The Woman Who Asked The Lord
/1 Sam 1:4-20; Mark 13:1-8
The Lord closed Hannah’s womb...
(Hannah), deeply distressed, prayed to the Lord.
She made this vow: O lord of hosts,
If you will look on the misery of your servant ...
And give to your servant a male child,
I will set him before you as a Nazirite.
I love this story of Hannah, not so much its main plot, which is Hannah’s distress, but its subplot, a picture of marital love, so rarely presented to us in scripture. For we are told that Elkanah, Hannah’s husband, gives Hannah a double portion “because he loved her,” and when he finds her heart sad, he says to her, “Am I not more to you than ten sons.” Please allow me to assume that he’s right, that he is, indeed, more to her than ten sons, that she loves him as much as he loves her, and yet, even so, she weeps bitterly at not being able to bear a male child. There’s a sermon in her weeping, in her, as we would say today, in her existential need to bear a son, as if it were a matter of life and death to her --- which is what we mean when we use the word “existential.” But that’s not the sermon I am moved to preach this morning. For there are words in this text that always strike me like a blow to the head, and I need to preach on them. Here are the words: “The Lord had closed her womb.” Those words remind me, remind us, that the Bible talks about God in ways that we no longer talk. We would not dream of saying to a young woman who mourns her inability to bear a child, “The Lord has closed your womb.” Scripture talks this way because scripture conceives God as having the power to directly and forcefully act upon the world, to close Hannah’s womb, for example, and open it; to do the same for Sarah in her old age so that she could bear a son; to send a flood upon the world, or a famine; or send a foreign army into Israel to punish Israel’s unfaithful living, or send another army for the deliverance of the Babylonian captives. For the Bible images God, not always but dominantly, images God as an infinitely magnified absolute king, able to enact immediately, coercively, whatever he wills. In our time, which we call modern, that monarchial way of thinking of God has eroded, due primarily to the new ways of understanding the universe and ourselves provided by the physical sciences and the sociological and psychological disciplines. These new ways of thinking, in famous words supposedly spoken to Napoleon, “have no need of the God hypothesis” to explain reality. For these new ways of thinking distrust any talk of a reality transcendent to nature, distrust any hint of supernaturalism. And that distrust has seeped into our culture, so that many of us people of faith become defensive and think of science as the enemy of faith; and others of us faithful people who accept the truths of science become a little bewildered concerning the reality of God and God’s acting in our lives.
So how are we, we who accept these new ways of thinking, how are we to deal with our bewilderment, how are we to love scripture, love its stories, live under its authority, affirm God’s reality, understand how God relates to the world and is present, feelingly, in our lives? Well, that’s a tall order, and though I believe we can do all those things, I don’t promise to fulfill all of them in what’s left of this sermon. But let’s make a start, a simple and obviously true start, by reminding ourselves that there are certain questions we humans ask that no other species ask, the most basic being: What am I here for, is there a whence from where I come, some reason for my existence other than the product of godless, purposeless forces; and further, is there a whither to where I go, a purpose to human existence, a goal, an aim for human lives, so that our existential restlessness for some ultimate significance, some ultimate worth in our lives, can find some rest. Neither culture nor nature can answer these kind of questions because they themselves are in need of ultimate meaning. There are even those who tell us that these questions should not be asked, that they are illegitimate questions, illegitimate because our modes of knowing what is true and what is not true, specifically our scientific modes, cannot answer them. What cannot be answered, they say, cannot legitimately be asked. But to renounce these questions of ours is literally inhuman, for it is to renounce what is most distinctly human in us. For we alone, as far as we know, in this vast universe of billions of galaxies (125 B of them) (we alone) ask these questions, and we ask them because, as Schleiermacher said more than two hundred years ago, we have a sense and taste for the infinite, and as Augustine said much longer ago, we are restless until we find rest in God. Even more, we ask these questions because we have a moral consciousness, a certainty that goodness really matters, ultimately matters. And we ask them because we have a sense of meaning, a drive for meaning, a feeling for purpose, for intentionality. And these questions of ours, these feelings for the infinite, for meaning, purpose, goodness, worth, give us — we people of faith should boldly say this — these questions and feelings give us better clues to the understanding of reality than the chance and necessity that modern science provides us with.
So let us say this about what it means to affirm God’s reality. It is to affirm that there is an ultimate context, an ultimate grounding in reality to the meaning for existence that we so crave, to the goodness that matters so much to us; it is to affirm God as that ultimate, objective ground to our sense of meaning, purpose and worth; it is to affirm God as that power, a power of Being, not ourselves, luring us beings to goodness, truth, compassion. I say “lure,” it’s the philosopher Whitehead’s word for God’s relation to us, for God’s way of acting upon us, because “lure” gives us an alternative to the monarchial way of thinking of God that I earlier spoke of. To think of God as lure, is to think of God not as forcefully wielding some act upon us, such as opening or closing a womb, but as calling us, beckoning us, towards some goodness, towards a little more love to others perhaps, or towards a little more justice to others, or towards reconciliation where there had been barriers; luring us, I say, meaning, leaving us finite human beings, with all our faults, with all our desires, ambitions, responsibilities, (leaving us) free to respond, free to open ourselves to God, fully, partially, even not at all. We can choose, consciously, unconsciously, to close ourselves off to God, or mistake another voice for God’s voice, for there are a multitude of other voices in our societies that are calling us, beckoning us. We hear them all the time. They are out there in our TV sets, in our websites, in our work places, and they are in here in our heads. Those voices can be powerful. Some of them can drive us to ruin. It’s why prayer is so important in our lives, for in prayer we try to silence those other voices, and in that silence try to hear God’s voice, try to feel God’s healing presence. I know how hard that can be. God can sometimes feel very far away; for God’s voice can be dim; it is a “still, small voice.” Sometimes all we can hear, as Paul says, is our own groaning. Perhaps even our groaning, if it is in prayer, can be enough for us.
I promised to say a word about loving scripture, just a few words. The most important thing is to remember that our faith is a biblical faith, it lives off scripture, and that like anything else that is living, it depends upon love, and so our faith asks us, no, begs us, to love scripture, to love those scriptural stories, to take them to heart, to let them nourish us, to love, for example, this morning’s story of Hannah, not that story’s ancient conception of God, but the underlying characteristic of faith present in Hannah’s life. For Hannah’s faith in God as a transcendent presence in her life leads her never to lose hope in the possibility of bearing a child. Her hope comes out of her faith, for faith without hope is a crippled faith. Hope implies a basic trust in the future, an openness to possibilities that we cannot foresee but have faith that God can draw us to them. We can love the Hannah story for the expression of that hope, for if ever we need to live with the hope that what does not look possible may yet be possible, it is today when our chances of sufficiently curbing our use of fossil fuel to avoid catastrophic climate change do not look good, for the voices of self-interest, personal, political, corporate self-interest, are powerful. Let us let that little story of Hannah vitalize us, for it reminds us that there is another voice out there, a transcendent voice, calling us, drawing us to life, goodness, truth, to possibilities we cannot see, but God can see. Brothers and sisters in Christ, let us never forget that we are not alone in this vast universe of ours, the universe itself, in its depth dimension, in its transcendence, in its divine ground, is with us, calling us, ever calling us towards a creative harmony, not only with our neighbors but with the whole earth and its inhabitants. Let us live our lives inspired by this hope that our faith gives us, and ...
Let us give thanks to God for it..
Let us give thanks to Christ.
Amen