November 15, 2009
Grace Church
Rev. Robert E. Hensley

1 Samuel 1:4:-20; The Song of Hannah; Hebrews 10_11-14 [15-18] 19-25; Mark 13:1-8

      Let us pray.   Lord God, grant us the grace of Hannah, to admit the depths of our pain and to turn to you in our bitterness and despair. Grant us the grace of Hannah, to pour out our souls before you, no matter who may be looking on. Grant us the grace of Hannah to live obediently in response to your word. Grant us the grace of Hannah to return to you with songs and prayers of praise upon witnessing your providence and provision. Amen. 

      One summer day, a petite and well-poised 92-year-old woman, who fully dressed herself, put on makeup and fashionably coiffed her hair before 8 a.m. each morning, moved into a nursing home. Her husband of almost 70 years, a beloved pastor in their community, had recently passed away, which necessitated the move. 

      After many hours of waiting patiently, she smiled sweetly when told her room was ready. As she maneuvered her walker to the elevator, her escort provided a visual description of her tiny room, including the eyelet sheet that had been hung on her window. 

      “I love it,” she stated, with the enthusiasm of an 8-year-old who’d just received a new puppy. 

      “But Mrs. Jones, you haven’t seen the room yet.” 

      “That doesn’t have anything to do with it,” she replied. “Happiness is something you decide on ahead of time. How the room is arranged has nothing to do with whether or not I will like it…it’s how I have arranged my mind. I have already decided to love it!” 

      She went on to share with her escort, “Each morning when I wake up, I choose to be positive and work with what I have, not dwell on what I have lost. As long as my eyes open, I’ll focus on the new day and all the happy memories I’ve stored away just for this time in my life.”  (“Deposit a lot of happiness,” Just Between Us, Summer 2009, 6.” 

      In Hannah’s prayer, we hear a woman’s triumphant shout to God’s affirmation of her deepest desire.  It is similar to the exclamation you are probably going to over-use when the stuffing and turkey take their second and third laps around the table a week from Thursday.

      It is the word we wish that toddlers would learn, although they all seem to have mastered its opposite. 

      It also could be the simple, one-word summary of Hannah’s prayer in today’s passage. 

      “Yes!” 

      She is celebrating like Tiger Woods after sinking a 40-foot putt on the 18th hole at Augusta. Can’t you just imagine Hannah throwing that same signature fist pump? She not only got what she wanted, but she’s watching – with a considerable amount of satisfaction – as her opponents eat dust!  

      Hannah offers an ecstatic and emotional prayer but with some very mixed motives. 

      I will get back to Hannah’s celebration in a moment.  But first I want to look at her prayer, which was free and private. A lot of the ways that we celebrate are much more costly and conspicuous. For the most fantastic – and narcissistic – of public celebrations, all we have to do is look to the world of sports. 

      In soccer, the world’s most popular sport, goal celebrations are unmatched in their passion and flamboyance. A YouTube viewing of “best goal celebrations” is worth your time and will provide some hilarious glimpses into human nature.  

      These celebrations after scoring a goal, touchdown or other victory include gymnastic tumbling runs, back flips, break dancing, team conga lines and all manner of dance routines. Players will shadowbox, karate kick and stage mock gun battles. The most coordinated effort has to be the six guys who sit in a line and pretend to row a canoe across the field. 

      And all of this just because you have kicked a ball into a net or took a pigskin into the end zone. 

      It is the touchdown celebrations that are more familiar to most American eyes. Since I was living in Chicago at the time, I will never forget the 380-pound “Refrigerator” Perry doing the Super Bowl Shuffle. By far and away the most outlandish TD festivity involved the Saints’ Joe Horn pulling a hidden cell phone out from under the goalpost padding and making a celebratory call after he scored. 

      Then in 2006, the NFL – sometimes called the “No Fun League” – cracked down on these end-zone antics. Celebrants no longer can use any props or celebrate with any other player at the same time.

      An end-zone dance and a triumphant “YES!”  That’s the emotion that comes through Hannah’s prayer in our Old Testament text and canticle this morning. To fully understand her prayer, we need to remember her situation. 

      Hannah was one of Elkanah’s two wives. No, this isn’t a B.C. version of HBO’s Big Love. Polygamy was actually a cultural pattern throughout the ancient Near East. While that does not make it all that acceptable to most of us today, it is none-the-less true. Women could not easily provide for or protect themselves in a patriarchal society, and warfare decimated the population of available men, so it was inevitable that the surviving men would take more than one wife to re-populate war-ravaged societies. 

      In 1 Samuel, chapter 1, we read that there was some catty competition between Hannah and Peninnah, the co-wives. You think? 

      Bearing children was believed to be God’s blessing upon a woman, while barrenness was a curse. In this morning’s lesson, the fertile Peninnah was mocking Hannah’s infertility (1:6). That is so not politically correct if you stop to think about it from our modern sensibilities.  

      The barrenness, the competition, the perceived absence of God, and also perhaps the husband sharing – the whole set of circumstances left Hannah despondent (1:8), bitter (1:10) and desperate (1:11). She was at her wits’ end, and if God would just give her a son, she would gladly give him back to God as a priestly servant. 

      God answered her prayer, and Hannah gave birth to Samuel – a name meaning “asked of God” or “heard by God.” Then true to her word, Hannah presented Samuel as God’s servant at the temple (1:28). 

      Our text is Hannah’s psalm-prayer in response to the entire season of chapter 1. This prayer has much on which to reflect:  

• As poetry, it was intentionally and carefully crafted.  

• It reflects Hannah’s experiences while also paralleling Israel’s exodus experiences with God. 

• It goes far beyond her answered prayer, focusing on the character of the one who answered it. 

• Hannah’s praise is prophetic, looking to Israel’s future king and calling him anointed – The King and not merely an earthy ruler. 

• Her praise comes at the moment when she is leaving her son behind in ministry – an amazing and remarkable juxtaposition!

       But of everything that’s there, please pay attention to how distinctly human Hannah’s prayer is. It’s full of joyfulness and spitefulness in the same moment.

      A home run for her and a strikeout for others – Oh yeah!

      Beyond the parallelism to Israel’s enemies, the “others” referred to is really the other woman – Peninnah. Hannah derides her enemy and claims her own victory (2:1). She chastises prideful, arrogant words (v. 3). Hannah says the one with many children is forlorn (v. 5).

      When people celebrate their own fortune, that’s fine. But what happens when they celebrate the ill experienced by those around them? That’s just inhuman, right?

      The Germans have a word for it:  schadenfreude, and it’s quite human actually.

      Schadenfreude refers to one person’s pleasure in another’s suffering or misfortune. Researchers have shown that two things lead people to report higher levels of enjoyment at another’s hardship – if they possess low self-esteem and if they were previously envious of the other person.

      Given Hannah’s history as the object of Penninah’s scorn and derision, both seem likely. Her celebration might not be completely gracious, but you can understand where she’s coming from, can’t you? You really can understand her triumphant, “Yes!”

      Just like any other human being, Hannah is a complex blend of motivations, attitudes and actions. Not all are good, and not all are bad. Every person has seen this kind of fractured nobility. Through Hannah and her prayer, there are so many ideas present in this story.

      First, it is God we celebrate.  God ultimately provides all that we have. God is sovereign over all and is often gracious in giving us what we desire. “Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Creator of lights” (James 1:17).

      Most of us are far better at desiring and asking than we are at being thankful for what we receive. Like Hannah, we can look for God at work and be intentional in giving God credit and praise for how God moves. It is no different from the kind discipline of writing thank-you notes when we receive gifts. These gifts are God’s “Yes!” to us.

      Secondly, answered prayer is rarely instantaneous. Like the persistent widow who kept knocking on the judge’s door, Hannah went up to Shiloh to worship God “year by year” (1:7). How often did she ask God for a child, and how many years did she wait?

      Hannah is a reminder of the adage, “The best things in life are worth waiting for.”  So would we rather wait for those things we’re asking God for and receive them, or would we prefer never to have them but not have to wait? That is probably a good measure of whether it is a “best thing” or not.

      Next, like Hannah, we ought to be at our most honest while we are worshiping God. We often forget that God is omniscient; Jesus stunned people by knowing in his spirit what people were thinking in their hearts (Mark 2:8). This means we can tell God in prayer exactly what it is that we are thinking and feeling.

      How many times have we prayed “nice words” while doubting them? Have we ever been furious and felt overlooked while saying those familiar words in the Lord ’s Prayer, “your will be done”? God is actually hearing the words; God also reads the truth of our heart. So we might just as well be honest when we talk to God.

      Or how many times have we sung hymns in church without thinking about the words coming out of our mouths? Check out the hymns and songs today – there are some huge statements in those lyrics! Do we truly mean everything we’re singing? Corporate worship really is an odd time to tell lies.

      After all, there is no need for us to put our “best foot forward” because God knows how much our feet occasionally smell!

      That leads us to number four: God accepts an imperfect celebrator. We have and will again fall short of the holiness God wants for us. But that should never be something that keeps us from approaching and worshiping. Hannah has her inspired psalm-prayer recorded in Scripture, though God might possibly have preferred a wee bit less vengeance in her spirit.

      Five: we celebrate what we keep close to us, and we keep close to us what we celebrate. In Hannah’s case, this was her faith in God, but it was also her bitterness toward Peninnah and her desire for vengeance. She never got rid of it and ended up celebrating its fulfillment. What are we allowing to stay close to us that we shouldn’t? There is a very real danger that we might end up celebrating it.

      Six:  God does bring justice in time. Whether it was Israel’s wicked enemies, Hannah’s torture under mockery or our own experiences of injustice, God does see, and God does act. We read that “the Lord is a God of knowledge, and by God actions are weighed” (2:3).

      While it’s often hard to wait for justice or to believe that it will come, God does promise it. If not in this life, in the next. Good and evil do not ever go unnoticed by the Lord.

      Finally: Jesus Christ is God’s big “Yes!” to the world and for the world. In Christ, hope arrives incarnate, as do forgiveness, restoration and justice.

      So, the next time we find ourselves throwing our hands in the air and screaming after a touchdown, or after we get the promotion (and someone else doesn’t), or after we get anything we have wanted desperately, perhaps we can pause and reflect.  It is a good thing to pause and think about what, how and why we’re celebrating, and then to modify our celebration to emphasize more God’s gracious behavior toward us and emphasize less the misfortune of others.

      These are good lessons for us to learn, and Hannah gives us a textbook example of both.   Amen. 

Source: 
 
St. John, Warren. “Sorrow so sweet: A guilty pleasure in another’s woe.” The New York Times, August 24, 2002. nytimes.com/2002/08/24/arts/sorrow-so-sweet-a-guilty-pleasure-in-another-s-woe.html.