"This Is My Song" - Sermon for the Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost

This Is My Song
Pentecost 22 – Narrative Lectionary 3
October 16, 2016
Grace, Mankato, MN
1 Samuel 1.9-11, 19-20; 2.1-10

I love Broadway musicals and, as you can imagine, I enjoy going to the Chanhassen Dinner Theater from time to time. In musicals, when done right, the songs are memorable, combining good tunes with a compelling story. One thing that tickles me, however, is how the characters will suddenly burst into song in the most unlikely places with a full orchestra backing them up, such when Julie Andrews sings on a mountain top in The Sound of Music. In our lesson for today, like a Broadway actress, Hannah bursts into song at a most unlikely time and place. There is no apparent orchestra backing her and the song is odd, a nationalistic song if anything. It’s as if Eliza Doolittle were to sing, God Save the Queen in the midst of My Fair Lady.

Last week, we were at the foot of Mt. Sinai where the Israelites’ song went from boisterous to lament. They had come close to extinction because of their apostasy in building the golden calf. Since then, they’ve been on the move. Poised to enter the Promised Land, they have been forced to wander 40 years in the wilderness because they doubted God’s ability to help them settle the inhabited land. Once the faithless generation passes away, under Joshua’s leadership they entered the Promised Land and conquered it only to be besieged on all sides by the nation states surrounding them. Because they are a loose confederation of tribes, they are easy pickings. Occasionally, God will raise judges to rally them, but they get tired of this cycle and eventually will want a king to unify them.

The story of Samuel is how the monarchy comes into being in general and how the line of David gets established in particular. And the story begins in the most unlikely of places, with an elderly priest and a barren woman. (A side note: this won’t be the last time that a story of greatness begins with a birth narrative of humility. Cue The Magnificat, the song that a young virgin will sing a thousand years later upon learning that she is caring God’s Son, the long-awaited Messiah.) Hannah is persecuted by her husband’s other wife; we call it bullying today. She goes up to worship at Shiloh and prays fervently for a child where she is accused of drinking by the priest Eli. Eli promises her a child and God remembers her. Hannah and her husband conceive, a son is born and when the child is weaned, Hannah gives the child back to God.

I don’t know what it’s like not to be able to have a child and I can only imagine what it’s like to not be able to conceive. I think the idea of barrenness comes close. And I think most of us have an experience of being forgotten, perhaps by God, which maybe even more painful. And to give a child up after waiting so long stretches the imagination. Again, the only thing I can think of that might be similar is a birth mother giving her child for adoption. Yet, right after she does so, Hannah bursts into a song about the power of God’s justice. Perhaps she does so because she is not only able to receive something, but she is also able to give something for the first time in her life.

Hannah sings because she knows that it is in barrenness that God works to make a future. Her song is both proclamation and prophecy. Hannah proclaims God’s faithfulness and remembering. She dares to sing a song that spits in the face of power brokers of the world and she declares that all evidence to the contrary, God favors those at the margins of society. In other words, God has not forgotten any of us. Furthermore, she hints of one who is coming 1,000 years later and who will bring justice to the world.

Hannah sings in response to God’s presence and working in her life. Where have you seen God’s presence in your life and what song would you sing? You might not be on Broadway or backed up by a full orchestra, but sing anyway. Sing of God’s faithfulness and remembrance of you. Thanks be to God. Amen.