At first hearing, today’s scriptures, about Hannah and from Hebrews, share little in common. They are separated by thousands of years. One is a family drama. One is called a letter, but really is a sermon, delivered to an unnamed community, somewhere in the Roman Empire. What connects them, for this morning, is hope. Each passage speaks of hope, of how to hope when life is difficult.
What do you imagine when I say hope?
- Hope is that thing with feathers perches on the soul and sings a tune without words, as Emily Dickinson so famously wrote.
- I live a hope despite knowing better, said James Baldwin.
- It is hard to have hope, says Wendell Berry… for hope cannot come by wishing…find it, then, on the ground beneath your feet.
The Christian story is a story of hope. Who are we? We are people of hope. This hope is not a casual cheerfulness, nor it is a sunny outlook disconnected from the reality. It a hope grounded in the real-ness of God and in the pain of the world. In scripture we see hope born of babies coming to barren women, hope emerging as dry land clears amid the raging sea, and hope rising as life exiting a tomb. “The creative newness of God forms our hope,” says priest Martin Smith. “Our future in God is always stronger than the ‘determinations of the past.’” Scripture teaches us how to hope.
When Hannah traveled with her husband and family on their yearly pilgrimage, the land was governed by judges, a series of short-lived rulers, some just, wise, and effective, but most weak, correct, and violent. It was a tumultuous time, a period in which hope for stability, security, and right community appeared dim. The dimness of the hope was represented by priest Eli’s eyesight fading and the lamp of the Lord being nearly extinguished. While Hannah may not have been thinking much about it, the barrenness of her womb symbolized the dilemma facing her people: an emptiness of life. Year and year she went with her family to worship. Year and year she prayed for same payer. She ate her meal alone while watching another woman eat amongst her children. Surely her hope to carry life in her belly was kindled with each trip, and when each year ended in barrenness, the hope mixed with grief, shame and isolation. As Ted Lasso said, “it is the hope that kills you.”
It is hard to keep hoping, when you have prayed and worked and waited, when you have waited, prayed, worked, and trusted, year after year after year. Hannah could have sunk into despair, resigned herself to never receiving the newness of God. She could have stayed home; refusing to pack an overnight bag when Elkanah prepared the mules and pulled out the tent, telling him, I am done appealing to a God who has forgotten me. Instead, persistence marks her life. Scripture describes her a deeply distressed. An alternate translation says she is stubborn, steadfast in naming her needs, imagining her future, holding hope amid her sorrow, and placing all before God, year after year after year.
When Samuel is born, he is new life, his own singular life. He is also a message to Hannah that God remembered her heart and heard her prayers. As joyous as the moment was for Hannah, Samuel’s birth had implications far beyond this singular family. For he will grow up strong in word of God, able to guide a people away from the era of ineffective, corrupt judges into a unified kingdom. Through Samuel, the people of God would be readied for a new day. As Bruce Birch says, “the seeds of dramatic social upheaval are planted through one life of faithfulness, trust, and love.” And notice whose life holds the seeds. It is the one of the margins, the one who appears to lack power, the one ridiculed, dismissed, and mistaken for disrespecting the sanctuary of God.
Hannah’s story is our story. We are heirs to her promise. She bears witness to hope born of stubbornness, to the persistence of prayer, to the openness to allowing our embodied lives to be channels of new life. Faithful persistence is always worthwhile. One life, lived in hope and trust, continually knocking on God’s door, gives birth to greater life for many. God is always at work, showing up in our stubborn insistence to accept nothing less than life lived in God’s holiness. Let us be stubborn in our hope; persistent in our insistence that God hear us, remember us, also.
Political turmoil, family drama, and personal distress form the backdrop of Hannah story. Hebrews speaks a different story. Here is a second-generation band of Christians who have grown complacent when their initial expectation for Jesus to come in all his fullness is met with disappointment. After the glory of the Resurrection and the electrifying coming of the Spirit, they were sure the world, despite its brokenness and violence, soon would be healed by Jesus’s triumphant coming. Instead, occupation continued, crucifixions continued, evil edicts came down from emperors. Taxes were high, food was scarce, travel was dangerous and meeting for church meant risking your life. So the congregation said, Why bother?
You know the feeling. You are certain the tide is flowing in the right direction. Soon life will be better. You are convinced a family rift is about to be mended, a candidate is going to win, a new relationship or job promotion will transform your life, or the right ruling will make the rough places smooth and the mountains level. . . until it doesn’t. The rift continues. The other candidate wins. The promotion goes to someone else. The rough places get rougher. The people addressed by Hebrews discover their beliefs are mocked, their job prospects dim, their friends have fallen away, and their future is in question. So what else does one do but pull back from the initial passion, resign yourself to caring a little less and playing it safe for a while? Into such a situation comes a word of clarity. Now is the time to understand Jesus a little bit better. And also a word of courage. Now is the time to do good.
In Hannah’s day, only the priest entered the Holy of Holies, but through Jesus’s life all of us are drawn into God’s intimate, loving, light-filled space. Jesus knows about pouring out love and being ridiculed, about attempting to heal and being shunned, about attempting to bless and being rejected. Jesus faced the world’s unjust cruelty and carried it into his grave, emerging the victorious suffering one. We who live in the time between his first victory and final one can have confidence in his hope-filled future. As Martin Smith puts it, because of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection, God’s capacity to make all things new, which is God’s real future, has seeped into the present and infused our time with hope.
The best way to access this hope is not by rubbing shoulders with the mighty, or keeping close tabs on the influencers. Hope in God’s future does not come by wealth, publicity, or official degree, but through worship. Worship: this sacred thing we do right here, with all its imperfections, Sunday after Sunday. For it is here that we grab hold of Christ, letting his power usher us into the mercy seat of God. It is here that we lift our voices to sing our faith, faith in things we cannot see nor accomplish on our own. It here that we reach across an aisle and shake a hand, giving another the peace that passes all understanding. It is here that we listen to sacred stories told for generations and say, “The word of God, which is active, piercing the heart and refining the soul.” It is here that enter our pleas for wars to cease, kindness to reign, leaders to be wise and God to protect those too long ignored. It is here, in worship, that I pray your heart is stirred to remember God’s faithfulness, because God is faithful, always laboring for our good.
As he calls us to worship, the author of Hebrews says, “provoke one another to love and good deeds.” Provoke one another. Agitate your neighbor. Provoke sounds like a negative direction. Peninnah provoked Hannah by teasing her about her empty womb. But this provocation is for greater faithfulness, for more courageous compassion, for deeper urgency to bring justice. It is, in John Lewis’s language, stirring up good trouble. Let’s pester each other to do good. When the future looked closed, Hannah persisted in prayer. When it was tempting to be discouraged by the world’s indifference, the encouragement came to remember Jesus’s suffering yet triumphant love. The way of God weaves through our world not by those deemed prominent or powerful, but the countless stubborn ones who persist in prayer, insist on compassion, and cling to faith in God’s capacity to make things new. Let’s be such persons for one another and the world. Amen.