Love, Always

Sermon

Hannah’s prayer is considered the spiritual ancestress to “Mary’s Magnifcat” that Mary, mother of Jesus, prays after learning she is pregnant and visiting Elizabeth. Hannah, like Mary (and others), is written to have had a miracle birth, and to a sort of regal line, no less: Samuel, one of Israel’s latest and greatest judges, and Jesus, the prophesied king of God’s people.

And like Mary’s Magnificat, to understand and give meaning to Hannah’s prayer, we have to understand Hannah, the person. Because Mary’s soul magnified the Lord for a reason, the person of Mary was chosen for the Gospel for a reason; Hannah, Hagar, Ruth, Esther, Naomi, Rebecca are presented as integral, necessary, characters for both the Jewish faith and Christian, for a reason.

“My heart exults in the Lord…I rejoice in your victory…The Lord will judge the ends of the earth; he will give strength to his king and exalt the power of his anointed.”

Without knowing Hannah, the prayer can sound like a battle song—”Our Deity kills, not Yours!”—or a text to justify the genocide and land theft of indigenous people—”We call ourselves Christian, so we have reign over all the earth!”—or to justify the actions of any clown that a group of people want to consider anointed—”Trump is chosen by God.” (If you knew Hannah, bet you wouldn’t use her prayer.)

So, how do we make sense of Hannah’s prayer, of Mary’s Magnificat, that does have this “Old Testament” language of a vengeful and fearful God that seemingly appoints people to judge the ends of the earth? And why are Hannah, Mary, Elizabeth, so happy that they and their children are going to be a part of that judgment?

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I have a Christian friend who is married and one of his wives just had a baby. He has two wives and loves telling me about his life. I’m learning to learn. He seems very happy, so he loves telling me about his life. He does already have a few children with one of his wives, but one wife had been struggling with infertility, and she was really sad. I can’t imagine, I told him, how hard it must have been for her to learn that. He told me, “Well no, we just know it has to be her because I had kids with Penny.”

“Well, there could be a lot of reasons; is she happy?”

“Of course she’s happy! I give her twice the allowance I give Penny, even though Penny’s the one with kids. Still, she won’t eat, she won’t drink, she’ll barely sleep with me. I go to church every week and pray that she just gets happy, but she won’t. It could be Penny, maybe she rubs it in her face that Penny has kids and she doesn’t. But, yeah otherwise, she has no reason to be unhappy when I give her everything. But now, she’s even happier. So I’m just going to let her do what she thinks is best for the kid. She might stay with her family for a while.”

Thank goodness, I thought to myself.

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I hope it was obvious when this character started talking about his wife’s happiness, that this is not actually about a friend of mine. This fake but painfully familiar conversation is a general outline of the brief glimpse we get into Hannah and her story, and what, narratively, leads into her prayer.

This is not how this passage is presented, however—Scripture does not say that they didn’t consider the many reasons for infertility; maybe it really was the case that with all the doctors and science of their time, they were able to figure out that in the numerous instances of infertility in Scripture, it really never was the man’s fault. Scripture also does not tell us that Hannah was unhappy or not in love. In fact, the authors tell us directly: she was loved. Scripture doesn’t tell us that Hannah’s husband was obtuse, it tells us that he really was confused about why his one of two wives was sad even though he gave her double the portion of meat and loved her so much.

Scripture presents us the story of Samuel’s birth, who was born to an infertile woman, one of two wives to a husband who loved her. She was depressed because she couldn’t have a child, and so she prayed faithfully for a child and was rewarded by a priest and God with a child, who would then go on to become Samuel. A heroic origin story.

So, why then is it important that we consider the in-between, the missing voices, in these kinds of stories—particularly when it might make a seemingly simple and happy story of God opening Hannah’s womb turn into a much more discomforting one of a woman forced into an untenable marriage for survival, told by her husband, her priest, her community, over and over again that it is her body that fails her, fails her husband, fails the Lord, and then told to “get over it” because she gets double the portion of food, whose heart changes and then she bears a child, who will go on to eventually become the wise judge Samuel.

It makes rational sense, makes moral sense, and makes theological sense that we consider the in-between and the characters, voices, perspectives missing from the Scripture we have in front of us today.

As we experience in our day-to-day life, our relationship with God is not transactional. We can’t and don’t rely on only prayer for food and shelter; we pray in gratitude, for the food, for the hands and labor of love that put the food together, for a home. You might pray for your team to win, but you know God’s not really on the side of one team or another; God wants people in community, celebrating or mourning together, breaking bread together, being human—cursing at terrible calls, debating which era is the better era, together. Instead, we feel’s God presence with us when we’re alone in prayer or when we fellowship or pray with our community. And we pray for God’s guidance so that we might “live up to our potential,” “be the best version of ourselves,” not so that we can secure a seat in heaven, but because we know God desires for our thriving and flourishing. For individuals, each person’s potential and call is unique, and to live up to potential, to be the best version, is to trust in the identity, voice, perspective you have been gifted, and to trust that your individual identity is a part of the same collective call that Hannah and Mary knew they and their children were a part of: God’s call towards wholeness, the in-breaking kin-dom.

And so we encourage prayer through therapy and emphasize mental health, encourage aligning ourselves with social workers and teachers, call for demonstrations against oppressive and dehumanizing systems, because our individual wholeness is inevitably tied to collective wholeness—a truth embedded into the faith of Hannah, of Mary, of the many people here and before us who held fast onto what is good, the people before us who recognized evil and hated it, and who let love be genuine by grounding it in the lives of those forced to live without having their most basic human needs met.

Hannah’s is not a prayer of a petty person praying to a god who answers the prayers of the mighty, praying for the downfall of her enemies, but this is the prayer of a person who has been perceived as lowly, treated as an object, disregarded and ostracized, purely because she uses she/her pronouns, praying to God, who listens to the prayers and cries of the oppressed.

Having gotten to know Hannah, I can understand her “Old Testament” language and general understanding of a maybe more vengeful God. Having fallen victim to the god of power, you want to hope that just desserts are a-coming for the oppressor, and that it might look similarly to how you’ve been oppressed—the swinging of the violence pendulum. But, having gotten to know Hannah and Mary, I’ve appreciated learning that praying to a god who only hears the prayers of the mighty only perpetuates the reality of oppression within our own selves and as a society. Praying to God, who hears the prayers of those who are treated as lowly, directs us towards a reality of wholeness as individuals and as a people.

I have more faith in God’s judgment over the ends of the earth coming from the wisdom of a person persecuted for the sake of righteousness than I ever will when told to me from those with ulterior motives to hold onto power. And I do so—entrust faith in the wisdom of those whose desire for wholeness includes not only themselves or their “in-group” but everyone, including myself—because it makes rational, ethical, and theological sense. When I do, I know it by how it fills my heart and soul with love, always.

Hannah and Mary’s heart and soul exult and magnify the Lord, not because they are women and are having a child, not because they had their prayers for a child answered, but because they are the few people in Scripture whose faiths are wholly affirmed. And not only has their faith in God, who hears the cries of the oppressed, been affirmed, Hannah has learned she and Samuel have been called to participate in the creation of the community of God’s people, called to help actualize her faith, where:

The bows of the mighty are broken, the feeble gird their strength; brings low and exalts; makes poor and makes rich…

Where power and wealth are made level, when lofty positions of power that don’t need to exist, no longer do, when women and men are able to make the same amount, where healthcare, food, and shelter aren’t tied to labor.

Pursue wholeness, for yourself and for the world. Direct yourself towards that which makes you full, avoid that which breeds anxiety and distrust in yourself. Lean into trusted communities and voices, and keep a keen eye and open heart to embrace how God might be calling you to individual and collective wholeness. What does it mean for you to live a meaningful life? What does a “meaningful life” entail?

When you do, you might find yourself surrounded by those who have been treated as lowly or you’ll learn that it’s happened to the people you’ve already been surrounding yourself with. Then, you’ll learn to recognize the unnecessary burdens that make us feel separate from others and even ourselves, the unsureties and insecurities that hinder us from joy. And once those burdens and insecurities and walls are let down, we discover in ourselves a capacity of love for self and for the world that far exceeds our own comprehension. When we pursue this kind of wholeness for ourselves and for the world, they and we will know it by our heart and soul that magnify the Lord and love, always.