Text: 1 Samuel 1:1-20; 2:1-5; 8-10
Speaker: Joel Miller

Maybe you’ve heard this story before. 

A woman who can’t have children – a barren woman – lives in anguish.  Her husband has multiple wives, and the other woman, or women, do have children, adding to the pain.  But her husband loves her most of all, and tries to comfort her, to no avail.  The woman wants, more than anything, even more than her husband’s affection, a son.  She, and others, view her barrenness as an act of God, a blessing withheld, a curse, and so an inescapable mark of shame and worthlessness.  Through some combination of divine promise, persistence, or prayer, she eventually conceives, giving birth to a son.  She rejoices in this turn of fate.  The son goes on to be such a pivotal figure that the story of their people can’t be told without him.

This is the story of Sarah and her son Isaac through Abraham, to whom Jews trace their family lineage and to whom Christians trace our spiritual lineage. 

It’s the story of Rachel and her son Joseph, through Jacob, Sarah’s grandson.  Joseph, to whom the book of Genesis dedicates over a quarter of its chapters – from his alienation from his brothers, to his rise to power in Egypt, to his reconciliation with his family, even as he enslaves all of Egypt with his grain distribution policies during a famine.                     

And it’s the story of Hannah and her son Samuel.  Childless, Hannah prays and prays for a son.  She makes a vow, that if God will give her a son, she’ll give God a priest.  She prays at the temple of Shiloh, veering far enough away from the way you’re supposed to pray in a holy place that Eli, the aging priest, accuses her of being drunk.  She names her “great anxiety and vexation,” as the NRSV puts it.  Her prayer is finally answered.  Samuel is born. 

She raises him till he no longer needs his mother’s milk.  When he is still young, on her annual pilgrimage to Shiloh, she makes an offering of flour, and wine, and a bull; and she offers her son to the care of Eli.  And she leaves him there, like she’d promised.  Samuel grows up in the temple under Eli’s training.  Samuel becomes not just a priest, but a prophet and a political leader, anointing the first two kings of Israel:  Saul, and then David.

Whether you know these stories by heart, or this is your first time hearing them, they land in our world – like so many of these biblical stories – as distant, at times offensive; and familiar, very, very human. 

It’s hard to claim stories so defined by patriarchy.  It’s frustrating to get only small glimpses into women’s lives and to have their contributions largely reduced to child-bearing, after which they tend to fade from the story as attention shifts to their son.  It’s difficult to imagine just how important sons were, not just as status symbols or protectors, providers in one’s old age, although definitely those.  But also, in a time when the idea of individual life-after-death wasn’t really a thing, as a way of living on through one’s descendants, keeping one’s name alive, being remembered and honored in one’s community.  It’s complex to hear stories that highlight the struggle of infertility, but always end in childbirth.  It’s harsh to swallow a theology that equates getting what you pray for as a sign of divine favor, not getting it as a sign of spiritual failure. 

There’s also something about these stories that is inescapable.  They tell of humans living very human lives. People living within a culture that grounds them in their sense of purpose and identity, even as it keeps them bound up in certain roles and mindsets.  People aware of their own mortality, in relationship with a God they barely understand.  That sounds pretty familiar.       

Hannah is filled with longing.  And with longing, comes anguish because longing is never quite fulfilled.  We know this.  It’s risky to want something really bad.  To some, you might appear drunk, out of your mind.  Hannah prays, hard.  She makes a deal with the future.  And even when her prayer is answered the way she wanted, I think it’s safe to say that her longing never went away.  It may have increased.  How do you hold close your answer to prayer, nursing it into strength with your own body, only to hand it over to someone else?

The story goes on to say that Hannah continues to make her annual pilgrimage to Shiloh.  It doubles as an annual reunion with Samuel.  Each time she brings him a new robe, which she makes herself. Each year a little bigger, her hands at home tracing the outline of his absent body, anticipating the growth of her fulfilled prayer.  No doubt holding within herself more prayers, not necessarily fulfilled.  More longing.  Even, more anguish. 

Children or no children, it’s risky to want something out of life.  It’s a bold move to ask for a blessing.  Even bolder when you get a blessing to keep coming back to it year after year, knowing it has outgrown your previous efforts to care for it.  The blessing, now with a life of its own, calls for one’s own expansion.  More fabric to fit a larger frame.  More room within oneself to hold this ever-expanding prayer.

The story also goes on to record an extended prayer of Hannah’s, also called “The Song of Hannah.”  It’s different than her first prayer.  Its more expansive – way beyond her wishes for her own future.  It’s a big prayer from a big soul that has expanded to include the full scope of creation. 

Scholars have pointed to Hannah’s Song as the inspiration behind Mary’s Song.  This is Mary’s prayer while pregnant with Jesus, which we sometimes call the Magnificat, from Luke 1.  Our Voices Together hymnal includes the title “My Soul Cries Out.” It’s a paraphrase of Mary’s Song.  We’re going to experience these prayers of Hannah and Mary by interspersing spoken verses from 1 Samuel chapter 2 of Hannah’s words, which Zeus will read, with sung verses of Mary’s words from our hymnal, which Katie will lead.  So please turn to VT 412.

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Maybe you’ve heard this story before.  A person of little social standing becomes part of a divine process of bringing restoration to a people who desperately need it.  This person has no outstanding qualities other than their willingness.  The blessing, the gifting, forms first within them, then is birthed into the world, taking on a life of its own.  In bearing and birthing this life, the person comes to know in a way they couldn’t have previously imagined, that what has taken hold of them, wants to take hold of everything and everyone.  It can’t be contained within just one story.  Or better yet, it is THE story, the one that takes as many forms as there are willing people. 

Hannah and Mary sing of a world in which the powerful are humbled and the lowly are raised up.  This is the work of God, and they’re part of it.  They speak of the hungry being filled.  That’s not a metaphor.  That’s real people with names who are desparately hungry due to war or natural distaster or poverty having food they can taste and digest to keep them alive and strong. They speak of the bows of the mighty being broken.  We could update that to say the bombs of the superpowers have been dismantled.  These are prayers and songs that could be banned, and have been, by governments nervous about its message.  See British India.  See Guatemala during the 1980s civil war.  See various pockets of slaveholding America.  The prayers of Hannah and Mary were deemed too dangerous for these places to be recited aloud.

Hannah and Mary can see something – something beautiful – close enough to hold, yet still far away.  They are longing for it.  They want it.  They lift their voice to God as if the longing of God is speaking through them.  This is their public, expansive prayer.  The word Magnificat means to magnify.  To make larger. 

“My soul magnifies the Lord,” Mary says.  My soul is expanding to make more room for the God whose future will seriously mess with the current order of things.  Hannah and Mary are compelled in this by the birth of their children, Samuel, and Jesus.   

We’re having this strange, but maybe necessary public conversation right now about whether one needs to have children to have a stake in the future.  I never dreamed that “childless cat ladies” would be part of our political discourse, but these are disorienting times. 

I have no comment on the cats, but here are a few things I know.  I know there are couples and individuals in our congregation who have very intentionally and thoughtfully decided, for various reasons, to not have children.  I know that queer folks have helped expand our common understanding of what makes for a family, well beyond biological ties. 

I know that couples who experience infertility find themselves on an emotional roller coaster that can border on unbearable.

I know that raising children is demanding and life-altering and that no parent can do it alone. 

I know that the future for which Hannah and Mary pray, the one of which they sing with God-inspired conviction, is one in which we all have a stake and toward which every willing one of us has a responsibility.  Like a child, it wishes to be born through us, and, like a child, it is not ours to dictate.  We join as partners in its becoming, and what it will become, even in the parts of our lives we can most control, is far from clear.  Like a child, it will expand our souls, and it will outlive us.   

This is THE story.  The one of Sarah and Rachel, Hannah and Mary, Samuel and Jesus, and Columbus Mennonite Church.  We live in the longing.  We live in the anguish.  We live within a prayer that is best sung with as many voices that are willing to join.