Church & Vulnerability

"Church & Vulnerability"

1 Samuel 1:4-20
November 15, 2009

When Elkanah sacrificed, he passed helpings from the sacrificial meal around to his
wife Peninnah and all her children, but he always gave an especially generous helping
to Hannah because he loved her so much, and because GOD had not given her
children. But her rival wife taunted her cruelly, rubbing it in and never letting her forget
that GOD had not given her children. This went on year after year. Every time she went
to the sanctuary of GOD she could expect to be taunted. Hannah was reduced to tears
and had no appetite.
Her husband Elkanah said, "Oh, Hannah, why are you crying? Why aren't you eating?
And why are you so upset? Am I not of more worth to you than ten sons?"
So Hannah ate. Then she pulled herself together, slipped away quietly, and entered
the sanctuary. The priest Eli was on duty at the entrance to GOD's Temple in the
customary seat. Crushed in soul, Hannah prayed to GOD and cried and cried—
inconsolably. Then she made a vow:
Oh, GOD-of-the-Angel-Armies,
If you'll take a good, hard look at my pain,
If you'll quit neglecting me and go into action for me
By giving me a son,
I'll give him completely, unreservedly to you.
I'll set him apart for a life of holy discipline.
It so happened that as she continued in prayer before GOD, Eli was watching her
closely. Hannah was praying in her heart, silently. Her lips moved, but no sound was
heard. Eli jumped to the conclusion that she was drunk. He approached her and said,
"You're drunk! How long do you plan to keep this up? Sober up, woman!"
Hannah said, "Oh no, sir—please! I'm a woman hard used. I haven't been drinking. Not
a drop of wine or beer. The only thing I've been pouring out is my heart, pouring it out
to GOD. Don't for a minute think I'm a bad woman. It's because I'm so desperately
unhappy and in such pain that I've stayed here so long."
Eli answered her, "Go in peace. And may the God of Israel give you what you have
asked of him."
"Think well of me—and pray for me!" she said, and went her way. Then she ate
heartily, her face radiant.
Up before dawn, they worshiped GOD and returned home to Ramah. Elkanah slept
with Hannah his wife, and GOD began making the necessary arrangements in
response to what she had asked.
Before the year was out, Hannah had conceived and given birth to a son. She named
him Samuel, explaining, "I asked GOD for him."

Last week I was listening to the Tavis Smiley show on National Public Radio, and I
stumbled upon a conversation between Tavis and a professor who was discussing the
rise in people using social networking websites, or internet applications like Twitter, to
share their most deeply held thoughts, anger, or bitterness. I don’t remember what the
incident was that brought on the discussion, but there have been so many of them of
late—you have NFL players complaining that they aren’t getting enough playing time
on Twitter, or you have people airing out the dirty laundry of their former love interests
on Facebook. You have a couple of congressman using Twitter to make some clearly
racist remarks about the President, and then, of course backpedaling faster than they
plunged down that road to begin with. Again, this sharing of stuff is beyond just
acknowledging that a relationship has begun or ended—you can do that on Facebook,
you know—but it’s using the tool of the internet to thrown that former partner under the
bus, hoping that their friends are willing do some hit and run with you. Way back in the
nineteen nineties, people would go to chat rooms that were focused on a particular
company and the performance of their stocks, and deliberately give false information,
and sometimes true information, in order to get the stock to go up or down, depending
on their motives. This was done anonymously, of course, and that is the lure, isn’t it,
the ability to share without necessarily having to out oneself to the whole world.

On one hand, that’s what makes the internet so useful, so good, is that it does allow
people to share with each other, hopefully positively, without having to disclose their full
identities, perhaps sharing their problems with strangers who can give positive,
constructive advice. And yet, that anonymity also means that people can tear each
other down, can spread lies and untruths, and rarely have to own up to their meanness
and lack of personal character. One of the few times when someone was held
responsible was a few years ago, when a mother of teenager wanted to hurt her
daughter’s rival by creating a false MySpace profile of young man who feigned an
interest in the young girl. The mother, under obviously false pretenses, strung this
poor girl along, playing with her heart, and then ultimately revealed that it was a hoax,
setting up the girl for ridicule to her classmates. The poor girl was so hurt and
humiliated that she killed herself, and the mother, rightfully so, was brought before the
courts, and most importantly, was brought before the public for the kind of public
lashing that she rightfully deserved. There is a good side to the internet, in that it
allows us a chance to seek answers, and seek support on the journey, but the shadow
are there too, the shadows are clearly right there to see in the despicable actions of
this mother.

And yet, the sadness for me is that it sometimes feel that the internet is the only place a
lot of folks can go to seek a fellow traveler, or to divulge their struggles, or the pain of
their journeys. Somehow we have come to trust each other less and less, as if having
to admit an actual struggle to one another is somehow a sign of personal or social or
financial weakness—to say to each other, “I really am having a hard time, I am hurting,
things are not so good, I sometimes wonder where God is in all this, I sometimes have
thought about ending my life,” is somehow a sign of personal failure, as if we have to
have it together all the time, and for a mature adult not to have it together, to not be on
top of things all the time, not being to always manage things in one life perfectly, is a
source of shame. And for those of us who follow after the way of Jesus, of the Christ, it’
s even more difficult, because we’re often told that to have faith is to have the answers,
is to have complete trust in God, and then to have to admit that one is sometimes
depressed, hurt, disappointed, in the world, in God, and in your life…well, it unnerves
people, it makes them uncomfortable, as if people of faith are never to show doubt,
hurt, pain, or disappointment. It’s almost as if we Christians forget whom we follow, this
Jesus who goes to Gethsemane to beg God to make it stop, to make the pain stop, to
make the pain of the future stop, as if we don’t follow a Savior who has shown us his
human side as much as he shown us his divinity. Ironically enough, we follow a Master
who often times is more human than we allow ourselves to be, who is willing to show us
his own disappointment in God, in fate, in others, than we will ever allow ourselves to
express to another human being, especially another Christian.

Friends, this happens too much in the church, and it happens too much in this place,
as it does in all places of Christian worship. You know, this story today in Scripture
really does illustrate that truth—the Scripture illustrates many things, the foremost is
the faithfulness of God to Hannah and the often unseen hand of God in the history of
Israel—but it also clearly illustrates how often we are unwilling to share our woes with
each other, our pain, our sorrows. You have Hannah—I love that name—you have
Hannah wanting a male child badly, because, of course, in a male dominated society,
sadly, males are more prized than females, and she finds herself in an odd competition
with the other wife—again, another mark of how patriarchal the culture really was. The
second wife taunts her for being without child and it cuts Hannah to the quick. Her
husband tries to console her, tries to express to her in deed and words that her
barrenness means nothing to him, that he cares for her for who she is, not for the
children she does or does not give him, which is to his credit, considering the culture he
lived in, where marriage was seen less as being about love and companionship and
more about children and heirs and property rights.

And the next things she does is eat and rise—in fact, in another translation, it says that
Hannah rose, and the great preacher James Forbes, retired now from the Riverside
Church in New York City, says that he thinks there is no finer name for a woman than
that, Hannah Rose, because it speaks of great power, even in this heartbreaking
situation—she rose up, she got herself together, and she went to temple to pray to
God, she went to church, and the interesting thing here is that she goes right by the
priest Eli, ignoring him almost, and perhaps that is why he is watching her so intently,
wondering whether or not her silent prayer is more like a case of public intoxication.
Even now, in the midst of her prayer and her sorrows, the patriarchy, the male
dominated society, is unnerved by her power—she ignores the priest and goes straight
to the altar, so to speak…But, of course, the situation is explained after Eli confronts
her with his false accusations, and he sends her off with a blessing.

There are two things to this story I want to point out: one is that I am heartened that she
went to the temple to lay her burdens down, that the temple was a place of spiritual
safety, and that she felt she could share her burdens with God in that place. One of
the things that has always broken my heart is the fact that so many don’t feel that way
about the church in general. It was interesting that when the economic fall-out happen
last year, most churches, including our own, actually experienced a dip in attendance,
and that was my experience in 2001 after 9/11, especially after a month or so after the
attacks on the World Trade Center. Surveys showed that there was brief upsurge in
attendance in religious communities after the events of September 11, but it quickly
dissipated, and figures show the attendance dropped significantly, all across the
country. It seems that for many people, not all people, but for many, the reality is that
the tougher the times, the more it drives some people to stay away from church.
Maybe they feel embarrassed, maybe they feel so emotional that don’t think the church
isn’t right place or safe place to show that emotion, maybe they don’t trust the church to
hold that pain well, and honor it, without having to try cover it up with religious pieties
and empty religiosity, some of which may contain some truth, but is inappropriate at
that moment. Whatever the reasons, people often run from the church when they are
hurting the most, which is heartbreaking, isn’t it? But not Hannah, Hannah comes to
the Temple to unload her deepest pain, and her most fervent hopes and prayers
before God, and I wish that we could all be like Hannah in that way, that we would do
what Hannah did when she rose up, got herself together and came to this place to ask
God for what she thought she needed most, which was a child.

And yet, I know it’s more difficult than that, to come here or any church community and
actually say “this is what I need, this is what I hope for”—nd sometimes it can be
overwhelming to a congregation to experience overwhelming pain. In the first
congregation I pastored in Spokane, Washington, we had a portion of our worship
service like we have in our service here, the Joys and Concerns, and we also had a
particular gentleman whose personal pain was so deep, so on the surface all the time,
that when he shared it with us, and he would do so every week, and for 4-5 minutes at
a time, it simply seem to sink the mood of the congregation—his real, authentic pain
was just so overwhelming that all the energy seem to go right out of the room, and we
were just overwhelmed. We ended up having to change the way we did Joys and
Concerns because it would sometimes take 15-20 minutes of the service, and this was
in a congregation that was only just slightly larger than this one! Now, I share that with
you not because I don’t want us to be authentic and truthful in our sharing during Joys
and Concerns, but sometimes a little personal editing goes a long way, right, as even
Hannah does here in this text—she doesn’t give Eli the details, but she does name the
reality that she is in pain, and she needs God’s help right then. In fact, I hope we will
do more of that in this place, this sharing with each other about what concerns us,
maybe a little bit more of that “letting our guts hang out a bit,” crudely put I know, and a
dangerous invitation to those who don’t edit well. I was reading something the other
day where a situation was described where someone stopped going to a particular
church because he said didn’t go to church to have people “lay their guts out,” which I
think is probably ironic, since, if anything, so few people actually think the church is
actually safe place to do something like that. Look, I don’t think worship should be all
sad, and I don’t think it should be all joy—it should reflect life, real life, as it is, holding
both shadow and light together, honoring both as a reality of what it means to live in
God’s world, and seeking to find ways that God is present in both places, in our joys, in
our sorrows, and everywhere else in between.

Now, what I don’t want us to do is to rush past Eli, to rush past the actual people that
make up the community that gives the temple its life and vitality—that is the second
thing I want us to look at in this text. I think it’s telling that Hannah goes past Eli, doesn’t
even bother to connect with him, this one who might have prayed with her to begin
with. You know, the weird thing about being a minister is that we often get to peer into
the deepest pains of people’s lives, the secret places they hold close, because they
invite us into those spaces, and yet, at the same time, we’re also often expressly
excluded from entry into other parts of their lives, because, in their minds, if Pastor
Sue, or Kevin or whomever, knew about that thing, that woe, that worry, well…it would
be too embarrassing. And I think that’s symbolic of how we often treat our fellow
travelers in places like the church: we allow others into this particular place of our lives,
but not that other place, because we have more shame around area B than area A,
and we feel like we’ve got to keep up pretenses if we are going to keep face with each
other. No, I’m not against personal privacy, if one wants to keep something close to
your heart, but I am against the church, this church or any church, not being a place
where one could stop at the temple door and say to Eli, to you or to me, and say,
“listen, I just need you to know that my heart is breaking right now and I wonder if you
would come and pray with me and simply be present with me.”

That is the challenge, isn’t it? To let down our guards, to trust each other, as much as
we are trying to trust God. I struggle with it too, we all do, this willingness to trust each
other with our pain. But it can be done, and if we are ever to be the kind of place that
people come to, rather than flee from, in times of personal and national tragedy, we’re
going to have to get that part right, that openness, that willingness to be with each
other during the difficult times. Don’t hear this as only challenge to this congregation,
but to the larger church as a whole—if we and they flee from religious communities
during social and economic hard times, we’ve got a problem, and we need to address
it, we need to make more spaces that allow for God’s people, all of God’s people, to
name their pain, and draw strength from people that care about them. There’s not a lot
of places left where we can do that face to face anymore—so many of us have fled to
the internet, thinking that anonymity will shield us from the pain of someone we care
about not handling the pain we share with them with the appropriate tenderness. In
Christian community, where we have the balance of shadow and light, cross and
resurrection, we have the ability to get it right, to be that safe place for others, and for
ourselves—the questions is: do we have the courage to lay our souls bare before each
other, to trust each other with our pain, knowing that what we share will be held and
loved and honored…and that we will no longer be alone with our pain, because we
have each other, because you have me and I have you. Amen.