Therefore...

  

Romans 12:1-8

When I was ten years old at summer camp, we could earn points for various activities. My favorites were archery, target shooting and memorizing bible verses. I had no idea then that I would become a preacher, but these verses sounded so much like a booming sermon that I threw open the window of our bunkroom, and shouted them down to passers-by until I had the whole thing perfected in the cadence of an old-timey preacher. I still have them memorized.

“I urge you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice acceptable to God which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world!  I roared out the window, jabbing my finger at the sky. But be transformed! By the renewing of your mind! That you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good, and acceptable and perfect!

 

Listen to all the active verbs there! So commanding and directive! All the things we are supposed to be and know and do! Present yourselves a sacrifice to God, do not be conformed to this world, be transformed, Even when the verbs are not technically active, we can make them active by how we hear them: renew your mind, prove the will of God, which by the way, is good and perfect.

 

Even the more gentle version we read today still puts a lot in our hands. Listen to all the active verbs, Use your gifts! (don’t waste them!) Helpers, help! Teachers, teach! Givers, give! Leaders, do a good job leading, and if you’re taking care of others, keep a smile on your face!

 

This striving, active, individual faith that takes it into your own hands and works hard at it may have been what my summer camp was going for, but it’s not what Paul is going for. 

 

All throughout the letter to the Romans, Paul is talking about real life, the Kingdom of God reality, life as God created life to be, life as God is moving everything towards once and for all. He is talking about living no longer in the illusion created by sin that we are apart and against, that belonging is earned and we’re defined by the world’s labels and our own striving, trapped under sin’s ranking, comparing and condemnation. 

He is talking about life in freedom –life where all people are upheld in the belongness of grace, and our identity is secure in God, and God is the primary actor and we are recipients and participants in a life made for joy. This is the life we are given by Christ, in Christ, in fact, in him we have died to anything else and been risen to this new life of belonging, connection and wholeness, so we should be living what is true about us and about God. 

Right before our verses, Paul writes “from God and through God and to God are all things, to God be the glory forever and ever, Amen!” Then our text begins with, “Therefore…”

Because all things are from God and through God and back to God, Therefore, present yourself to God, your whole, living, embodied self.

 

Paul loves run-on sentences where things are all connected back to God. We tend to break those up and lose the thread. Out of curiosity, I spent some time checking the original Greek on all of this, and it turns out that contrary to how we like to hear this, there is only ONE active verb in the whole thing. The one thing we can do and should do, according to Paul, is to offer ourselves to God. 

 

That’s it.  That is the one action we are to do. And it’s no small thing, it’s everything. It’s a sacrifice, Paul says, a holy sacrifice that God finds well-pleasing, or, delightful. (God speaks the same declaration over Jesus at his baptism, “this is my Son, the beloved, in whom I am well-pleased, in whom I delight). In other words, when we give ourselves to God, our “everyday, ordinary life—our sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life” God is delighted, and we are doing what Paul calls our ‘reasonable’ or logical worship. What conveys our gratitude and praise, and honors God as God, is ourselves, given to God.

 

When we do that, then all sorts of things happen that we don’t do. The rest of the passage is filled with things that happen to us, or through us, or for us, except for the next two verbs, which I was thrilled to discover are middle passive. This is a verb form we don’t have in English, so we usually just make it active, which is pretty messed up, because the middle passive means we participate in something we don’t initiate.  So, when we actively present ourselves to God – here I am God, just me, just like I am, that’s all I have to give so I give it all- then the ‘being not conformed’ to this world and the ‘being transformed’ are things God does to us and in us, that we join in. We are not the ones making it happen; we are surrendering our will into the will of God who initiates the work in us, and we participate in that work that God will bring to completion.

 

This might sound small, but it’s kind of a big deal.  We are both passive and active at the same time in our not conforming to the realities of this age, and in the being transformed by God, who renews our minds to become more and more able to discern what God is doing in the world, which is, Paul tells us, the good and the delightful, bringing wholeness and completion to world. We begin to see that happening around us. We start to notice what we didn’t notice before. We are being changed, pulled out of the lies and deception that would pit us against each other, center ourselves in the narrative, or let fear or force dictate reality, and we’re pulled instead into God’s relentless and subversive work of healing the world that moves through us to all the others we already belong to in a life made for joy and fullness.

 

Years ago, I got all excited learning about Meister Eckhart and ended up introducing you to a phrase from a quote by James Finley teaching about Eckhart. (For the thousandth time, I apologize,) he says, “Lovers cannot make their moments of oceanic oneness happen, they can only assume the inner stance that offers the least resistance to being overtaken by love. The poet cannot make the poem come, the poet can only assume the inner stance that offers the least resistance to the poem arriving. The healer cannot bring the healing, the healer can only assume the inner stance of least resistance to healing coming through them.”  

 

Actively surrendering our will to the will of God is assuming the inner stance of least resistance to the Holy Spirit; it's this middle voice verb of attentive readiness for what God wants to do in and through us.  Like poets, and healers, and lovers, and artists, and musicians, and friends, we get to participate in the things we can’t make happen, and marvel at the beauty we end up sharing in. 

 

This is all by God’s grace, not because we’ve somehow earned it, or deserve any more or less involvement or attention than anyone else. God gives to each person grace for the life they’re to live—even Paul’s own telling us this, he says, is by the grace of God. 

 

Then he goes on to say we don’t need to reach our minds above and beyond what is a fit for us. There is an echo here of the Psalmist in 131, “O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not concern myself with matters too great or too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child.” And in Psalm 46, “Cease striving and know that I am God.”

Paul says our minds, rather, have been made for sound judgment, and God gives each person the measure of faith we need for the calling we have, (i.e., It’s all very reasonable. Quit overcomplicating it).  We’re one body in Christ, he says, like a human body with many parts that don’t all have the same function but instead work together. And we have gifts, given by grace, differently to each of us.

 

And here is where it gets even cooler with the Greek grammar: everything from here on out is passive, even though we driven, active, moderns who go, go, go, do, do, do, and can’t stop won’t stop don’t translate it that way. 

So, Paul starts listing gifts – prophesy, is in proportion to faith. Service? He does not say, then serve! Teachers? Teach! Do the things! No, he says, in effect, if the gift is service, then you are an instrument of service, if the gift is teaching, the teaching comes through you, if the gift is encouraging, then you are a conduit of encouragement, if the gift is giving, then generosity fills you and spills over, if leading, then you have diligence, if you’re showing mercy, then cheerfulness lives in you.

 

Each action happens not by determined striving, setting your mind to it, trying to be a decent person or good Christian, but because who you are is made already to participate with God’s action moving through you in this particular way, and it will come out in ministering to others.

Can you hear the freedom? The life? The holy sacrifice of ourselves that becomes worship and gratitude to God? Can you see why God finds this everyone-living-who've-they've-been-made-to-be-and-so-working-cooperatively-together utterly delightful?

 

Each person is both entirely unique and entirely connected to everyone else. We are all essential. We are urged to participate with what God has already done for us all, by who God has already made us to be.

 

Last weekend, on our day retreat, we played Poetry for Neanderthals, a fun, ridiculous game that makes you speak only in single syllable words, which turns out to be really, really hard, and sound very, very funny. But in order to play the game you need to get what a single syllable word is. And all of a sudden, there is Wendy, so naturally teaching the group how to hear the syllables, clapping words with her hands and giving us examples that we clapped with her, and the teaching just flowed from her. She didn’t have to put her mind to striving to be teacherly and take up the teaching task, it just happened because she was connected to the rest of us, and the gifts she’s been given by the grace of God poured out of her into the group, bringing everyone in and uniting us in understanding.  

Likewise, Edie, when her friend left the room, went to check on him and make sure he was ok. Compassion and care just happened--her body stood up and out she went. 

And if you have been away for a while, or have something difficult going on in your life, chances are you’ve heard from Kay. Because she is attuned to people and interested in others, and she won’t let you fall through the cracks. 

Jen’s creativity starts flowing for the next hands-on worship project right after this service ends, and she often sparks ideas for me just by sharing her own ideas. 

When Pat fires up the grill, or Kristen drops a line of poetry on us, we’re glimpsing their unique souls, participating with God in the good, delighting God and the rest of us too. And I would venture to guess that no other church has an empty ‘pet chaplain’ job waiting to be filled--we simply named what was already happening through Joyce.

 

All these gifts are not about improving a religious club or even just strengthening our relationships with each other here.  We are each part of the Body of Christ--God’s embodied interaction in the world. God’s life is happening through every person in this room out there in the world in our ordinary, everyday, walking around lives. That’s what it is to be Christ’s Church. But being church together, we get to see it up close in one another, practice and encourage each other in it. And sometimes we recognize in someone else the gifts they may not yet see in themselves. We get to grow together as one body deeper and deeper in the life of Christ for the world. 

 

From God, through God and back to God it all flows. Therefore, the most logical way we can worship God is to present our peculiar, particular selves to God, and God happens to find that delightful. Freeing us and transforming us to recognize and join God in bringing life and wholeness in the world, God makes it so we participate by being who are, with and for each other. 

 

Amen.

Saving each other

Daily Devotion - April 3

I will send a brief message each day (except Mondays) while we are pausing gathering in person.
- Kara

There are lots of ways to tell the story we are living in, and they can be equally true. Many of us are stuck at home. That's one way to tell it.  All of us who stay home are saving lives. That's another way.

This week I heard (from a very helpful podcast for families during this time, called In the Bubble, with Andy Slavitt). that a single person who goes about their daily business can be responsible for up to 40 deaths.  Likewise, every person who stays home is possibly saving up to 40 lives.  

One story is that you are a victim of circumstances. Another is that you are sacrificing to save others.  

For many of us, this form of sacrifice is indeed a sacrifice. Aside from all we've lost and let go of in this time, there's also a frustration at the sense of helplessness, when what we might long for is helpfulness. Staying home and "doing nothing" doesn't feel like a contribution. But it is the best thing we can be doing. Indeed, we are contributing. We are helping.  (There are lots of other ways we can be helping from home too).

So first of all, I want to say to you who are staying home, Thank you for your sacrifice.

But then, many of us are out there in the world as essential workers: garbage collectors, postal carriers, delivery drivers, and so many more, - those who are risking their own well-being and even lives on the a daily basis, on what has become "the front lines." Health care workers.  Grocery store workers.  These are our heroes.  

So I want to say to you who are on the front lines, Thank you for your service.

There are only four kinds of people in the world: those who have been caregivers, those who are currently caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who need caregiving.” — Rosalynn Carter (shared by The On Being Project)

Our caregivers right now are scared, under-equipped, tired. They are called in to work extra shifts bagging groceries, and being taken off their floors and out of their niches of expertise to assist in the E.R. They're being pulled out of retirement, or graduating early right into the fray. They're going home to their own families, stripping off their clothes before they enter the house, stepping into the shower, skipping the welcome home hug. 

How blessed we are to be cared for by these people!

Blessed are you, who walk the beat bringing messages and packages right to our doors, day after day.

Blessed are you, who take away our trash and leave our cans empty, ready for the next week's worth of living to fill them up again. 

Blessed are you, ready to receive us, wearing the one mask you are allotted for the whole day, gently lifting us into bed when the fever rises, and helping us breathe when the air wont come.

Blessed are you, who stand all day long, separated by nothing more than a a narrow counter while the rest of us remain quietly on our bright tape Xs, six feet apart from each other.

Blessed are we, to be cared for by these people, and blessed are our caregivers!

Here is a blessing for a nurse, by John O'Donahue

...In this fragile frontier-place, your kindness

Becomes a light that consoles the brokenhearted,
Awakens within desperate storms
That oasis of serenity that calls
The spirit to rise from beneath the weight of pain,
To create a new space in the person's mind
Where they gain distance from their suffering
And begin to see the invitation
To integrate and transform it.

May you embrace the beauty in what you do
And how you stand like a secret angel
Between the bleak despair of illness
And the unquenchable light of spirit
That can turn the darkest destiny toward dawn.

May you never doubt the gifts you bring;
Rather, learn from these frontiers
Wisdom for your own heart.
May you come to inherit
The blessings of your kindness
And never be without care and love
When winter enters your own life.

 from "For a Nurse," in To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings, by John O'Donahue.

(20 Ways to support healthcare workers and others on the Front Lines)
(United Way Helping those most vulnerable - with food, housing, assistance)

CONNECTING RITUAL:

Perhaps, tonight before we go to bed, whatever time that is in each of our homes, we might pray this prayer, and so join our hearts:
God bless those caring for us all in this time.
Give them comfort.
Give them peace.
Give them courage.
Give them rest.
Show me this week how I can bless the caregivers in my life.
Amen.

This week, we are reading through the Gospel of John.  In my house, it is at the dinner table. Maybe for you, it will be when you wake up, or before bed, or over lunch.  It can be read in about 20 minutes a day, or by reading three chapters each day.  If this is your approach, today, we are reading Chapters 19-21. This completes the book!

Don't be afraid

Luke 1:26-38

Mary

This is the famous scene, the angel’s pronouncement, which the church has called, “The Annunciation.” 

Denise Levertov’s poem, Annunciation, asks,

Aren’t there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?

        Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehending.

More often
those moments,
      when roads of light and storm
      open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from

in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
                                 God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.

The suggestion that we all have moments of divine invitation to be part of something more feels like a stretch sometimes. In a week where I have spent more time than I care to admit being, as my kids call me, a “Karen,” (which apparently means someone who always asks to speak to a manager), in my case, trying to sort out delivery issues for a bed that has twice been in a truck on its way to my house but still has not arrived, between fighting a head cold, scraping my windshield and shoveling my driveway, juggling work, and parenting, and making dinner, and Christmas shopping, and ending most evenings watching the news in open-mouthed horror, this week it feels a bit farfetched for me to imagine being invited by the divine into something extraordinary.  

But imagine this is true. Imagine that we are. (Because it is. We are). 

Imagine for a moment how we might greet these annunciations.

Lots of people, this poem suggests, do great and valuable things in life without any awareness of or appreciation for it. They go through life unaffected, oblivious to the conspiracy of redemption unfolding around, and indeed even sometimes through, their own lives.

Others come to their annunciation moments with definite awareness, and so also fear and trembling at the terrible toll that risking will likely take on their equilibrium.  They back slowly away from the moment of change and choice, turn away and sit back down in their perpetual risklessness, preferring the delusion of safety, the illusion of inertia, to reckless trust.  And those people don’t get to be part of the marvelous things beckoning them to life.

But Mary.  She was open and ready when God’s Yes came. 

God said, I am about to do the unfathomable.  You, Mary, will be in this with me. And she met the moment with her heart open. She saw it for what it was, and she heard the Angel Gabriel when he told her, “Do not be afraid.” 

What is it to say Yes to God’s yes? 

To meet your annunciations when they come? 

To allow yourself to take them in - to be taken in - with bewilderment, curiosity, willingness, and courage?

How can this be? Mary asks, explaining to her celestial visitor the biological impossibility of the thing he is announcing.  It is impossible.

But impossibility is how God always chooses to come. 

So the angel tells her about Elizabeth. 

He could have told her about any of the barren wombs or stuttering spokespeople, dead seas or impenetrable walls, invincible armies or lions’ dens, enormous giants, weak-minded monarchs, messed up protagonists, or hopeless, impossible situations through which God had been bringing salvation and hope to the world since the world began. But he doesn’t look back for his stories.  Instead, he says, Right now, even while we are speaking, God is doing this impossible thing. 

And then the angel tells her about old Elizabeth, whose prayers had dried up, who is even now already bearing this great in-breaking of salvation.  

Nothing is impossible for God, Gabriel answers Mary.

And Mary says Yes. She says Yes to becoming the Mother of God.

There’s a saying in NVC – non-violent communication, that we’ve studied a bit around here – that every No is a Yes to something else. When someone tells you No, they are saying yes to another thing – whether they are needing space, or autonomy, or agency or have made other plans with someone else - there is always a Yes somewhere inside the No.  

I want to suggest the opposite is true as well, for us finite creatures.  There is always a No inside our Yeses. When we say Yes to something, we are saying No to other things – every other option, in fact.  Yes to chicken means we’re not having chili. Yes to marrying this person means No more living life completely on my own terms.  

When we say Yes, especially to God, we are called to renounce something. We must let something go. That’s how love works.  Something we’ve thought our life would be or already was, some illusions about control and invincibility, we must sacrifice something of ourselves, something must die. 

Most often what dies was not really giving us life to begin with, we only thought it was. But sometimes we are called to let go of good things. Things that are giving us a good life, making us happy and stable.  

Mary was engaged to a kind and decent man, about to start her life. A good life. A happy, ordinary, stable life. And when she says Yes to God, all that disappears. Like Elizabeth whose retirement will be invaded by a fiery prophet child, like Hannah long before them, who gave up her own child to God and Samuel became the prophet who lead God’s people, Mary is being pulled into God’s redemption of the world, and it means she is no longer going to be who she was. The Annunciation could very well be called The Renunciation. Gone is the life she had embraced for herself, the path so neatly laid out before her, she renounces it here.  

Jan Richardson’s poem, Gabriel’s Annunciation, begins with these words, 
For a moment,
I hesitated,
on the threshold,
For the space
of a breath
I paused
unwilling to disturb
her last ordinary moment,
knowing that the next step,
would cleave her life,
that this day,
would slice her story
in two
dividing all the days before
from all the ones
to come

How vulnerable it is to let go of all that gave your life meaning and purpose and order and jump into the unknown like this!  But she does, she lets all of it go in order to participate with God in something bigger. 

Hannah went in eyes wide open and offered her renunciation before even the gift arrived.  But Mary, perhaps she didn’t fully grasp all that she was letting go of, the predictable and most likely mostly pleasant life she would never live from then on out.  

She traded it away without knowing, because how can we know what our Yeses will mean until we’ve already been changed by them?  What she traded it for was a life fully alive, she traded it to see God, to be disciple of Jesus.  Mary and his brothers were there among the disciples and followers of Christ, listening to him tell about God’s salvation, watching people be healed, seeing the power of God at work in the world.  Mary watched her child die a terrible death, and she spoke to the angels sitting aside an empty tomb. She was in the room when the Holy Spirit came, and she was a leader in the early church.

Don’t be afraid, the angel says. Not because suddenly everything will be steady and safe. It’s decidedly not safe, and it’s most certainly not steady. It’s absolutely risky and will for sure change everything.  Don’t be afraid because the one who calls you is God.  You are held in God’s love, joined in God’s purposes. 

But Mary is not the only one vulnerable here.  Imagine also the vulnerability of God, not only to come into the human experience, weak and helpless, at the mercy and in the hands of those you’ve created, preparing to live, and die as they do.  But God also takes on the vulnerability inherent in love, the possibility of rejection. Mary could have said No. 

We’re at something of a deficit here, when it comes to our own annunciations. Before we even get to the question of renunciation and trust, we must first accept that God is real, that God is doing something greater, and that God might interrupt our lives and call us into it.

So perhaps the word for you this week is simply this, What would it be to go through your week assuming God is alive and active in the world?  

What if you lived this week like this is true?  

And certainly, this is enough for any of us, because most of us, most of the time, either deny, ignore, or forget that God is real. What if this week you sought to consciously remember?

But let’s go one step farther, if you’re willing, and say, not only is God alive and active in the world, God is inviting you – specifically you – to participate in God’s schemes.  You don’t know when or how the invitation will come, but your annunciation, that is, your belovedness and chosenness in God for a purpose, is as real for you as it was for Mary.  Greetings favored one; the Lord is with you!

You won’t be called to carry the actual Christ-child; that role has been taken. But to live a God-bearing life? That is a role you share with Mary.  There will be specific callings just for you within that role.  People who come across your path, a phone call, a question, an opportunity you will recognize, a vulnerability you’re invited to share.  

More than Mary, even, we are drawn into the very life of Christ – we are invited to life in Christ, a life, C.S. Lewis reminds us, that is “begotten, not made, that has always existed and always will exist.”  We will be drawn into life that doesn't end, life inside the love and connection between Jesus and the Father; and life with the Holy Spirit interfering and leading.  The God-bearing life is Jesus’ life lived through ours, our hands and feet and voice, our words and actions.

Will your moments be lived be grudgingly or unaware? Will you recognize the cost and back away from the invitation? Or will you open your heart and life and join in what God is wanting to do through you?  

Most likely, and most often, it will be to see another person in their humanity and minister to them, or to receive ministry from another person. This is who God is and how God comes, as a minister, and as one in need of ministry, and so it is how we experience God in our lives as well. We bear each other’s burdens and share each others joys, knowing that when we do so, we are joining in what God is already doing – we are where God is.

Immediately after the Angel’s annunciation to Mary, she goes to Elizabeth. When Mary hears that Elizabeth too is pregnant with an impossibility, she makes a beeline for the one person who will understand and can share this with her. And when Elizabeth sees Mary, little fetus John the Prophet in her womb does joyful summersaults, and Elizabeth just knows, without Mary saying a thing, what it means. So Elizabeth prophesies, saying, “Who am I that the Mother of God should come to me?” 

 And then Mary, having been seen, having had this whole crazy thing confirmed right to her face, breaks out in a prophesy of her own, that has come to be known as the Magnificat,which we sang earlier, about what God is doing to set the world right. 

It is not until they share this mystery with each other that they can live into it fully themselves, and I think that’s what it means to be Church.  

We do not say Yes to God alone – we are given each other, given to each other, and there we find God – in words and acts of healing and hope that pull us out of ourselves and the minutia of our self-absorbed worlds, or out of our fear about the general state of things, and into action, along with the God who is already always acting.

So, perhaps your call this week is to imagine God is alive and active. 

Or perhaps it is to anticipate annunciation and say Yes when it comes.  Or maybe, it is to step into your own renunciations and let go of what keeps you from Yes.  In any case, you are held in God’s love, joined in God’s purposes. 

Just a few months after the annunciation, when she delivers this baby and brings God into the world as a tiny, needy, human child – before priests from a far off land come to meet the baby, before she and Joseph flee to Egypt with the baby, before the potty-training, and the talkback, and the teen years – that night, lying in the hay with Joseph by her side, just after placing the sleeping child into the manger, the stable, already crowded with animals, is suddenly invaded by a group of shepherds from a nearby hillside. 

They tell Mary about their own annunciation.  They tell her about a sky full of music and light, about the Angel’s pronouncement that God has come into the human story; God’s Yes to the world is embodied, “Do not be afraid!” the angel had told them, “This is good news of great joy for all people!” 

They tell her this when they’ve said Yes to God themselves, and set out to find the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. And then, when they share their story and are received, together they all bear this mystery, they are Church.

And Mary, we are told, treasures their words, and ponders them in her heart.  Their words become for her another annunciation, just like Elizabeth’s before them.  Mary continues, her whole life long, to open her heart to God’s pronouncements of love and invitations to involvement.  And the rest of her life she keeps agreeing to be in this with God.  And for the rest of her life, she is.

The God who does impossible things is even now, right this moment, doing impossible things in the world.  This God wants to do impossible things through you.  It’s absolutely risky and will for sure change everything. You will be vulnerable, and you will have to let things go that you thought you needed.  

But, Don’t be afraid, because the one who calls you is God. And what you’re saying Yes to is to see God, to be disciple of Jesus, to live a life fully alive. And this mystery is lived by sharing it, so you wont be asked to do it alone. 

Amen.

This is part of a series, journeying with some of our Biblical ancestors: Hannah, Mary, Anna & Simeon, John, Samuel, David*, The Samaritan Woman, 

(*This is an older message about David, in this series, we had a wonderful performance of 'David" by Theater for the Thirsty)

Sharing with God

Hannah, a window designed by Watkins Stained Glass  

1 Samuel 1-2:10

Hannah

Ask anyone who has ever wanted a child and struggled to conceive, whose gone through the agony of multiple miscarriages, the terrible roller coaster of invitro, or the long and scary process of adoption, ask them what it is like to finally, after everything, hold their child in their arms.  There is nothing like it. It is miraculous.

My friend adopted her daughter from Haiti, from an orphanage where she volunteered.  In this place, where there were too few sets of arms, and too many babies needing holding, once or twice a year, my friend would go  down and hold babies.  After fostering locally, and praying and longing for a long time, and after many arduous legal steps, she flew to Haiti, back to that orphanage, to meet the baby girl that was to be hers.

She texted me a photo that day, the tiny soft face of a two month old, pressed against her own tear-streaked and joy-filled one.  She held her in her arms and whispered that she loved her and that she couldn’t wait to be her mom. And then she had to return home. She had to leave her baby alone in the crib where she would not likely be held much, for the next few weeks, to await the final legal hurdles.  

But in the meantime, a bureaucratic move in Haiti closed adoptions, and for the next fourteen months her daughter remained in the orphanage while her case stalled on hold.  She visited twice in that time, for a few desperate days and nights she sat in a rocker in a concrete room surrounded by metal cribs, holding her baby in her arms, talking to her and singing to her, and then laying her down and leaving, getting on a plane and flying home without her. 

Finally, the paperwork cleared, and she flew back and was able to take her home, when she was a year and a half old.  Finally my friend became Stefanie’s mother.  And Stefanie is hers to raise, forever.  For months afterwards, she wore Stefanie in a pack, to give her human contact and help her bond.  She watched her sleep and prayed for her in the dark, an astonished thank you to God as she listened to her peacefully breathing. 

Imagine if, after all that, one day my friend packed a suitcase, and buckled Stefanie into a car seat, drove across the state to a church, took her out of the car and held her hand up to the door, pulled it open and walked inside, placed the suitcase beside her and knelt down, brushed Stefanie’s braids from her face, kissed her forehead, handed over paperwork terminating her parental rights to whomever was standing there, and turned and walked away?  

How could she do it? 

How can Hannah give back her child? And how can God allow it? 

How can we accept this story? How can this be in our bible? 

I remember this story from Sunday school. It didn’t go like that. It was about how badly Hannah wanted a child, and how she was made fun of for not having one, and how she prayed really hard and didn’t care how she looked doing it, and how God heard her prayer and gave her a child, and how she was so thankful she gave him back, and how cool it was that Samuel got to live in the temple, lucky him!, and how awesome God is for answering prayer, and how selfless and obedient Hannah is for saying Thank you so big.  

We never questioned the darkness in this story.  Surely we glossed over the terribleness of letting go of your child, the child you’ve wanted so badly.  And we didn’t talk about what it means to be barren, which is to say, in Sunday school we may have had this unfortunate term explained awkwardly as being unable to conceive, but really, we didn’t discuss the barrenness of the human condition, the wilderness of a desolate soul, empty, isolated, defined by longing, every moment unfulfilled, utterly despairing.  And we surely didn’t talk about sacrifice.  Deep, terrible sacrifice.  Or question who God was who could let such a thing happen.

Hannah’s song, that we chanted earlier, her prayer, is famous.  It harkens back to the song of Miriam when the people are delivered out of slavery in Egypt, and it foreshadows the song of Mary when the fetus John leaps in Aunt Elizabeth’s womb at the sound of the voice of the mother of the God.  Hannah is known for this song.  

And who wouldn’t sing a song of victory and vindication, a song of awe at God’s amazing, table-turning ways that lift up the poor and bring down the mighty – when you go from being desperate and hopeless to being given the very thing your heart most desires! That is something to sing about!

But her song doesn’t come when her prayers are answered; they are not about finally getting the child she has always wanted and being his mother for the rest of his life. Hannah sings when she leaves her son at the temple, when she gives the child back to God.  

When she turns and walks away from the one thing she most desired in the whole world, she does it with a song of praise.

There is something going on here that feels nearly impossible to grasp.  As we begin to ask our questions, “Who is God and what is God up to?” And “What is a good life and how do we live it?” specifically in the lives of people we are journeying with, right out of the gate we come up against a problem with Hannah.  Because our view, my view, of a good life, would be for her prayer to be answered and for her finally to be Samuel’s mother, and for Samuel to be hers to raise, forever. And God would be the one who answers that prayer, lets that fulfillment happen, doesn’t take back the gift God has given. 

But that’s not how Hannah sees it.  She names her son Samuel, a play on the verb sa-el- to ask- because she had asked him of the Lord. But this verb means both movements, both to ask fervently, and to lend back. The movements of giving and receiving, receiving and giving back. The gift of it all. So that Samuel’s very identity is one who is received and given back, the gift, in whom is experienced the movement of God toward us, and us in return to God.

For us, the good life is wanting something really badly and then getting it. The world’s stories are happily ever after endings. Rags to riches, humiliated to vindicated, worthless to important. Hannah’s identity changes in the world, she becomes Samuel’s mother. She is no longer the barren one, her own persistence means God heard her and answered her prayers. The story should stop there. The moral could be, don’t give up on your dreams. We’d love that kind of story. They make movies about those stories.  They write Sunday school books about those stories.  

But that’s not a way of God story.  Right in the middle between the creation and the eschaton, between the exodus and the promised land, between palm Sunday and Easter, is the part we skip over or race through or whitewash when we tell God’s story because it gets too messy, because we don’t know how to explain it.  We make it all cheery and shallow instead of painful and disconcerting, cute jewelry crosses instead of gut-wrenching “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” because the Christian life is supposed to be all victory and joy, and so we don’t talk very much about either the barrenness or the sacrifice, we don’t talk about the unanswered prayers or the terror of answered prayers and what they demand of us. 

Hannah has been drawn into something so miraculous that she envisions something so far beyond what we modern people are satisfied with.  She has changed. She’s no longer barren, written off, hopeless, but neither is she just Samuel’s mother.  She has been drawn into a bigger reality, and she wants nothing less than that for her own child.  What has happened can only be from the act of God, and so she will only let this baby participate in the act of God. Nothing less will satisfy.

So, as she leaves her child there, Hannah sings.  She sings a song of victory, and hope, and joy. She praises a God of strength and might, and thanks a God of power. 

She pronounces God’s preference for the weak, God’s deliverance of the poor, God’s partiality for the barren, the lost, in the story of salvation.

She speaks against the proud and the arrogant, those who think they have it all.  She declares God’s lordship over all the earth.  She sings this with all her heart.

The story doesn’t stop there, because God’s story never does.  

In a very turbulent time for Israel, the people kept on asking God for a King, a human leader other than God, that they could turn to, so they could be like the other nations. And finally God relents. But God needs someone to guide them in this time, to lead them to this king, and to advise the king too. God needs someone to be the one who goes between God and the people. And it will take a special person, one who will see the bigger picture, who will not seek to simply be king himself.  It will require one who looks beyond personal fulfillment to the greater cosmic story, and chooses to participate, chooses to trust God with his very life.  This is Hannah’s son.

Hannah’s story begins another story, Samuel’s story, and Israel’s story, actually, because the whole book of Samuel is really the story of Israel, Israel who was lost, and written off, hopeless and futureless.  This barren woman becomes God’s bearer of a lost nation’s future, a symbol of hope. 

His whole life long Samuel is to the people the embodiment of justice and compassion, he represents the ear of God and the voice of God.  He belongs to God and he belongs to Israel. He is the embodiment of the relationship of receiving and giving, God to the people, the people to God, the giving and receiving that it the gift of life when you live as those belonging to God.

We see Hannah again later in Samuel’s story.  It says in chapter two that every year when they return for the sacrifice at Shiloh Hannah brings Samuel a little robe that she has made for him.  And every year the priest acknowledges and honors her for her sacrifice.  And she and her husband go on to have five more children.  And the boy Samuel grows up before the Lord, claimed and cared for by God.  And years later Hannah’s song is taken up by King David and woven into his own poetry, into our Psalms, our scripture, after her son Samuel grows up and becomes a prophet of God who anoints a shepherd boy to be King, the ancestor of the Messiah.

Life is for sharing with God.  Even when what we most want is deeply good, the good life is not getting what we most want. 

And to live a good life is not to be passive recipients of God’s blessings. 

The good life is being a full participant with God in blessing the whole world.  

Hannah does not sing because she finally gets what she most wants.  She sings because she gives the gift back to God.  Because she is in the position of being able to give to God.  But her sharing began in the darkness, not just in the light. Not just when she has something to share but before that, when she was empty.  Hannah made her grief God’s business. She invites God into her barrenness. 

And when she does that, God takes her at her word and holds her to her promise, what dignity there is in that!  God receives Hannah’s impossible gift, but not as a passive recipient either.  God participates in Hannah’s gift by making Samuel a blessing to the nation, a linchpin in salvation history. Hannah trusted God and shared her anguish, and God trusted Hannah and used her help redeem God’s people.

Hannah becomes a prophet, singing out with joy about the end of the story that awaits us all, because she herselfhas tasted the hope, the fullness and freedom, the blessing of a God who doesn’t play by the rules of the world. She’s released from competition and inadequacy, of an identity defined by what she can or can’t produce, and even of a good life horizon that ends with our own personal fulfillment and joy. Instead she has found her life taken up into the life and purpose of God.   The movements of giving and receiving, receiving and giving back. The gift of it all. Hannah sings because she has tasted the real reality.

Life is a gift.  All of it.  The light and the darkness of it.  We are neither in this desolate, alone and against, nor are we called to be passive recipients.  We are invited to be full participants, collaborators with the Divine. 

But to do so, we must go to our own barren places of longing and despair and refuse to sit in them alone. We must invite God into our suffering, tell God what we are experiencing, and demand God’s response. 

When we do, we will find that the places of death, and darkness, and discomfort that we’d rather skip past, that we’d rather make into shallow moral lessons, those are where the story really happens, where the end is glimpsed, and the beginnings are created, and the redemption is worked out, and people are made real, and life is deep and significant, and we touch the eternal.  

And the beloved ones we are given, and given to, on loan from God, in this short and miraculous life, are also participants in the real.  Our identity is as those who are received and given back; we are gift to one another, in whom we experience the movement of God toward us, and us in return to God.  And we can give one another to God.  We can pray nothing less than the life and purposes of God for one another, and accept nothing short of full participation in the cosmic blessing of the world for ourselves.  And God will receive and honor that gift.  Because God comes and give us God’s very self.  

This is how we enter Advent. Come, Lord Jesus.

Amen.

This is part of a series, journeying with some of our Biblical ancestors: Hannah, Mary, Anna & Simeon, John, Samuel, David*, The Samaritan Woman, 

(*This is an older message about David, in this series, we had a wonderful performance of 'David" by Theater for the Thirsty)