The Barren Has Borne Seven

Sermon for Proper 28B RCL 11/15/2009, Offered by Nathan Ferrell for Trinity Episcopal Shared Ministry

Texts: 1 Samuel 1:4-20; 1 Samuel 2:1-10; Hebrews 10:11-25; Mark 13:1-8


Did you notice the words of the Collect appointed for this day, the one appointed always for this penultimate Sunday of the Church year?
“Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life…”

We are people of the Bible, my friends. We believe that the Bible, the Holy Scriptures, is given to us by God to teach us how to live. Now, to be sure, we in the Episcopal Church are not particularly known for being a people who really dig into the Scriptures. In our sermons, we do not typically spend 30 minutes dissecting a passage of Scripture line-by-line. But don’t let that fool you. We may not study the Bible as regularly as others, but we do read and pray the Bible more than other Christians. In fact, over 80% of the Prayer Book is taken directly from the Bible. And do not forget: it was our Anglican forebears who gave to the world the authorized King James Version of the Bible, certainly the most published and widely distributed book in the history of the world.

As a branch of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church, we Episcopalians stand firmly upon the Bible as the foundation of our faith. Most of you likely do not know that this is the promise that we must make when we are ordained as deacons and as priests. As we stand before the Bishop, before the people of God, and before the presence of God, this is the pledge that we make:

“I solemnly declare that I do believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, and to contain all things necessary to salvation” (BCP P. 526 & P. 538).

Okay. So we have these Holy Scriptures as a gift from God, and we look to them to teach us. We seek to inwardly digest them, as the Collect states. And you know what they say: “you are what you eat!” When we digest anything into our stomachs, it becomes absorbed and spread by our blood throughout our bodies and then incorporated into the very cells of our body. So, by analogy, to “inwardly digest” the Scriptures means to make them part of who we are, incorporated into every facet of our beings.

But how do we go about this? Practically, how do we do this? By intention and discipline, my friends. These two: intention and discipline.

Let’s stay with the analogy of food and eating for a minute. If you become aware that your body needs more fiber in order to function better, you first must form the intention to change your diet. Once you intend to change in this way, what follows then is the daily task of carrying through on your intention. This requires daily discipline to follow your new diet, not to allow the whims of your desires to lead you astray, but to stay true to your good intention. With intention and discipline, then you can change your diet and improve your health.

It is the same with our use of the Bible. If we have the intention of learning more about Christ and of growing closer to God through the study of the Scriptures, what follows then is the daily task of carrying through on your intention. What you need then is daily discipline to follow your new routine. What we all need is daily reading and study of the Scriptures in a way that allows us to ruminate on – to digest – the meaning of the text for our lives. With this good intention and daily discipline, we can change our lives and improve our spiritual well-being.

Each one of us in this place who has experienced the waters of baptism has made a vow to follow Christ as our Savior and our Lord. Without question, there are a plethora of spiritual practices and disciplines that we can adopt to help us to follow Christ more closely. But nothing can replace the most basic practice of daily meditation upon the Holy Scriptures. There can be no substitute for this, no shortcuts.

So we have established the bedrock reality that the words and stories of the Bible provide us with a framework by which we can understand God’s will for our lives. So what then about this very interesting story about Hannah? What are we to make of this old, old story? What does the example of Hannah teach us about salvation and about our relationship with God?

As you can see from the text read this morning, Hannah made an attempt to manipulate the Lord. Just as when Gideon laid out the fleece to test the Lord’s calling, Hannah made a bargain with God: if you give me a son, then I will give him back to you.

Now, it is crucial to remember the context. There were likely to be a thousand women in Israel at that time who were “barren”, who, for whatever reason, were not yet able to bear children. And it may be that all of those women were making similar deals with God in their prayers. Some of those deals may have been honored and some certainly were not. Out of the very many, this story is the one that was written down and recorded – this one, because of the importance of the son who was born to Hannah. Samuel served as the pivot point, the hinge of ancient Hebrew history. Before him was the time of the patriarchs and the judges, when the Israelites lived in a tribal society, loosed gathered around strong tribal chieftains. But Samuel was the one who began the monarchy. Samuel anointed David as King, and David went on to unify the rival tribes and to create one strong kingdom.

Hannah, of course, had good reason to long for a son. In that society, the value of every woman was measured by her vitality in childbearing. Also, it was normal manner of things for the wife to outlive the man. Her children then were her means of survival as a widow in those late years of life. Sons, in particular, were a widow’s safety net against want and starvation, because they controlled the resources of the household.

So Hannah’s need is understandable. But what about this deal-making with God? Is this the way that we are to approach God when we are in need? Because the Lord heard and remembered Hannah in her need, does this mean that the Lord will hear us if we make similar promises in our prayers? Absolutely not.

What Hannah did right here is to ask. We must ask; we must always ask. That is the basic, fundamental rule to all healthy relationships: to ask. When we feel pressure and anxiety over some need in our life, it is right to ask God to supply our perceived need. But God then is free to respond with a yes, a no, or a maybe. For any relationship to be healthy, the one petitioned for help must be free to respond as they see fit. We must ask with no strings attached, otherwise our request degenerates into nothing more than selfish, greedy manipulation. This is where Hannah went astray. Fortunate for her, God had plans that superseded her vain attempts to manipulate the Almighty.

As for us, we have the wise counsel of the Lord to guide us into a better way than the method of Hannah. Jesus taught us to let our yes be yes and our no to be no. To speak without guile, without ulterior motives, without any attempt to manipulate the other. He also taught us how to pray and how to seek after the will of God as the highest good for our lives: “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in the heavens.”

Rather than attempting to manipulate God into doing our will, true joy in our lives, and deep peace in our hearts, can only come when we learn to accept God’s will, whatever that may be. For in Christ we know that God is good all the time, and God’s will for us is always good, even when we fail to see the good. And because of that, it is right for us to give our thanks and praise, always and everywhere. Amen.

“Let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching” (Hebrews 10:25).