1/17/21 1 Samuel 3:1-10-20 The Language of the Unheard Joy Douglas Strome
Prayer for Illumination: Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Rock and Redeemer. Amen.
Don’t fret if you haven’t heard the story of Samuel. It’s a favorite of Sunday School curriculum, because so few of our texts have children in them. It doesn’t always make it into the top ten stories of the Bible. But it’s a good one, and a good one for today.
You can’t really understand the importance of Samuel without first knowing his mother
Hannah, the one who threw her life down before God with the urgent prayer for a child. Every wannabe mother out there, who flips quickly past the Facebook pictures of children propped up in chairs, chalk board beside them chronicling their success, month after month knows Hannah’s heart.
For Hannah, and in particular for Hannah in her day, the creation of a child was the only thing that would make her life complete, whole. The fact that she hadn’t was like wearing a Scarlett letter around town, Oh yeah, that’s Hannah, the one who can’t have children. What a pity. She must have really angered God to receive this kind of punishment. Did you hear that she made a fool of herself at temple? Again. As if God would reward that kind of behavior. We’ve made some progress, women no longer carry the stigma, but it still sits there….the way the culture idolizes and romanticizes the family, and for the woman who can’t bear children and wants to, or has made a decision not to, she carries that burden quietly.
Hannah’s prayers were answered, but not before she made a deal that’s pretty hard to hear.
If God would give her a child, she would dedicate the child to service at the temple. Her prayer to
God is famous, well maybe not to everyone, but it is a beautiful set of words that give Hannah a place in our history that is important….and for wannabe mothers and others, the price feels pretty steep......
In thanksgiving for the child Samuel, she sings a song of praise to God, and thanks gives way to proclamation, a proclamation that is more than a song:
Here’s a sample: v. 8 God raises up the poor from the dust; and lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor. For the pillars of the earth are the
Lord’s and on them God has set the world.
It is her own Magnificat, planting the seeds for dear Mary whose own miraculous pregnancy brings forth a similar proclamation. Text criticism would inform us that it might not be Hannah’s voice, but a general call of thanksgiving from oppression from a later time…..but even that gives
Hannah a place---that the ancients would deliver a poem of liberation from Hannah’s lips should have us leaning in for more.
So it seems important to lay that groundwork, before we ever get to the boy Samuel, hearing voices in the middle of the night he cannot identify. Samuel was dedicated to service in the temple as a kind of thank offering to God and Hannah promised to bring him there as soon as he was weaned.
So between Hannah’s song of liberation and the story for today we hear of the troubles in the house of Eli. Eli’s sons were raised to be priests, priests who had rules and laws to live by and who seem to have a disdain for both. Not unlike our law and order president who is happy to look the other way while violence unfolds at his bequest. The sons know the slippery talk of those in power for themselves….. not the people they serve. Well of course the sacrifice of meat at the temple has rules around it, but they don’t apply to me, I’m going to take the filet mignon home for my family to eat tonight. The priests had rules around their body, but that didn’t stop them from laying with the women who served at the entrance of the tent of meeting---sexual abuse we call it nowadays. Rape of one in power over one without it…...
So Eli’s family was full of power, but his sons had lost their way. Eli was old and losing his sight, and the boy Samuel (Hannah’s precious son) is given over to the care of this group---what a
cringe-worthy upbringing for this gift from God. Hang in there with me and don’t get lost in the weeds of these details. We’re going to back up and look at the big pictures.. But let’s get to the story of the hour. Eli knows his family is doomed; he’s been warned once, but now it is apparent that God is trying to speak to Eli through the young boy Samuel. Samuel does not immediately understand and
Eli, in a “come-to-Jesus” moment (I know that’s an anachronism---I don’t care)….says to Samuel---go ahead, tell me what God has to say---I can take it. So Samuel, in the middle of the night…Samuel goes walking in his sleep, from the mountains of faith, to the river so deep---oops, just stepped into a
Billy Joel song.
So Samuel obeys and the news is not good. It’s worth an interruption to say that Sunday
School curriculum generally stops at Samuel’s recognition that it is God speaking to him and we teach the message of listening for God and learning to recognize God’s voice for what it is. But not today…..it’s not enough to hear God’s voice and know that it is God, it presses on for Samuel to deliver that bad news….that God will call out bad behavior, for priests, for prophets, for kings, for presidents, for anyone. Let me say with clarity: God may help us call out bad behavior, but it isn’t
God’s job to fix the mess we’ve made in our political world.
Chapter 3 closes with the observation that Samuel will go on to be a revered prophet for all of
Israel.
So….for the big picture. Seems there are a couple of timely messages here. Let’s start with a twist on the Sunday School message. listening for God. Recognizing that God is speaking.
Participating in the conversation. Now that’s a great concept, but here’s my worry. I don’t know what your nighttime sleep is like, but rarely does anything that comes to me in the middle of the night turn out to be something I’d want to stake my life on. If I am deep asleep and some random dream has captured my imagination, even if I can remember it when I awake, it has not often occurred to me that, well let’s be real, it has never occurred to me that that is God’s voice speaking, merely my subconscious having its psychological way with me overnight. If I wake up in the night, without the
prompt of a dream, it’s often because I can’t sleep…..my daytime worries and real-time nightmares won’t let go long enough to sleep. I’d love to hear from God right then, tell me what’s what, give me some direction……but mostly there’s only the sound of the Brown Line when it starts back up at 4:00 a.m……
So my question is: if the middle of the night is our platform, do we really want God to speak then---when we are most vulnerable, when our fears are most evident, when the tangle of fatigue and dark and anxiety cloud any clear vision. For that matter, let’s talk about the entire 24 hours. I ask along with BBT, does anyone really want to hear the voice of the living God?....and if we do, what’s worse: to hear it or not to hear it….to face fainting at the power of it or to live oblivious to it? (BBT,
Voices in the Night)
So, as much as I love the story of Samuel’s awakening to his role as prophet for Israel, I believe the second big picture message is more important. Hannah dedicated this child to God not to terrorize him at night, but that he might serve God in an important way. Moving the house of Eli out of power was the first thing he did. Two themes will come from Samuel’s time as prophet to the people: the importance of good governance---it will be Samuel who helps the Israelites transition from a period of judges to the period of the monarchy. The second theme in Samuel is the complexity of relationships both between people and God and among people. The time of the monarchy is as problematic as the period before in many ways, but Samuel’s role is the same in either era. To listen for God’s word….and then deliver to God’s people. To keep before them the way of faithfulness and to, to call out bad behavior, and for better or worse, have the courage to speak truth to power.
Tomorrow we celebrate the life of Martin Luther King Jr. I’ve been reading his book “Why We
Can’t Wait” in preparation for an event with the Community Renewal Society tomorrow. The non- violent movement of his day sits in my head with such stark contrast to what we’ve just seen in
Washington. MLK had such a way of speaking truth to power---of getting out in the open the systems that were making it impossible for people of color to thrive. Can you imagine how his voice might
tremble with equal parts passion and fury in addressing us today? How ashamed we’d be to tell him his life was lost and that we’d made so little progress? Can you imagine him before the Congress, or on the mall in Washington DC calling for change, and shining a light on the violent actions of last week…..and all that led to it.
Samuel opens with “the word of the Lord was rare in those days: visions were not widespread. It feels like that now, doesn’t it? We have little evidence that God is speaking through this, or that God is coaching anyone in the background to speak truth boldly and persuasively. Is the word of the Lord rare in our days too?
What does God see in us that we can’t see? What is God trying to tell us that we can’t hear?
Who identifies God’s voice when we cannot see it? Will our community of faith be able to join together in finding our way through this? Could God be counting on us to say “here I am, a servant of the Lord?” Yes, of course.
Listen to a prayer for the church that Martin Luther King wrote:
Lord… We thank you for your church, founded upon your Word, that challenges us to do more than sing and pray, but go out and work as though the very answer to our prayers depended on us and not upon you. Help us to realize that humanity was created to shine like the stars and live on through all eternity. Keep us, we pray, in perfect peace. Help us to walk together, pray together, sing together, and live together until that day when all God’s children — Black, White, Red, Brown and Yellow — will rejoice in one common band of humanity in the reign of our Lord and of our God, we pray. Amen.