I spent a lot of time thinking about what to say about the terrorist attacks in Paris, before I realized that there were also terrorist attacks made by the same group in Baghdad and Beirut which the news cycle had not taken quite so seriously. Then I realized that there were also deadly natural disasters in Japan and Mexico on Friday. Then I worried that there were likely other tragedies that I didn’t know about. Then I thought of the 200,000 deaths in Syria that have motivated 4 million refugees to leave their homes. Then I remembered that there are lots of refugees NOT from Syria. On Facebook I kept seeing these words, written by a poet named Warsan Shire from Nairobi, Kenya:<\/p>\n
\u201clater that night<\/p>\n
i held an atlas in my lap<\/p>\n
ran my fingers across the whole world<\/p>\n
and whispered<\/p>\n
where does it hurt?<\/p>\n
it answered <\/p>\n
everywhere<\/p>\n
everywhere<\/p>\n
everywhere.\u201d1<\/p>\n
I asked Drew Vickery, who was here this weekend for the CCCYM (Conference Council on Youth Ministries) event what he thought I should say about the attacks on Paris, and after a few hours he got back to be and said, \u201cNothing. I think you should focus on hope.\u201d #fromthemouthsofteens. I don’t have words to take away the pain of the world, I don’t have words that will stop or transform extremist militants, and I surely don’t have words that will bring any of the lives tragically lost.<\/p>\n
The hours I spent reading up on the terrorist group last night brought one imperative sentence to light, \u201cFor certain true believers\u2014the kind who long for epic good-versus-evil battles\u2014visions of apocalyptic bloodbaths fulfill a deep psychological need.\u201d2 This clarified my role for today: to offer a form of faith that is not about defining \u201cgood\u201d or \u201cevil\u201d but rather about seeking wholeness for ourselves that can encourage others into wholeness. So, here we go…<\/p>\n
Hannah is surprisingly resilient. It isn’t that painful things don’t seem to hurt her \u2013 they do \u2013 a lot! They don’t overcome her. We see it twice in her story. The first thing that we know about her is that she’s barren. Now, people in the ancient world did not think that barrenness COULD be a male problem, but even if they had, Hannah’s husband’s OTHER wife was distinctly not barren. A woman’s value came in her childbearing capacity, and to be barren was to be worthless. To be barren was to be ashamed. Hannah was barren.<\/p>\n
And yet…her husband loved her. This is not particularly normal, nor expected for marital relationships at the time. In fact, it looks like it was true in only one of Elkanah’s marriages. He loved Hannah, and he gave her preferential treatment because of it. His words indicate that he doesn’t even care that she’s barren, which I think supports the case that he really loves her and not just her \u201cvalue\u201d in his life.<\/p>\n
This was not sufficient for Hannah. She wanted to have a child. We are completely incapable of determining if this is about her maternal instincts or if it is about a desire not to be in shame, but let’s assume it is some of both. Her husband’s love did not take away her shame, although it may have helped her have resilience to it.<\/p>\n
Every year when she had the chance, she went to the house of God and prayed there. We’re told that she asked God to open her womb, and even tried to strike a deal with God about it. This is imperative to her story, she eventually gave birth to the prophet who would anoint the first kings, and it better be clear how faithful his mother was in order to establish his faith.<\/p>\n
This is the first place that I see Hannah’s unusual resilience. By most accounting, if a woman’s womb was barren, it was barren because of divine punishment. Yet, as one scholar put it,<\/p>\n
\u201cHannah at once embodies both the patriarchal constructions of her worth and a deep assumption that God is concerned about her. \u2026 When Hannah seeks out God’s presence in this state of anguish, her prayer signals that she is aware of a divine concern for those who are questionable worth. She does not come to God with formal petition. She does not come with traditional sacrifice. She comes in loneliness, isolation, and despair. She lays bare all the emotion and pain.\u201d3<\/p>\n
She believes that God cares about her, despite her barrenness, despite her shame. She is resilient to her own shame. It doesn’t stop her from seeking the Holy One AND making requests of God and EVEN bargaining with God (which is a dangerous idea). She doesn’t let it stop her, and that indicates that she thinks God might listen to her.<\/p>\n
That’s some GOOD theology for a mostly powerless, shamed woman 3000 years ago.<\/p>\n
There is a repetition of her resiliency as well. Eli, the priest, is often presented as not knowing a whole lot about God. He isn’t a bad guy, he just hasn’t had much contact with the Divine. So, when Hannah was praying with all her heart, Eli confused this with a drunken stupor, and decided to come up and shame her about that.<\/p>\n
She might have slinked away.<\/p>\n
But not Hannah. She, a lowly, barren woman corrected him. She is such a delight! She wasn’t mean about it, she correct his assumption. She has NOT been drinking. She explains that she was PRAYING (we don’t know if she gets this out with or without sarcasm in her voice), and she makes a request of him, \u201cDo not regard your servant as a worthless woman, for I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation all this time.\u201d She not only asks favors of God, she asks one of the high priest.<\/p>\n
And we should know something is going on by now, because Eli receives her correction and grants her request. Then God does too, and she gives birth to a child and names him Sam-u-el, \u201cGod has heard.\u201d<\/p>\n
I wish more people were like Hannah, refusing to be put in their place, denying the capacity of anyone else to define their value to the divine. I wish more people took the mantle of shame that other people tried to put on them and simply refused to wear it because they KNOW that they are worthwhile to God.<\/p>\n
The Magnificat of Mary which celebrates God’s mighty acts is song that fell from Mary’s lips when she was pregnant with Jesus. It is based strongly on Hannah’s song that she sang to celebrate God’s mighty acts when Hannah was pregnant with Samuel. Hannah’s song, just like Mary’s, focuses on God’s power to care for the poor, the broken, and the vulnerable. It also emphasizes God’s capacity and willingness to bring down the high, the mighty, and the rich. They are songs of celebration of God’s work for the disenfranchised. They are RADICAL claims about God that anyone with a vested interest in the status quo should worry about.<\/p>\n
Hannah is the Biblical predecessor to Mary. She’s a big deal, in large part because she knows that God cares about the people that the people don’t care about \u2013 including her.<\/p>\n
Hannah is a model of shame resilience on the basis of God’s grace, a model we desperately need in modern day Christianity. This week I read Karen McClintock’s book Shame-Less Lives, Grace-Full Congregations, and she had a lot of wisdom to share about shame and grace. Early on in the book she points out that, \u201cWe are encouraged by the dominant culture to self-improve rather than self-affirm and to strive for more rather than to be content with what is and satisfied with ourselves. The pervasive and soul-defeating presence of cultural shame leads to perfectionism, addition, and self-hatred.\u201d4 Later, she clarifies that, \u201cShame is not a course-correcting emotion. While guilt says, \u201cI made a mistake,\u201d shame says, \u201cI am a mistake.‘\u201d5<\/p>\n
At two point she offers the words that make SO MUCH sense of the world, \u201cShame is often the first tool grabbed off the workbench by those entrusted to maintain the status quo,\u201d6 and, \u201cBecause shame feels so terrible, we avoid it through the use of blame.\u201d7 But it wasn’t until she said, \u201cYou can never be satisfied with yourself if you are constantly striving to be as wise, good, kind, or as generous as God,\u201d8 that I knew she was preaching to me. She continued that point with a quote from Barbara Brown Taylor who said, \u201cI thought that being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was, and it was not until this project failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness.\u201d9<\/p>\n
Finally, since this is a quick run through of an excellent book, I want to offer one of her stories:<\/p>\n
“I had the opportunity to mentor a clergyperson I’ll call Sam during his first few years as a parish pastor. … To help him integrate his adult self and his ashamed little boy, I had him spend a few weeks between our conversations thinking of himself as ordinary. \u00a0I encouraged him to ask himself, ‘What would an ordinary person feel right now? \u00a0What would an ordinary person want, do, say? The exercise provided him with a reflective distance between his idealized self and his ordinary self. Once he accepted his ordinariness, he could balance service with replenishment and encouragement with separation."10<\/p>\n
I think Hannah knew how to do that. She was just an ordinary woman, so was Mary, and they knew God to care for ordinary people.<\/p>\n
With the possible exception of Jesus, every character in the Bible is visibly and deeply flawed. This clarifies that God works with and through real people, not perfect ones. They called on their actions sometimes, but God doesn’t ask them to \u201cshape up or ship out\u201d when it comes to their flaws. They’re just accepted as they are.<\/p>\n
Dear ones, God created you as you are and loves you are as you are. You need not be perfect, you need not be particularly GOOD, you need not be extraordinary. You are enough.<\/p>\n
May that knowledge fill the world.<\/p>\n
I suspect it will help. Thanks be to God and may God help us ALL. Amen \u00a0<\/p>\n
____<\/p>\n
1 Accessed at http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/quotes\/812310-later-that-night-i-held-an-atlas-in-my-lapon<\/a> 11-14-15.<\/p>\n 2 Graeme Wood, \u201cWhat ISIS Really Wants\u201d in The Atlantic March 2015 Issue. Accessed athttp:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2015\/03\/what-isis-really-wants\/384980\/ on Nov. 14, 2015.<\/p>\n 3 Marcia Mount Shoop \u201cTheological Perspective of 1 Samuel 1:4-20\u201d in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 4 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009) page 292.<\/p>\n 4 Karen A. McClintock, Shame-Less Lives, Grace-Full Congregations \u00a0(Herndon, VA: The Alban Intitute, 2012) p. 4.<\/p>\n 5 McClintock, 22.<\/p>\n 6 McClintock, 52.<\/p>\n 7 McClintock, 67.<\/p>\n 8 McClintock, 95.<\/p>\n 9 McClintock, 101, quoting Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), 218-219.<\/p>\n 10 McClintock, 107-109.<\/p>\n – <\/p>\n Rev. Sara E. Baron<\/p>\n First United Methodist Church of Schenectady<\/p>\n 603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305<\/p>\n