and LGBTQIA+ inclusion….
“Delegates spent most of their time
together on three big topics of conversation—dismantling racism, the future of
episcopal leadership in the jurisdiction, and the future of The United
Methodist Church…. Specifically, the covenant calls on the NCJ bishops of color
to convene all BIPOC delegates (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) to discuss
how to address trauma in communities of color. It asks the NCJ Mission Council
to report on how their budget incorporates anti-racism work. In addition, the
covenant urges all members of the NCJ to avoid pursuing charges for LGBTQIA+
clergy, and requests that episcopal leaders dismiss charges related to LGBTQIA+
identity or officiating same-gender weddings.
“The covenant also stipulates that
the Mission Council must designate NCJ funds to work with conference
anti-racism teams to create a racial analysis at the local church and
conference levels—and to align annual conference budgets with antiracism work
and intentional efforts geared toward people and communities of color. The
Mission Council is also asked to collaborate with the NCJ College of Bishops,
to ‘develop an exercise for NCJ delegates to engage in conversation to
understand the impact of homophobia, transphobia and heterosexism within United
Methodist Churches during the next meeting of the jurisdiction.’”[1]
Very cool, but what on earth does any
of that have to do with poor Hannah and her desire for a son?
Alphonetta Wines gives us some
important Scriptural context for Hannah before I contextualize her in our
world. “Although separated in most
Bibles, 1 and 2 Samuel form a single book that depicts the
difficulty involved in Israel’s transition from a loose system of judges to a
unified monarchal system. As the opening narrative, Hannah’s story provides a
foray into this compelling narrative portrayal of the complexities involved in
this transition.
“Knowing that the Bible seldom
highlights a woman’s story, the reader is immediately put on notice that this
is not business as usual. Hannah’s barrenness puts the reader on notice that
her child will be a special blessing from God that will impact the story of
Israel for generations to come.”[2]
We have a lot of stories in our
Scriptures about women and the children they bear outside the norm—we have
Sarah and Isaac, Rachel and Joseph, Elizabeth and John, Mary and Jesus. In Hannah’s world, women had no social
standing of their own; any personhood of theirs came through their father,
their husband, or their son. We do not
know whether Hannah wanted a son because she wanted a child whom she would love
or whether she wanted the security of a societal place if something happened to
her husband, and it doesn’t really matter.
She wanted a son, and she couldn’t have one.
“So it went on year after year,” says
verse seven, year after year of having everyone she met tell her that God must
be mad at her for something to have made her barren; year after year of hearing
her husband completely miss the point when he would ask whether he wasn’t worth
ten sons; year after year of hearing the scorn of her fellow wife who could and
did have son after son after son; year after year of the prayers that went
unanswered and the in-between space of being someone’s wife but never someone’s
mother.
Until this year—this year that we get
in text after a trip to Shiloh because something big is about to shift, because
we as the readers are waiting for a new announcement, prepped by the story of a
nation God brought out of Egypt and settled in a promised land.
This year in which Eli, the priest,
also doesn’t get it.
“How long will you make a drunken
spectacle of yourself?” he says to the grieving Hannah silently begging God to
give her children. “Put away your wine.” There are some who see Eli’s blunt dismissal
as a test, but he was being a jerk. He
was telling Hannah that her grief was too strange, that her desire was too uncoordinated,
and even if he was testing her he was doing so in such a way that it dismissed
her as she had been dismissed year after year by everyone who looked at her and
saw nothing but a God-cursed woman. And
bless her to her toes, Hannah answered, “No, my lord, I am a woman deeply
troubled; I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I have been pouring
out my soul before the Lord. Do not regard your servant as a worthless woman,
for I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation all this time.”
Year after year had been enough. Hannah looks the servant of God in the face
and says, “I have value, my prayers have value, and I am having a really,
really bad day and you will respect that.”
There is no apology here, there is no hesitation, there is no varnish of
the fact that her grief upon anger upon anxiety is the only offering she has
for God these days. She is as bold in
her advocacy for herself as she was in her prayer—and that’s what gets
through as Eli answers, “Go in peace; the God of Israel grant the petition you
have made to him.”
I love when there are Scriptures
where faith is rewarded not because it is meek and mild—although those are
great, too—but because it is awkward and messy.
This is faith that has teeth and claws and a heart that demands God’s
presence because the lack of it is simply unbearable. This is the jagged edges of desperation and
the sharp points of determination, not “where the rubber meets the road” but
where the soul cries out to its maker.
It’s the kind of faith that goes into
a jurisdictional conference held together by Zoom and duct tape and demands
that we talk about race and sexuality and justice, the kind of faith that refuses
to keep waiting on the important work of the Church so we can move just a bit
rather than staying in the year after year of uncertainty and pain.
Professor Ted Smith says of Samuel,
the boy born to Hannah and her refusal to have a polite breakdown, that he “is
the fruit of Hannah’s faithful refusal to be comforted by anything less than a
gift from God. He serves as a bridge between the old and the new. He is a
culmination of the old order: from a distinguished family, blessed by Eli, all
but conceived at the cultic center of Shiloh, and dedicated as a nazirite. But
the author of the books of Samuel also wants to stress that Samuel represents a
new thing that God is doing. Samuel’s birth is clearly a work of God, a fresh
kindling of the spark of Hannah’s faithfulness. God has remembered the covenant,
just as Hannah prayed, but not simply reestablished the old religious and
political orders.”[3]
“Behold, I am doing a new thing,”
says God in Isaiah 43:19. Sometimes
that’s a new thing in the form of a new leader; sometimes that’s a new thing in
the form of a covenant that commits not only words but money, time, and
resources to the ongoing work of battling our culturally embedded racism;
sometimes that’s a new thing in figuring out how to put together a global
conference in order to finally name the split slowly cracking us in half;
sometimes that’s a new thing in saying that yes, the Church needs to be
overhauled in how we present ourselves to the world. Sometimes that is the very old thing of
gathering at a communion table to remind ourselves of this messy, beautiful
faith in a God strong enough to hold our great anxiety and vexation.
I do not know whether General
Conference will still meet next year. I
do not know what will come of the challenge already issued to the covenant our jurisdictional
conference just created. I do not know how
the UMC will change—but I know that it will, that it must, that year after year
after year is eventually interrupted by a silent prayer at Shiloh because there
is a new thing coming and God hears those who cry out for their own personhood
to be recognized. As we gather around
this ritual that also has changed over and over again, that does not look like
it did even a few years ago, we are reminded that faith is not a static thing
but a dynamic back-and-forth as we humans learn over and over of God’s
expansive grace. So we come, we celebrate,
we bring our prayers of great vexation and anxiety, we weather the people who
do not understand and think only that we are drunk, and we say to our God be
with me here, now, in this year, in this moment, in the new thing that is being
made.
And God says yes; let’s get creative.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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