SINGING HANNAH’S SONG
A sermon preached by
Rev. Dr. Randle R. (Rick) Mixon
First Baptist Church, Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Text: 1 Samuel 1:4-20; 1 Samuel 2:1-10
We have all known some aspect of Hannah’s story and we have each sung some verse of her song. In Hannah, we see and hear the whole range of human emotions. Her song is a song of lament, a song of hope and a song of thanksgiving. Most of us have found occasion to lament, to cry out our hope, to sing our thanks to God.
Today’s text continues our consideration of remarkable women. Last week, as we considered Naomi and Ruth, we sang Shirley Erena Murray’s fine hymn, “Of Women, and of Women’s Hopes We Sing.” In that hymn we sang “of sharing in creation’s nurturing, of bearing and of birthing new belief, of passion for the promises of life.” Such words fit well the story of Hannah and her song as we follow the transformation of her life from grief to grace to gratitude.
It may be hard to imagine the humiliation that was Hannah’s in her barrenness. We do not live in a culture in which women’s identities are so caught up in bearing children, especially sons. But this was the expectation in Hannah’s time and place. Childbearing was her primary function and source of honor in a heavily shame and honor based society. We do get some insight here that marriages were not just contractual arrangements for purposes of procreation, for Elkanah is clear about his love for Hannah, in spite of their childlessness. At the same time, he seems to be a successful man in his culture and the demand for sons to carry on the family name and fortune were intense. After years of unsuccessful attempts to have children, Elkanah, perhaps with Hannah’s encouragement, takes a second wife and she is fruitful.
However this arrangement clearly creates a highly dysfunctional family. Hannah and Penninah do not get along. Hannah is envious of Penninah’s fertility and Penninah of Hannah’s favor with their husband. Over the years the negativity and bickering between them has grown to epic proportions. By the time of this year’s pilgrimage to Shiloh, Penninah has gained the upper hand. Her humiliating comments have become poison darts that pierce poor Hannah to the core. Hannah cannot lift her head, she has no appetite, she is drowning in her own tears. Neither Elkanah’s offering of a double portion of the sacrificial meal nor his attempts to console her with tender words of affection can dry her tears or lift her hopelessness. Have you ever felt so far down that it seemed your tears would never stop and your heart would literally break?
Hannah is desperate and in her desperation, she turns to God. She knows no place else to turn. Hear her song of lamentation, “O Lord of hosts, if only you will look on the misery of your servant, and remember me, and not forget your servant…” Tony Cartledge suggests this is really a rather formal and abbreviated version of how Hannah must have really prayed. He speculates that her prayer went something more like this, “Oh God, please give me a son. That’s all I want from you, all I will ever ask from you. I’ve been your faithful servant all my life, but I think you have forgotten me. Oh God, remember me! Oh God, have mercy on my misery! Oh God, don’t forget me! Oh God, please just grant me a son! One son. That’s all I ask. God give me a son – just for a while – and I will give him back to you. I will dedicate him to your service. I will see to it that he never cuts his hair, so all will know he is dedicated to you. Oh God, don’t forget me! Oh God, have mercy! Oh God…” (Tony W. Cartledge, Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary, 1 & 2 Samuel, p. 33.)
The point is that in her desperately agitated state, Hannah does not appear in the sanctuary neatly composed, praying carefully crafted prayers. Her words come out jumbled between her sobs of anguish. It appears that she has thrown herself before the altar in such a state that poor old Eli thinks she’s drunk. Of course it would not have been uncommon for people to overindulge on the festival occasions and she was either uncharacteristically praying silently or Eli was too deaf to hear her from a distance. So he draws his own conclusion. But she is not inebriated, she is desperate. “No…I am a woman deeply troubled…I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord… I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation all this time.”
She has done everything she can think of to produce offspring and prove herself worthy. But now it is said that God “has closed her womb.” She has been labeled barren and that is to be her stigma for life. How can one live with such stigma and the ridicule that came with it, especially when that ridicule was most intense in her own house. As a faithful follower of Yahweh where else can she turn to pour out her heart in lamentation for her lot in life and to plead for remedy?
But this song of lament is also mingled with her song of hope. It is very often our capacity to lament that leads to hope. If we can cry out our pain and turn our suffering over to one who can heal it, hope for a better future is the likely outcome. Hannah finds in the sanctuary, before the altar, someone who will listen to her lament, someone who knows her and understands her, someone who is eternally there for her, regardless of the outcome of her request. She turns her anguish over to God and by letting it go she finds hope for her future.
We have to understand that the vow that Hannah makes to God would be common in her culture, though it is not exactly the kind of bargaining with God we might engage in today. Hannah’s vow to God is clearly conditional and it is rooted in her relationship to God. How many of us would strike this bargain, “If you give me what I am asking God, I’ll give it back to you”? When Hannah gets off her knees there is new found peace and hope in her. She does not know if God will give her what she asked, but she has a deeper sense that God is with her. At the door of the temple, Eli confronts her, but when she reassures him of her sobriety, he sends her on her way with a blessing, “Go in peace; the God of Israel grant the petition you have made to him.” There is no magical incantation here or promise of fulfillment, just a good word that adds to Hannah’s hope. So, she sings her song of hope, “Let your servant find favor in your sight” and she returns to her own tent where she eats and drinks and is no longer sad. There is cleansing in her song of lament and there is healing in her song of hope.
But, of course, this is theological history and its purpose is to tell the story of how so remarkable a leader as Samuel came to be. In this case, it must have had something to do with his remarkable mother and the loving faithfulness of both his parents. A boy is born to Hannah and Elkanah; the boy has good genes. And Hannah is true to her vow. We might imagine that she would want to keep her son. She doesn’t let go of him until she has weaned him, but she is a person who keeps her agreements and so the little boy is taken up to Shiloh and turned over to the care and training of Eli. She tells Eli, “For this child I prayed; and the Lord has granted me the petition that I made to him. Therefore I have [dedicated] him to the Lord; as long as he lives, he is given to the Lord” (1 Samuel 1:27-28). This is the beginning of her song of thanksgiving, but it continues, “My heart exults in the Lord; my strength is exalted in my God.” She goes on to sing, with a grateful heart, of God’s ability to transform life, to undo expected social norms and turn the world right upside up, to reverse the fortunes of the poor, to feed the hungry, to bring down the mighty and lift the lowly, to gladden the hearts of the down trodden, as indeed her own has been gladdened. Her song of lament has led to her song of hope and her song of hope to her song of thanksgiving for the way that God has moved in her own life. You see it’s not just her young son she has given to God, she has really given herself to that relationship with the holy and her life is transformed in the process. No longer drowning in her own tears, she exults in God who has made her whole.
I understand that this text is tricky, especially for those of us who have poured our hearts out to God and not gotten what we wanted. But, I know that, for me, there has been healing in simply opening myself to God and pleading my case. There has been a deep sense of being heard and understood, held and carried, even when I didn’t get what I wanted. What happens when we sing our songs of lament and hope and thanksgiving is that we align ourselves with God who will see us through. We turn ourselves over to the one who can heal us and make us whole, even when healing and wholeness do not look like what we wanted or expected.
Following Walter Brueggemann, Kate Huey writes that, unlike us modern folk, “Hannah comes from ‘a praying people’ who put God not just in the center of their life but all through it. And right at the center of their prayer life is the prayer of petition, the ‘rawest and most elemental form of prayer….a real address to a real partner in anticipation of a real response,’ even if that response is not exactly what they ask for” (Kate Huey, SAMUEL, Pentecost +24, 2009, at i.ucc.org). Do you ever pray like that? It is a challenge to the modern mind to think we might ever throw ourselves so elementally on God’s mercy. How often do we get caught up thinking we can just figure this out for ourselves, only to find ourselves lost and lonely when our best laid plans and carefully constructed solutions do not work?
The old hymn says, “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea; there’s a kindness in God’s justice that is more than liberty…For the love of God is broader than the measure of our mind; and the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.” Hannah recognizes the need not only to find God at the center of her life, she realizes that she needs to center her life in God, to immerse herself in God’s mercy, to sink into the kindness of God’s justice, to lose herself in God’s love, even when she can only “see in the mirror, dimly.”
From lamentation to hope to thanksgiving, could our songs follow such a trajectory? Sunday after Sunday we offer our joys and concerns, sometimes audibly, sometimes, like Hannah, we only mouth the words or hold them in our hearts. Here in this sacred place, within our community of faith, we lift our laments - for lives lost and broken, for hopes dashed and injustice done, for suffering and pain, our own and that of the world. Here in this holy hall, surrounded by our church family, we share our hopes – for healing and wholeness, for comfort and guidance, for peace and justice. Here in this house of prayer, joined with our sisters and brothers in Christ, we sing our songs of thanksgiving - for joys shared, for hearts healed, for bodies restored, for justice done and good works rewarded, for special occasions celebrated, for love and laughter and life together. Like Hannah of old, here we are heard and held and blessed as we sing our songs. Thanks be to God. Amen.