I love the story and song of Hannah in 1 Samuel 1:4-20, 2:1-10. After
commenting on the Epistle (briefly) and the Gospel (a bit more) I’ll return to
this text, which I'll be preaching on - with a great quote from
another Hannah, Wendell Berry’s Hannah
Coulter).
“Let
us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds.” Dangerous, as
it can slip into nagging judgmentalism: Hey, you should love and do good deeds!
And yet, so very hopeful. What if we took as our mission statement that we
might not only love and do good deeds, but actually provoke others to do the
same – not as in needle or cajole, but inspire, doing good with them? The verb paroxmuson implies inspiring more than
provoking.
“Not neglecting to meet together, as is the
habit of some, but encouraging one another.” Indeed, perhaps especially
post-pandemic, people are happy to neglect meeting together. There’s this story
from John MacArthur that preachers love to tell. A man who had once
been active in a church stopped coming, and after a few weeks the pastor
decided to visit him in his home. When the pastor arrived, he found the man
sitting in a chair in front of his fireplace where a fire was roaring. Without
saying anything, the pastor took a seat beside the man and sat in the silence,
watching the flames.
After a few minutes, the
pastor reached for a pair of tongs and pulled a single, burning ember out of
the fire, setting it off to the side on the hearth. Before long, the ember’s
flame had reduced to a glow, and then it went out completely, eventually
growing cold. The pastor and the man sat in silence a bit longer, and then the
pastor again took the tongs, picked up the dead ember, and put it back in the
middle of the fire, where it sparked back to life. As the pastor got up to
leave, the man spoke for the first time, saying, “Thank you for your visit, and
especially for the fiery sermon. I’ll see you on Sunday.”
Jesus goes apocalyptic – which is a feature
in preaching and theology we might avoid, given all the abuses of Gnostic
end-of-time predictions. Yet at some point, the only shred of hope we have left
is for God’s ultimate intervention beyond history itself. Jesus, unlike other
apocalyptic writers, so productive in those days, reports no visions, but
speaks only of his own authority.
I recall as a boy watching Billy Graham
preaching on “Nation will rise against nation,” and he explained this was
precisely what was unfolding in the 1960s. Fact is, if you study history, it’s
always this way. Peace is our dream that in our gut we know is a fantasy. So
much pain. Jesus opens a window of hope, explaining that our intense sorrow
over the world now can be compared to labor pains. Wow. Although it tiptoes
into being silly, there’s a way to reflect on those birthpangs:
With a playful imagination, Henri
Nouwen (in Our Greatest Gift) pondered these pains that ferry us into life. In Our Greatest Gift, his thoughtful book
about dying, he tells a story about fraternal twins talking with one another in
the womb: The sister said to the brother, ‘I
believe there is life after birth.’ Her brother protested vehemently, ‘No, no,
this is all there is. This is a dark and cozy place, and we have nothing to do
but cling to cord that feeds us.’ The little girl insisted, ‘There must be
something more than this dark place. There must be something else, a place with
light, where there is freedom to move.’ Still she could not convince her twin
brother. After some silence, the sister said hesitantly, ‘I have something else
to say, and I’m afraid you won’t like that either, but I think there is a
Mother.’ Her brother became furious. ‘A Mother!?’ he shouted. ‘What are you
talking about? I have never seen a mother, and neither have you. Who put that
idea in your head? As I told you, this place is all we have. Why do you always
want more? This is not such a bad place, after all. We have all we need, so let’s
be content.’ The sister was quite overwhelmed by her brother’s response, and
for a while didn’t dare say anything more. But she couldn’t let go of her
thoughts, and since she had only her twin brother to speak to, she finally
said, ‘Don’t you feel those squeezes once in a while? They’re quite unpleasant
and sometimes even painful.’ ‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘What’s so special about
that?’ ‘Well,’ the sister said, ‘I think that these squeezes are there to get
us ready for another place, much more beautiful than this, where we will see
our Mother face to face. Don’t you think that’s exciting?’ The brother didn’t
answer. He was fed up with the foolish talk of his sister and felt that the
best thing would be simply to ignore her and hope that she would leave him alone.
And now, to return to 1 Samuel 1:4-20, 2:1-10, and how Saul was Israel’s first big, tall,
impressive leader – and how we not only preach on 1 Samuel 1-2 but actually
lead based on it:
If we
turn back a few pages, we discover the real dawn of a new day for Israel was
not when Saul was crowned, but when a woman, a nobody, unable to conceive,
surprisingly gave birth to a son – as if the script for what would unfold for
Mary and Jesus fluttered down to earth centuries earlier. Hannah was barren, which
was the ultimate weakness for women in the Bronze Age. She had nothing going
for her except the tender love of her husband, Elkanah. She was taunted by her
rival, Peninnah, whose cruel words twisted like a knife in her gut. How much of our suffering is comparative in nature? I see others having, laughing... but I was left out, unchosen, sad.
There is a theological quandary in the writer’s assertion that “the Lord had closed her womb.” The preacher may or may not engage the question – but it’s well worth pondering even in the background. Ask an infertility doctor why a woman hasn’t conceived, and she can explain to you facts about sperm counts, fallopian tubes and more. Did God so arrange such things to frustrate couples? Or do we see, again, the lovely faith of Bible people whose lives and realities were so hinged to God that they could not imagine anything apart from God? – and yet it is not that God blocks the pregnancy (which God should do a bunch of other times when God seemingly doesn’t…), but that she just hadn’t gotten pregnant?
Hannah did what the helpless do: “Hannah rose and presented herself
before the Lord… She was deeply distressed and prayed to the Lord, and wept
bitterly” (1 Sam 1:9-10). Anguished prayer is weakness splayed all over the
floor. And notice it's "year by year." No quick allaying of her suffering. It's a marathon.
Eli the priest observed her, and assumed she was drunk. Then he took
pity on her. Or perhaps he realized he was witnessing what every priest longs
to see: a soul entirely abandoned to God. He blessed her. And then this woman,
with no natural strength in her womb, conceived and bore a son, Samuel.
The mind-boggling wrinkle in Hannah’s story, though, isn’t the seemingly
miraculous birth. What staggers us is that she kept an outlandish promise she
had made in her desperation. Trying to coax God into giving her a child, she
pledged to give that child right back to God. She could easily have reneged on
the deal once she cradled her precious son in her arms, nursing him, giggling
with glee over his arrival. He was all she’d ever wanted. And in those days, a
son was your social security, the one a woman needed to care for her in old
age.
But she took the boy to Shiloh, and left him there to serve in the
temple as an apprentice to Eli. What more poignant words are there in all of
Scripture than these? “She left him there for the Lord” (1 Samuel 1:28). The
world says Grab the gifts you can, hang on to them, accumulate strength and
resources. But Hannah, instead of clinging tightly, opened her hands, and let
go of the best gift ever. She chose to return to her weak, vulnerable state.
“She left him there for the Lord.”
There is a kind of holy leading the world will never understand. After
his election, Pope Francis handed back the powers of the papacy he’d just won,
riding in a Ford Focus instead of the papal limousine, moving into a guesthouse
instead of the Apostolic Palace, wearing a simple cassock instead of regal
finery. Henri Nouwen left a faculty position at Harvard to live in a L’Arche
community in Canada, where his job was to care for a single, severely
handicapped young man named Adam. Maybe the most effective pastor I’ve ever
known declined multiple promotions, quietly mentored dozens of young clergy,
and in her parishes she happily beamed offstage as her laity excelled as they
never had before.
Imagine all those obscure people who have led so marvelously that we
have never heard of them. Leadership is letting go, a refusal of possession,
control or manipulation, an offering to God. Letting go must be the secret to
leadership, since it is the secret of all of life; the results are those
immeasurables, like contentment, gratitude, and the flourishing of others.
I love Wendell Berry’s novel about a Kentucky farm mother, Hannah
Coulter, who muses, “The chance you had in life is the life you’ve got. You can
make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after
they have got them, and about what people make of other people’s lives, even
about your children being gone, but you mustn’t wish for another life. You
mustn’t want to be someone else. What you must do is this: ‘Rejoice evermore.
Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks.’ I am not all the way capable
of so much, but those are the right instructions.” Leaders let go of fantasies
and selfish wishes, resentments and any sense of entitlement or deserving. How
counter-cultural! Leaders can be content; we already have enough, and so we are
freed for joy. Who wouldn’t follow a leader to a place of joy?***
