Hannah, In the Heart of God; 1 Samuel 1&2; ICCM; Pastor Rebecca Ellenson
Eli, the aging priest of Shiloh, encounters Hannah praying for a son and he thinks she’s drunk. One other time in the scriptures, pray-ers are mistaken for drunks—on Pentecost. Let that sink in for a minute—have you ever mistaken a pray-er for a drunk? I haven’t.
I get asked to pray a lot—at dinner parties, at public events. But ask someone who’s not a pastor to lead a public prayer and what happens? Heads are bowed, the room gets quiet, and the unlucky fellow squirms and starts talking in broken Elizabethan English. There’s a scene like that in the movie, Meet the Parents. Ben Stiller plays Gaylord Focker. The father of Gaylord’s girlfriend asks him to pray and he winds up yammering away ending his prayer with the words to the Godspell song, Day by Day. The scene is funny because it strikes a chord. Prayer often becomes something awkward and forced, somber and lifeless.
Not so for Hannah. She pours her heart out, there, in the religious center of the day, just steps from the Ark of the Covenant. She has been taunted and diminished for years by her inability to bear a child. I’m sure it’s not the first time she has prayed for a child. She is deeply distressed and bitterly weeping. She bargains with God from her anxiety and vexation. And something happens there in that holy space because the text says she left, went to her quarters, ate and drank with her husband, and she wasn’t sad anymore. Soon, she conceives and bears a son. She raises him to weaning and then she “lends him” to the Lord. Samuel becomes a key figure in the history of Israel, bridging the shift from Judges to Kings.
Israel is described as without hope. The nation falters under wicked and spiritually dull rulers. The word of the Lord was not heard in those days; Eli, the high priest, was losing his sight; and in poetic terms we read that the lamp of God would soon be extinguished. Eli’s two sons, Hophni and Phinehas, were wicked and corrupt priests who despised the offering of the Lord and violated the women at the tabernacle door. It was a bleak time.
So, as often happens in the bible, the story moves forward through an apparently unimportant person, Hannah. The overwhelming power of patriarchy shaped biblical faith in some ways that have been painful and oppressive for women. In fact, men are still granted cultural privilege in nearly every country in the world, even though more than 3000 years have passed since Hannah offered her desperate plea to God. But just like we like saw last week with Naomi and Ruth, here again God provides and remembers the often forgotten ones. Despite cultural prejudices and injustice the story of God’s people includes the quiet nearly invisible but very personal struggles too. So this week I get the pleasure of preaching about the amazing story of another woman of faith – Hannah, the prophet Samuel’s mother.
I’m not going to focus on the disturbing Biblical pattern of men having multiple wives and concubines; or that a childless woman was described as having her womb closed by the Lord; or that her husband could take other wives so that even though his wife was brokenhearted over her inability to have children, he didn’t have to be; or that Elkanah is so insensitive that doesn’t understand why she is weeping and refusing to eat; or that the priest Eli couldn’t tell the difference between agony and drunkenness when confronted with a distressed woman. He wasted no time in shaming her for her presumed intoxicated state. I will set aside all these difficult and revealing parts of the story in order focus on the amazing faith of Hannah and her perseverance in the face of extremely difficult odds.
Hannah is a bit like Job. She is beyond being just frustrated. She doesn’t just hope that God will help—she expects to be heard. She doesn’t sit back, sweet and patient, waiting. She gets in there and pours it all out before the Lord— the pain, sadness, anger, the oppressive position in which she is caught, even willing to bargain with God. Not subdued by cultural pressures on her gender, Hannah refuses to accept abuse and shaming, suffering in silence. She stands up for herself before her rival Peninnah, her husband Elkanah, the priest Eli, and even the Lord God. And her whole life is restored. Then in the second reading we get to hear her song of praise, which is remarkably similar to the Magnificat, Mary’s prayer song.
The life of Jesus shows us that he stood with those who were on the struggling side of life. He came to save the least and the lost and to restore hope to the many whose lives were threatened daily by the prejudicial actions of others. Jesus came for the Hannahs of the world in every generation.
Hannah’s story reminds us of other such stories, like Sarah and Rachel and Elizabeth and Mary, just to name a few. Throughout the Bible, the struggles of childbearing and rearing are not pushed aside into the realm of private and sentimental matters, but instead figure importantly in the great drama of salvation history. They are stories full of suffering and oppression and also full of persevering faith through the dark places. These stories are often turning points in the tide of history because God remembers and attends to the people others may ignore. God answers the prayers provoked by the personal struggles of faithful women such as Hannah in a manner that creates public and radical social turnarounds through them.
I don’t think this is just a simple story with a happy ending, the barren woman has a child and rejoices. If that was the point then what about all the times when our desperate bargaining with God doesn’t result the way we want it to. When infertility isn’t fixed? And is this woman’s grief and suffering so easily resolved by having a son? Is it that simple? Is that how prayer works?
Hannah’s suffering is rooted in an unjust system. She does turn her first child over to the corrupt priesthood, the wicked and dull rulers. And year by year she visits her son, bringing him clothes she has sewn for him. She doesn’t forget the gift from the God who heard her cries. Hannah’s song expresses not just her relief and joy of becoming a mother, finally. It expresses the deep and systemic injustice of a women’s lives at that time.
Hannah’s song, like the Magnificat that Mary sings to Elizabeth, isn’t just a new mother’s song. Both are songs of revolution where the bows of the mighty are broken and the poor are raised from the dust. What happened to Hannah that day when she prayed fervently, pouring her heart out, placing herself in God’s own heart—the day Eli thought she was drunk? Did she cry out not just over her childlessness, but also the very system that stripped her of dignity and power and agency? When God heard her what changed to make her no longer sad? We read that Hannah, not Elkanah, named their son because she asked him of God. Samuel means God hears. And Hannah, who lives her life in the heart of God, her name means Grace.
Mother Theresa said once that prayer is not asking. Prayer is putting oneself in the hands of God, at God’s disposition and listening to God’s voice in the depth of our heart. I think most of us have probably pleaded with God at some point, for healing, or for the life of a loved one, or for a solution to some desperate situation. We’re invited to do that by all the biblical examples of that. But it goes beyond that to listening, and resting, no matter what the outcome is, in the very heart of God, knowing our prayers are gathered up into the Grace of God, the Love and Unity of Being itself.
Prayer isn’t the stilted awkward, overly formal and out of touch blabbering… it is where we are invited to live, no matter what the outcome. God hears, and God holds us, and uses who and what we are, Hannah, Mary, You, Me… to transform, to save, and to heal the world. Eugene Peterson the masterful writer and translator who gave us the biblical paraphrase called The Message once cautioned that God is “the leading character in the story of our life,” and as such, we should not “look for God in our life stories” so much as “to see our stories in God’s own heart.”