26th Sunday after Pentecost

 

1 Sam 1:4-28; 2:11, 18-21; 2:1-10

This is the final week of our Season of Women, the church year is coming to a close and together this year we have been on quite a journey and we have heard so many powerful tales. Tales of women who are fierce in so many ways, women who are wise, women who lead armies, women who topple empires, women who proclaim the good news, women who lead through service, women, several women who challenge God (directly or through Jesus) so thoroughly that they change the mind of God.  

And now today we come full circle and we end where we began, with a mom.  We started this journey with a Mom, with Mary, the mother of God, agreeing to smuggle God into the world in her very body, with a story about a woman enduring great danger and great pain in order to say yes to God. We began with a mom singing a love song to her son about toppling the mighty and bringing justice to the poor.  And we have gone on a long and winding journey through the bible beginning to end and back again to end up right back to where we started, with another mom, Hannah, saying yes to God, and singing songs that change the world.

And I have dreaded this one a bit because I both love and hate this story.  Hannah hits me in heart.  As a Mom of young boys there is only so much Hannah I can handle.  But we need to see her today, we need to hear what she has to teach us, even if it is really hard.

Because all Hannah wants is to be a mom.  And it is more than just social obligation because her husband Elkanah loves her treats her well, he has other children so inheritance isn’t an issue, I think she just really wants to be a mom, and I get it.  And so she comes and she prays before the LORD and she makes a vow that if God will give her a son, she will dedicate him as holy to the Lord his whole life.  And when the priest Eli catches her, he accuses her of being drunk and she has to explain herself and then he says ‘may God do what you ask’.  And then she goes home and has a baby.

And the appointed lectionary story ends there.  Because the lectionary story is a story about men, about Elkanah and Eli and fundamentally it is told as an origin story about Samuel in order to introduce him as the main character of this book which named after him.  Because well he is important.  And the Church has a long and ongoing history of silencing women’s pain and ensuring that their stories don’t get told.

But not us, not today, because Hannah’s voice, her story, on its own merit is worth hearing even if we have to dig for it.  Because what she has committed to is devastatingly hard.  Her dream comes true, she becomes a mom, but now she has to give what she loves away to serve a bigger purpose.  And you can tell by the way she delays that this is hard, how could it not be?  But she follows through, the baby she wants, she loves, that she prayed for, she dedicates him to the Lord and turns him over to others even when he is still so small, maybe as young as 15 months old.

But even then, story doesn’t end, you really have to search for this last little nugget as the story moves on, back to powerful men, to the stories of the corruption and depravity of Eli’s sons which we skipped over.  But tucked deep inside, standing up against that, against cruelty and oppression of men who steal from the weak and the desperate, Hannah answers with love.  Our last couple of verses, Hannah’s last mention in the bible tell us that Samuel’s whole childhood as is little boy serving in the temple, every year, his mom brings him a little linen robe and tiny ephod to wear.  I remember the first time I read this, years ago when my boys were babies, actually crying over this line, over this little boy in the temple in his mom’s tiny robe.  There is something so beautiful and so heartbreaking about this image. 

And this is actually a pretty big deal because this stuff is really expensive and hard to make.  Priestly robes had to be made from pure fine linen, uncut with easier to work with cotton or wool, and they had to be woven by hand in a single piece.  They would have taken immense skill and hundreds of hours to create, every year, for a woman who before long had 5 other children at home to care for.  But she never gives up on Samuel, the boy she wanted, the boy she prayed for, even when she has other sons that stay home with her, her love and devotion never wanes.  Does Samuel feel it, a boy alone in the temple, but wrapped every day in his mother’s love?  Does he treasure this gift and those few days a year with her?  How does this love shape who he becomes and what he grows to do?

Because we learn something else today too.  Before Hannah leaves Samuel in the temple, right before she goes home, before she weaves that first robe, she sings him a song.  Hannah’s Song, the song we sang as our Psalm today and it is fierce.  And it might sound a bit familiar, because it has a twin, it is very closely related to Mary’s Song, the  Magnificat, the first song we heard in on our journey this year.  And they fit well into this parallel tradition of scripture, secrets hidden in plain sight within the bible’s text.  Songs and stories about how the mighty fall and the weak are vindicated, about how the poor are fed and the rich are sent away empty.  Songs of women, passed down through ages, secret songs, protest songs, freedom songs, songs and stories told around fires and in tents, songs that led slaves to freedom.   These are the tales women keep and songs they sing because they know that powerful men rarely listen until it’s too late.

So Hannah leaves Samuel with a song about who he will be and what God will do through him.  Did she sing it at the loom when she wove his robe?  Did she sing it when they saw each other each year?  Because that song becomes the story of Samuel’s life, and he walks in its shadow all his days, as he vanquishes Eli’s corrupt sons and bring peace to Israel, as he anoints Saul and eventually deposes him, as he elevates David from shepherd to king, through feast and famine, war and peace that song rings true, that love song sung to a baby gives birth to the kingdom of God.

So that is what we learn today.  That is what we learn from Hannah, what we learn from all these women.  It begins and ends with love.  Love that changes the world.  Love that wins.  Over hate and death, corruption and fear.  Love that never dies.

So can we learn to love like Hannah?  Are we strong enough to sing these songs?  In a world where our leaders sometimes seem a lot more like the corrupt and cruel sons of Eli, than like Jesus, can we love enough to keep singing Hannah’s song and Mary’s song? Will you whisper, will you hum, will you break out into song, that the Lord breaks the bow of the mighty and girds the weak, the Lord sends the rich away hungry while poor feast, he lifts the needy to places of honor, he brings life out of death.

Just like Samuel does indeed go on to do all those things.  And Jesus goes on to do all these things.  We too can do all these things.  Because a mother’s love is powerful enough to do all these things.  This is how we win.  By loving when others hate.  By loving in the face of pain and oppression and loss, by loving even when it is hard and dangerous and feels impossible.  This is how we let the women of the bible lead us, by showing us how to love so that maybe one day we too can sit down at the loom and weave songs of love into the fabric of the world.  Amen.