1 Samuel 1:4-20

The town of Manchester, England once knew some very good times. It was the hub of the Industrial Revolution and the home of Rolls Royce automobiles. Although its past was remarkable, its present is simply a sad reflection of the depressed economy affecting similar towns around the world, not to mention towns all over Ohio. For now, the only thing the residents of Manchester can count on is this: their town’s future is uncertain.

Stefani Schatz is a young Episcopal priest serving a working-class church in Manchester. Most of the members of her small church are unemployed and have been for years or, in some cases, for generations. Many of them know only the loneliness and shame of never having meaningful work and they find solace in drugs and alcohol. The region, and its people, are depressed.

“There is no sense of hope,” Stefani says. “So many people believe that nothing will change, nothing will get better...This feeling pervades everything.” (1)

That feeling of depression, hopelessness, and despair for the future was exactly what had defined the life of Hannah, whose story we just heard. Where our culture values above all one’s ability to be a productive, working member of society, Hannah’s culture valued a woman’s ability to bear children, and particularly sons. Hannah had a husband who loved her, she had food and shelter, but none of this could make up for the fact that she did not have children. And she couldn’t even speculate that the fault lay with her husband, Elkanah, since his other wife, Peninnah, had multiple children, both boys and girls. Hannah knew that whatever the reason she didn’t have children, the fault lay with her. Even worse, there was no knowledge of the many biological reasons she may have been infertile; in those days people believed if you couldn’t have children, God was simply punishing you. So Hannah believed that nothing would change, nothing would get better...and that feeling pervaded every moment of Hannah’s life.

The Bible tells us that Hannah was miserable, she cried all the time and had no appetite. Hannah’s present, even though she had a loving husband, was gray and colorless, and her future, no brighter. And things were bad enough at home, where Penninah was always making snide comments, but the worst was the one time each year when the whole family travelled together to the temple at Shiloh. There, in public, Penninah made sure everyone knew that the children with them were hers, not Hannah, and that Hannah was barren, that God was punishing her. Every year, Hannah dreads this trip.

Then, one year, at the annual pilgrimage to the temple at Shiloh, she decides she can’t stand her own despair one second longer. After the misery of having to share a celebratory meal with Elkanah and Peninnah and their noisy brood of children, listen to what the text says happened: “After they had eaten and drunk at Shiloh, Hannah rose.”

The preacher James Forbes says that he tells every couple who is expecting a baby girl that they should name her Hannah Rose. Hannah rose. Finally, after years of depression and despair and staring into a hopeless future, Hannah made a decision to act, and she rose up from the table. Hannah rose and she went to the Lord’s house, the temple. (2)

And as Hannah rises and goes to the temple, a glimmer of hope enters our story.

Hannah enters the temple, and once inside she worships, she prays, she weeps, she spills out her despair to God. Perhaps she has simply grown weary of acting like she has it all together, of putting on a happy face for her husband, of trying not to react when Peninnah cruelly provokes her, pouring salt in the wound of her barrenness. Maybe she has had enough of her own tears. If God is punishing her, then she is going to share those tears with God. Hannah even goes so far as to bargain with God, promising that if God grants her a son she will return the child to the temple and dedicate him to God as a nazirite, a servant. Hannah prays so fervently and with such passion that the priest who sees her accuses her of being drunk! But she assures him otherwise. “I am not drunk,” she says, “I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord.”

“I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord.” Maybe that’s an experience you have had yourself or maybe you’ve even witnessed someone else doing it. But in Old Testament times, people didn’t go to the temple to pour out their souls before the Lord. They went to the temple to bring sacrifices, the first fruits of their harvest and their livestock, and to present these sacrifices to the Lord in the hope that God would bless them. When Hannah rose up from that table and entered the temple to pour out her soul before the Lord, that is the first time in the Old Testament someone uses the temple to directly petition God. No wonder Eli thought she was drunk! Even the priest didn’t have any idea what she was doing!

Stefani Schatz, that Episcopal priest in Manchester, has witnessed people pouring out their souls before the Lord, and she says she most often sees it happen, not in the course of Sunday morning worship or during weddings or baptisms, but at funerals. Since she became the pastor of the Manchester church, she has done a lot of funerals, nearly one a week, not because the church is so big, but because the congregation is older and generally not in good health. But in the midst of all these funerals, she has discovered something: when people bring their sorrow and despair into the church for the funeral of a loved one, God meets them there. The minute they enter the church to worship and pour out their grief and sadness -- to pour out their souls -- before the Lord, they are changed. “Men cry, people comfort each other,” Stefani says. “Submerged in the mourning, I see such joy.” (3)

Although Hannah didn’t enter the temple at Shiloh for a funeral, she buried something there when she poured out her soul before the Lord. When she left the temple after receiving the assurances of the priest that God heard her cries, she was able to return to her family, to eat and drink with her husband, and, the Bible tells us, she was no longer sad.

Did you notice what happened there? Before her prayer was even answered, Hannah was no longer sad. The joy that had been submerged in Hannah’s mourning surfaced because she rose and entered the temple and when she did that, God entered her story. And when that happened, Hannah’s understanding of herself changed. She was no longer defined by the value afforded to her by her society; she now knew that she belonged first to God, the God who received her prayer. And she knew this even before that prayer was answered.

And indeed, Hannah’s prayer was answered. “In due time,” says the text, she conceived and bore a son. And Hannah kept her side of the bargain and took her son to the temple of Shiloh. She rose up again and offered her son -- her first fruits -- to the Lord.

If that was the whole of the story, if the story simply ended there, with Hannah taking her son to the temple and presenting him to the priest, nearly bursting with pride, it would be a story worth telling and a story worth preaching. Hannah’s story reminds us that when we rise up and go to God’s house, which for us is here, the church, and when we present our whole selves to God, not just our reverence and our gratitude but our depression, despair, and anxiety for the future, God receives us. When we enter God’s house to pour out our souls before the Lord, God enters our stories and brings new life from our barren soil.

So if the story ended there it would be enough, but it doesn’t end there. Hannah’s son, the one she dedicates to the Lord, is Samuel, and Samuel will grow up to be the last of the judges over Israel. Samuel will oversee Israel’s transition from a group of tribes ruled by judges to a nation ruled by a king. Samuel will be the “kingmaker,” anointing first Saul and finally David, who will rule Israel for more than forty years.

At the beginning of 1 Samuel, Hannah isn’t the only one waiting on God to deliver her from an uncertain future. As Walter Brueggemann puts it, “Israel is a community in moral chaos.” (4) So when Hannah enters that temple in Shiloh and pours out her soul before the Lord, she is playing out her particular story, yes, but she also represents this particular historical moment in the story of Israel. At this moment, Israel is barren, its future as a nation, as a people, is by no means certain. It is not until the appearance of David that Israel’s story begins to change, and without Samuel, there would be no David.

Behind Samuel and David, two heroes in the story of Israel, stands a depressed, bereft, barren young woman named Hannah. Like Hannah, Israel must pour out its soul before the Lord and wait for God to enter the story and bring the first fragile green shoots of new life from its barren soil.

*****

At the 1996 summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, things were tense for the American women’s gymnastics team. The team competition had come down to the Russians and the Americans and on the last day of competition, with just one rotation left for each team, the Americans had a slight lead. The Russians’ last rotation was floor exercises in which they were very strong. So if the American gymnasts did not perform exceptionally well on the vault, they would lose the gold medal to the Russians.

Kerri Strug was the last member of the team to vault. But on her first attempt, she under-rotated the landing and fell. When she stood up, she was limping on her left foot. But with a look of steely determination, Kerri sprinted down the mat again and launched herself into the air. She executed a spectacular vault, stuck the landing and then immediately began hopping on her right leg, clearly in agonizing pain.

In that moment, overcoming her injury to capture the gold medal for her team, Kerri Strug gained the love and affection of the entire country she represented. It wasn’t just because it was a great story; it’s because it was our story. She overcame adversity, she “pulled herself up by her boot straps,” “she took one for the team.” Announcer John Tesh even suggested that Kerri’s story went beyond her country when he said, “Her story is an inspiration to every adult, to every youngster who has ever had a dream.”

The story of Kerri Strug wasn’t just about Kerri Strug. It was about her team, her country, and even all humanity. Stories like that are bigger than just one person. That is also true of Hannah’s story. The story of how barren Hannah rose and poured out her soul before the Lord, and then conceived and bore a son who grew up to anoint the great King David is not just Hannah’s story. Her story was also Israel’s story, the story of how God creates life where it looks like all hope for the future is lost. And later, a barren world would discover that Hannah’s story is not just Israel’s story, but the story of a world, mired in chaos and confusion, who received not an earthly king, but Christ the King, God in human flesh, come to show us that what is so hard for us to believe is indeed true: that God longs to stand with us in our despair and hopelessness and make a new way where we thought there was none.

When, like Hannah, we have been driven to despair trying to understand where God is in our stories, we need to rise up and enter the church, plant ourselves in a chair in God’s waiting room, and pour out our souls before God, no matter how foolish or intoxicated we might look to anyone who sees us, trusting that God will grant us the gift of seeing how our stories are part of God’s story, the gospel story, in which poor, barren women are lifted out of their despair, a young shepherd boy becomes a mighty and powerful king, a tiny nation of chosen people shines a light to all the world, God takes on human flesh and walks among us, and when Jesus is unjustly condemned to death, after three days he will rise. Hannah rose...and so can we. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. 1 Howard, Anne Sutherland, Claiming the Beatitudes. The Alban Institute, 2009, p. 34.
2. Forbes’ sermon on this passage, “Hannah Rose,” can be found online here.
3. Howard, p. 35.
4. Brueggemann, Walter, First and Second Samuel (Interpretation commentary series), John Knox Press, 1990, p. 10.