1 Samuel 1:4-20 & 1 Samuel 2:1-10
As you may have noticed, I am not a particularly stoic person. When we sing a particular hymn, or read the words of a particular psalm, or even at times when I am preaching or teaching or sitting with folks going through something hard, tears come to my eyes easily. I have always been this way, and I doubt that part of me will ever change. I’m what I like to call a church crier, a person who is particularly affected by the atmosphere of a sanctuary and the prayers and liturgies of the church. You may be familiar with this or experience it yourself at weddings, and it’s rare to see a funeral where there are no tears. But when I say I’m a church crier, I mean I have teared up or even wept during every kind of liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer. I have a close friend who is the same way, and we often move one another to tears just sharing our most recent church experiences. I used to be embarrassed by it, but I have come to believe that if there is one place in this world where we can cry without shame, it is God’s house. In fact, I know that for some, it is the only place they allow the tears to fall. We church criers are part of a long and important lineage, and today we have heard two passages about our patron saint.
Hannah is a woman experiencing the incomparable grief of infertility. We meet her when she has reached a depth of depression that causes her to weep and steals her appetite and will to sustain herself. Her husband, who cares for her enough to give her twice as much food as the rest of his family, begs her to eat. He does not understand why her heart is sad, why she weeps, for he has children by another wife and does not share Hannah’s pain. Hannah cannot seek solace from the other woman in her household, for Peninnah torments her and views her as a rival. So Hannah goes where she knows her grief will be held, where her anger and her longing will be heard. Hannah goes to God.
Before there was a Temple in Jerusalem for all people of the covenant to worship and sacrifice to the Lord, there was Shiloh. Shiloh, the home of the Tabernacle in Hannah’s day, was the pilgrimage site for ritual sacrifices, the celebration of religious festivals, and the seat of the priest Eli. It was the holiest place Hannah knew, the place where she could be nearest to the presence of God. In the lonely valley of her grief, Hannah goes to church.
Hannah’s time with God is not serene or contemplative. The author of First Samuel tells us she weeps bitterly, distressed to the point of incomprehensibility. In her heart she vows to dedicate the first fruits of her womb to God, set apart for a life of service in Shiloh, even if it means she will not be the one to raise him. A church crier if ever there was one, Hannah offers up her grief, her tears, her pride, her anxiety and vexation, her hopes and the future of her family to God, holding nothing back. The desperation of her prayer is familiar to those of us who have found ourselves laid bare before God, either begging for something to come to pass or wishing with all our hearts that something hadn’t. In God’s house, Hannah shows us that no emotion is too big or too small or too ugly or too complicated to be felt in God’s presence.
The priest Eli is mystified by Hannah’s display. Up until this point in scripture, every single prayer or conversation with God has taken place out loud. Prayers were spoken aloud, scriptures were read aloud, in a very real sense God’s people believed God would hear them best if they were closest to the Tabernacle itself, the place God had chosen to dwell among the people as they wandered in search of the promised land. The concept of someone communicating with God without spoken words is so alien that Eli can only assume that this woman’s behavior is a product of intoxication. The priest himself, the person who spends the most time of anyone in the presence of God, who is entrusted with the prayers and sacrifices of the entire community, cannot fathom that God might know his heart beyond words. All the same, a grieving woman trusts that the God who made her would hear and heed her prayers, and by her trust Hannah reveals to us a God who knows our inmost hearts.
Hannah does not leave the presence of God miraculously and instantaneously pregnant. And as we know, very many people pray for such miracles and never experience the outcome for which they fervently prayed. But all the same, after baring her heart and shedding her tears before God, Hannah returns to her husband with a countenance that is no longer sad, with an appetite and a will to continue. Simply in the naming of her grief, in intimate time with the Lord, Hannah experiences some relief, some hope. Hannah cries in church, and walks away a little lighter, a small miracle of its own for anyone who suffers from depression and anxiety as she does.
The Lord remembers Hannah, and Hannah never forgets her Lord. It is easy to forget, after a prayer is answered, that it is God who holds us through all things. It is evident in our own prayers, how many petitions we share when praying for our own needs and those of others, and how often silence follows the call to offer our thanksgivings. Perhaps the answered prayers, the joys and the gratitudes, feel too vulnerable, too tender. Perhaps we fear jinxing ourselves by naming our thankfulness, or perhaps we are anxious about being judged. But Hannah the church crier has no such hesitation.
Hannah’s Song, which we recited as a Psalm today, is the prayer Hannah offers before God and her family on the day she returns to Shiloh to dedicate her son to service under Eli. Unlike her tears and muttered supplications, Hannah offers her thanksgiving aloud for all to hear. She exults in the Lord and extols God’s power to reverse the fortunes of the poor and the downtrodden, and her words will become a hymn of praise for her people for generations to come. One of those generations will be Mary the mother of Jesus, whose Magnificat echoes the Song of Hannah in line after line. That Magnificat is of course sung or said in Episcopal and Anglican churches every single night as a part of Evening Prayer, the prayers of two women from another time and place continuing to shape how we talk to God to this very day.
If we remember one thing about Hannah’s story, let it be the way she prayed. Sure, her son was miraculously conceived and went on to become the prophet who would anoint the first kings of Israel, and that’s important too. But Hannah was the first person in Scripture to trust God to know her needs before she asked, to believe that God could hear her even when her grief made speech impossible. Hannah taught a priest a new way to pray and proved that sometimes tears are prayers in and of themselves. Hannah reminds us that voicing our gratitude can impact the world in ways we cannot even imagine. Hannah invites us to pray, with our words and our actions and our tears and our silence. So let us pray.
Mother A Writes 