My Soul Gives Glory (Twenty-Two Sundays after Pentecost; 1 Samuel 1:9-1, 19-20; 2:1-10; October 16, 2016)

My Soul Gives Glory

Twenty-Two Sundays after Pentecost
1 Samuel 1:9-1, 19-20; 2:1-10
October 16, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Much of the story of Hannah seems quite familiar. We can sympathize with her struggle to have children, with her earnest prayer to conceive, with the joy at her son's birth. This is especially so for those of us who have struggled in the same way or watched those we love struggle with infertility.

But there is more to this story than that.

Hannah was the wife of Elkanah, a man of the tribe of Ephraim. He had two wives, Hannah and Peninnah. From the order in which they are listed, I assume that Hannah was his first wife and Peninnah his second. Peninnah, we are told, had children. Hannah, as we know, did not.

In fact, I infer that Elkanah had married Hannah first and when it was clear that she could not have children, he married Peninnah.

This is strange to us all by itself, but the reasons are even stranger. Ancient Israel was strongly, even rabidly, patriarchal. The men ruled or, more precisely, the fathers ruled. Elkanah needed sons, or at very least a son. Only a son could inherit property. Only a son could stand with Elkanah in the sometimes vicious in-fighting that was the struggle for honor and prestige in the ancient villages of Israel. Elkanah needed a son.

It didn't matter how much Elkanah love Hannah. And he loved her very much. The value of a woman was what she could contribute to her husband. A wife's main contribution was sons or, at every least, children. Hannah could not do that.

So, for example when Elkanah's family brought offerings to the shrine at Shiloh, Elkanah would divide it into portions and give one portion each to Peninnah and her sons and daughters for them to offer. And he gave one portion to Hannah, because she was childless. He was bound by the rules of the game. He could not give her more.

Hannah's co-wife Peninnah taunted her and made her life miserable. Peninnah was the wife who did what wives were supposed to do and Hannah was not and she never let her forget it. In her depression Hannah couldn't sleep. She couldn't eat. All she could do was weep.

"Hannah, why are you crying?" her husband Elkanah would say to her. "Why won't you eat? Why are you so sad? Aren't I worth more to you than ten sons?"

The short answer, of course, was, "No, he was not." Her status was determined by her sons not her husband. In the eyes of patriarchy, the eyes that Hannah had made her own so that she was only able to see herself through her culture's eyes, she was worthless.

This is a story about men:
Elkanah, whose wife Hannah was unable to have children; Samuel, the son eventually born to that wife who was the last judge and the first prophet of Israel; and, most importantly of all, David, Jesse's son, whom Samuel anointed as king over the tribes of Israel. We only know the story of Hannah because that story figures in the foundation story of David's dynasty.

Kings, priests, and royal prophets are not interested in the struggles of women. They are not interested in their sleepless nights, their meals prepared without the slightest bit of appetite, or the taunts and gossip of other women. They are only interested in property and royal succession. When Hannah is at Shiloh with her family and her humiliation is fresh and she is praying desperately and quietly on account of her shame, to the priest Eli she is only a drunken woman disturbing the holy silence of his sanctuary. Hannah is an intrusion into patriarchy's otherwise smooth functioning.

I wish I could say that patriarchy is dead, but it is alive and well. This has been brought home forcefully in the news of the last few days. We cannot ignore the fact that there are men who believe that their wealth and fame entitle them to have access to the bodies of the women they find attractive and to ridicule the bodies of those they do not. And, from the support that these men get, we know that for every one of those who can get away with treating women this way there are many, many more who aspire to that status, men who resent having to treat women as people who have a choice about who touches them and how.

Not all men behave this way, but enough do. Enough do that a walk through the halls of our high school becomes a test of a girl's self-esteem. Enough do that nearly every woman has been sexually assaulted. Enough do that women select their wardrobes as if they were responsible for what the men they meet do and say. Enough do that the legal system is often more concerned with the impact of a rape conviction on a young man's career prospects than with the impact of rape on the well-being of the young woman who was his victim. Enough do that all men enjoy a kind of privilege in every encounter they have with any woman.

But, this still isn't the whole story. I've really only set the stage. Nothing has really happened yet. When something does happen it isn't Elkanah who does it, nor Eli, nor even Peninnah. When something happens, quite unexpectedly, it is Hannah who acts. She has been the victim so far without a shred of agency, without any clue that she can act on her own. She changes that. She pours out her heart to Yahweh. She just dumps everything in God's lap.

That not much agency, but it's a beginning. She deems her experience and her suffering to be worthy of God's attention and response. She may be worthless in her own eyes, but she's not worthless in God's. Eli speaks and blesses her and, for the time being, that is enough. She had something to eat. The sadness lifted. She went home with Elkanah and in due course she got pregnant. She named the boy Samuel, "I asked God." She named the boy.

One little act--pouring her heart out to God--leads to the bolder act of naming her son, a privilege reserved for fathers. And soon this act leads to another: She decides that this son will not belong to Elkanah, but instead will belong to Yahweh. And when the boy was weaned she took him to Eli the priest at Shiloh and gave him to Yahweh.

As a subversion of patriarchy it wasn't much. But it wasn't nothing either. Yahweh had opened up a little wiggle room for Hannah in an oppressive system and Hannah grabbed her chance and made the most of it. And because Hannah cried out and because Yahweh heard her and answered her cry, this is more than the story of the founding of David's dynasty. It is also a story of liberation. So much so that her song echoed through the ages and found an answering song from the heart of a Galilean peasant girl with a reproductive problem of her own. Mary's song became the evening song of the Church, a part of our legacy. We, too, worship the God who loosens the bonds of patriarchy.

That's why I must say this, and say it in particular to women and girls. You do not exist for the convenience or benefit of men. Your bodies do not belong to them. They are not entitled to touch you or to make comments about your bodies without your permission, even if they are a boyfriend or husband. You are human beings, children of God, worthy of all the dignity and respect this implies. It's true. It's true not because I say so, but because God says so in the lyrics of Hannah's song.

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