Transcript
The Old Testament reading today urges us to take a closer look at a woman named Hannah. Hannah lived over 3000 years ago in a village called Ramathaim-Zophim, which is about 18 miles northeast of Tel-Aviv. She was married to a man named Elkanah, and her life was defined by one big problem: she was infertile. That’s a difficult and emotionally draining problem for many women today, but at least they have opportunities to seek other avenues of fulfillment in life. That was not true for Hannah in her time and culture. For a woman, not to have children meant not to having a purpose in life and bearing up under terrible stigmatization.
So Hannah and Elkanah did what many couples do today, when they find themselves in the same situation: they sought a surrogate mother, and they found one named Peninnah. Back then, however, that meant that Elkanah had to open his home to Peninnah and give her legal status as a concubine (that is, a wife with limited inheritance rights). As you can see, patchwork families are really nothing new, and the stresses they can cause on relationships aren’t either. Peninnah proves to be as fertile as Hannah is barren, and soon Elkanah has a whole slew of children. He doesn’t seem bothered by the arrangement at all. Why would he be? He gets his heirs, which was the most important thing for a man in that time. For Hannah, however, the whole situation is traumatic. Peninnah’s children are a constant reminder of her inadequacy, and Peninnah herself is not above rubbing salt in her wound.
Every year it was Elkanah’s custom to pack up the entire family and travel to Shiloh, a day’s journey from their home. Before the temple was built in Jerusalem, a century or so later, Shiloh was the site of the tabernacle, a portable version of the temple from the days of the wilderness wanderings. This was the place you went to offer sacrifices to the God of Israel. There were regular feast days, when the Israelites went up to the tabernacle in large numbers, but this seems to be a private affair in which Elkanah offered to the Lord what Jews came to call the “second tithe”. You can read about it in Deuteronomy 12. 5 – 12. If you find yourself grumbling about tithing (giving God 10%), you might be horrified that Israelites were commanded to offer a second tithe. This was something different, however. The idea was that you set aside a decent portion of your harvest and take it to the tabernacle where you would offer sacrifices. Normally, the priests and their servants, the Levites, would get to eat the sacrifices that were offered, but the point of the second tithe was that you get all the meat and grain in order to have a great big Thanksgiving meal, “eating before the Lord and rejoicing, you and your family, because the Lord has blessed you” (Deut 12. 7).
Sounds wonderful, right? I’m sure it was…for everyone but Hannah. For her sitting around the Thanksgiving table was a dismal reminder of what she didn’t have and therefore couldn’t be thankful for. It didn’t help that Elkanah was a boorish dope, who thought that giving Hannah the best steak was all that it would take to cheer her up and when that doesn’t work makes it all about him: “Isn’t it better to have me than ten sons?” (Some of the women her today are probably thinking, “Sounds like something my husband would say.” I apologize on behalf of all insensitive men!)
Regardless of who you are, I am sure we can all relate to Hannah when it comes to this: Communal worship can be a gut-wrenching experience. Celebrating Thanksgiving can be like pulling a scab off a barely healed wound. So much so that you dread going to church, participating praise to God, offering him your thanks. There are so many reminders of disappointments and loss. I know that’s true for me today. I am mourning my brother, who died in April, and the last time I saw him alive was here; the last thing we did together was attend a service in this church in the summer of 2023. It is good to be here with you today, but it is a painful reminder of my grief.
So why did Hannah do it? Why did she subject herself to this ordeal year after year? First of all, it never would have occurred to her as a premodern person that she could simply dispense with the communal experience of worship. We moderns think of ourselves as individuals whose identity is defined in isolation from others, which I suppose is why we so frequently end up alone and lonely. Hannah’s identity was wrapped up with her experience of herself as part of a community. “Spending time alone with God”—what you do in our culture if you’re really spiritual—is not a bad thing, but no one in Biblical times saw it as an alternative to communal worship or even sought it out much (except Jesus, who, being God, never ceased spending time with him!).
So, Hannah went to Shiloh with her family to worship God, though it meant confronting her pain and her disappointments. Our text hints at the fact that it was nonetheless beneficial to her. It gave her an opportunity to do three things she could not have done otherwise.
First: Hannah participated in the offering of sacrifices in the tabernacle. The sacrificial system (laid out in detail in the book of Leviticus) was God’s provision for the forgiveness of sin. Today, in a world without sacrifices, that raises a lot of questions about why God chose that way rather than one less distasteful to modern sensibilities, but in the ancient world, it would have been self-evident: That is how you get rid of sin; everyone simply knew that. We don’t know what sins Hannah confessed as she observed the process by which they were ritually transferred to a sheep or a goat, whose throat was subsequently slit, so that the life drained out of it, thus atoning for her transgressions. Perhaps she was aware of the danger, in her situation, of becoming bitter and ungrateful. I hope her troubled soul felt a measure of relief.
Second: Hannah knew she was in the presence of God and used this opportunity to pour out her heart to him. this place, the tabernacle, was where God symbolically dwelt. Of course, God wasn’t limited to the tabernacle (or later the temple), but there was something about being there that reminded you that God really was listening to you, attending to your prayers. We read that Hannah was deeply distressed about her situation and wept bitterly. She made a vow to God that if he would give her a son, she would dedicate him to the Lord. And the Lord heard Hannah’s prayer, for a year later she was nursing a baby boy.
She made good on her vow, too. As soon as the boy, whose name was Samuel, was old enough, (probably about five years old) she brough him to Shiloh to serve the priest and saw him only yearly after that. That must have been heart-breaking. We read that God gave her other children, but this was her first-born son and miracle baby. Still, she didn’t complain. As a matter of fact, she wrote a magnificent poem to commemorate what God had done and would do in the future.
This brings us to the third thing Hannah was able to do at the tabernacle: She was able to see her life from God’s perspective and consider it within a larger paradigm of meaning. She wrote a poem that attests to her astounding insight into what theologians call salvation history. The last line reads: “The Lord will judge the ends of the earth; he will give strength to his king and exalt the power of his anointed one”. The Hebrew word that is translated “anointed one” is “meshiach,” or Messiah. This the first occurrence of that term in the Bible. Later, when Samuel was older, he was the one who identified David as God’s anointed King, from whom the Messiah Jesus descended. Hannah did not know how this all would play out when she penned this psalm, but she had a sense that God had not just given her a son to still her maternal longings, but also because this child had been set apart by God to play an important role in his plan.
Today, we stand far removed from Hannah and Samuel, and things have changed; not simply because 3000 years have gone by, but because of the coming of Jesus, God’s promised King and Messiah. Our reading from the Letter to the Hebrews celebrates the priestly work of Jesus. The author was a careful reader of the Hebrew Scriptures, and he picked up on some ambivalence about the efficacy of the sacrifices in the psalms, especially Psalm 40. 6 – 8, which he quotes in the passage immediately preceding ours. It intimates that the system of sacrifices was not ultimately efficacious, because the sacrifices had to be repeated over and over again. Jesus, on the other hand, offered himself as the once-for-all sacrifice and thus was able to truly cleanse us from our sins.
That’s why we don’t bring sacrifices like Elkanah did. We still confess our sins, but we do so with utter confidence that God has already forgiven us in Jesus the Messiah who died to atone for them. And we can experience the presence of God in a way that Hannah could not have imagined. She stood at the entrance of the tabernacle. As a woman, she could go no farther. Her husband could enter the courtyard where the Levites prepared and offered the sacrifices on the altar. Only the priests could actually go into the tabernacle, and only the high priest could enter the holy of holies, where God symbolically dwelt above the ark of the covenant, and that just once a year. Compare that with what Hebrews says: “We have confidence to enter to the holy places by the blood of Jesus.” We can go right into the holy of holies behind the curtain and commune directly with God (Heb 10. 19 – 20). We have direct access to him mediated by Jesus. He takes us, as it were, in the very presence of God with him. What a privilege!
Another difference is that God’s special presence is no longer connected to a particular building. A good thing, too, because as the Gospel reading reminds us, Jesus prophesied the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, an event that took place in 70 A.D. Since then, there is no building where God symbolically dwells. Intriguingly, the New Testament describes the Church as God’s temple (1Cor 3. 16). He now dwells among Jesus’ followers, whom Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians describes as a living temple being built by God’s Spirit (Eph 3. 21 – 22).
What hasn’t changed is that communion with God is best experienced in communion with others. In the final verse of our reading from the book of Hebrews the author commands us not to neglect meeting together, which the early Church had already started to do every Sunday by the mid-First Century. Why this exhortation? I think because the things we are commanded to do in the preceding verses are really hard to do alone: 1. Drawing near to God in full assurance of faith, not doubting that our sins have been forgiven. 2. Holding fast to the confession of hope, not wavering in your convictions about who Jesus and what he has done. 3. Doing good works. Serving others, taking care of the poor and the needy. It is here among those loved by God that you receive bread and wine to remind you that your sins are truly forgiven. It is here among these saints that you confess the faith; not just “your faith”—your individual potpourri of beliefs, some of which are true and some of which are quite likely not. It is not easy in our age to hold fast to belief in the triune God, the supremacy of Jesus, his atoning death and resurrection, his coming again to judge the world. When we confess these things together, we remind ourselves that they are true! It is here among God’s people that you are encouraged to put others’ needs above your own; you certainly don’t hear much about that elsewhere in our culture.
Like Hannah, we come together to worship the one she calls “the God who knows.” We cannot hide from him here; our joys and our sorrows are laid bare before him. That is not easy to take, and that’s why we sometimes dread coming to church. But it reminds us that we are not alone and that our experiences are not unique. Others share them, Jesus above all.
When Hannah left the tabernacle that day, the last thing she heard were these words (assuming the priests were doing their job): “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.” This, above all, is why we come together to worship the Lord: to hear him promise us his pleasure, his presence, and his peace.
