A sermon preached at Calvary Presbyterian Church in San Francisco, CA

October 13, 2024

1 Samuel 1:9-11, 19-20; 2:1-10

Introduction to Worship:

Good morning and welcome to worship here at Calvary Presbyterian Church, both those of you in person and those of you joining us online. We are glad for this time to be together. 

Today we’ll be talking about being ‘all in’ for our faith, using our very lives as an offering to God. 

You hear people talk about being ‘all in’, and often they are talking about the work they put in during the off season to be able to score more touchdowns, three point shots, or homeruns. And while I am very excited about the return of basketball season, this is not what we’re talking about today. 

Across faith traditions, there is a sense that offering our very lives to God is what is called for. Before he became the Buddha, Sidartha Gautama had a good life, by all standards. He was a prince, with the privilege that came with that. He ate the best food and wore the best clothes. He’d married a princess and they were expecting their first child. 

He had a number of experiences that awakened him to the challenges of life—aging, suffering, death—and over time he decided that seeking a way to overcome suffering was what he had to do. So he left his family, his wealth, his power, his comfort, and began his search. He was all in. He dedicated the rest of his life to communicating what he learned about enlightenment and 2,500 years later, we still see that bearing fruit. 

Ida B Wells was born into slavery in Mississippi and freed by the emancipation proclamation when she was a child. She became a teacher to support her family. And then bought a share in a newspaper and became a journalist. When a family friend was lynched in 1892, she started to investigate them, and uncovered some dangerous truths about lies society had been told. People were told that lynching only happened occasionally, and only to people who raped or murdered people. 

But her friend had done none of those things, and she discovered lynching was far more common and was “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized.” Few people in her day spoke the truth so clearly. 

A mob of white vigilantes ransacked the offices of her newspaper, threatening death to anyone who continued to write for it. So she started publishing pamphlets, and spoke throughout the country and in Britain. She was behind the founding of the NAACP.  She was all in, and 100 years later, we continue her work of speaking dangerous truth to power. (Both of these stories, and more, can be found in Miroslav Volf’s book, Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most)

I could tell stories all day about people who were all in for their faith and beliefs. I could tell stories about some of you, dedicating your lives to the causes you hold most closely to your heart. 

You don’t have to be Jesus, or the Buddha, or a famous activist to be ‘all in’ with your life. But wrapped up in all of their stories is a web of questions for us to consider. 

What matters most to us?

What makes a good life?

What kind of life is worthy of our humanity?

What do we owe each other and the world? 

As we worship this morning, and as we go through our week, may these questions percolate on the back burners of our minds. Let us worship this day, all in for joy, for hope, and for praise. 

 

Sermon:

The Ark of the Covenant resided in Shiloh. It was here that Elkanah and his two wives, Penninah and Hannah, would come to worship and to sacrifice to the LORD of hosts. And, each year, as they would journey to Shiloh, the part of the text we didn’t read says Penninah would provoke Hannah. Perhaps this is the ultimate family of dysfunctionality. . We don’t catch the dialogue, but I suspect it went something like this.

Penninah: “Hannah, aren’t you excited to go to Shiloh? So we can say thank you to God for all of our blessings, for all of our children? Oh wait. You don’t have any children, do you? Silly me. I forgot. So, what do you thank God for?”

Hannah, remembering that her mother told her if she had nothing nice to say, she should just curse silently under her breath, said nothing.

Her husband, who loved her greatly but seems a touch clueless here, says, “why are you crying? Am I not better than 10 sons?”

Um….no. Seriously? No, you’re not.

So Penninah walks into the temple with her children, proudly, confident God has blessed her greatly. Elkanah walks in, dutifully, appropriately. Hannah walks in, deeply distressed and weeping bitterly. She pours her soul before the Lord, begging for a child, begging to be remembered by God.

Eli, the priest, sees her praying.

“Go in peace.” he says. “The God of Israel grant the petition you have made to him.”

And God does. Hannah becomes pregnant and gives birth to a healthy boy she named Samuel. And after the boy was weaned, she took him, just as she promised, and gave him to the Lord. Left him at the temple in Shiloh with Eli, only to see him once a year when the Elkanah family came to worship and sacrifice.

I’m not sure I’ve always understood Hannah’s response after her son was born. I used to wonder if, after praying so long and hard for a baby, could I have handed him over to the priest at the temple? And if I did, would my song have been a song of praise as she sings?

Hannah has always been a mystery for me.

Her song, though, has affected me differently this week than other times when I have read it. It is a song of praise of sorts, but it isn’t the same song as I suspect Peninah would have sung—about how glad she is that God knows how faithful she is so she could be so rewarded. Hannah’s praise also recognizes lament, pain, and loss. I hear a song about life, and death, and loss, and victory.

I hear a song that acknowledges our lives are in the hand of God, and not resting in our own power, might, and success.

It’s a song of hope and promise, where the future will be better than we can imagine right now in the present.

We know the ending of Hannah’s story. We know that Hannah goes on to have 5 other children. But she doesn’t know that when she’s praising God and handing over her one child to the Temple.

We know that Samuel grows up to be a great prophet of God, who anoints Saul and later David to be kings of Israel. But Hannah doesn’t know that when she’s praising God and handing her baby over to be raised in the Temple.

One thing she might have known, had she been paying attention, is that Eli’s family was a hot mess. His sons were not faithful men. The priesthood was a career where the job was passed from father to son, and Eli’s sons were corrupt, stealing the best parts of the offering for themselves. The text says “the sons of Eli were scoundrels; they had no regard for the Lord or for the duties of the priests to the people….Thus the sin of the young men was very great in the sight of the Lord; for they treated the offerings of the Lord with contempt”.

Was it clear to her that Samuel would be safe? Being raised in unstable conditions, in the midst of a family that put the fun in dysfunction?

When she was singing her song of praise, she was handing her son to be raised by a man whose parenting record was spotty. And she still sang her song of hope. Because her hope was not in the things she could control, or the situations she could manufacture. Her hope was in God.

My heart exults in the Lord;
my strength is exalted in my God.

And what she knew about God, what allowed her to trust her son into the service of God at the Temple, was that God brings up the fortunes of the poor and strengthens the weak. She sings a subversive song, which we will hear echoed during advent in Mary’s song, the magnificat in the Book of Luke. A song where political power counts for little. A song where weakness becomes strength. A song where hungry people are fed. A song where barren people become bearers of life. 

A song that upends our understanding of blessedness. Surely, people who knew Hannah and Penninah would have said well meaning things to Penninah with all her children, like “you’ve been so richly blessed”, without reckoning how that would be heard by Hannah. But Hannah still knew blessing, even when it was invisible to the people around her. She knew any blessing she had was from God, and that it is God who placed the pillars that hold the world. 

Hannah’s song is as subversive today as it was then. Women remain vulnerable, crying out for autonomy, safety, and respect. People remain hungry, crying out for bread. People remain at risk, crying out for equality and safety in the streets. Leaders remain corrupt, taking the best of the offerings at the expense of the weak. 

I once heard Dr. Melissa Harris Perry speak at a conference about the disease of Racism in our country, and in the church. She is the Maya Angelou Presidential Chair at Wake Forest University, as well as an author and television host. She spoke about the fact that her great-great-grandmother was sold as a slave. And she wondered how her ancestor could have imagined who her descendants would become. Could a woman being sold as a slave consider that one day her grandson would be a professor at University of Virginia, where professors were once allowed to bring their enslaved people to campus? Could she have imagined that her great great granddaughter would be a professor and an author?

I wonder what song her great great grandmother sang when she was bringing life in the antebellum south? Was it like Hannah’s song? Let’s be clear. To bring life into a dangerous world is an act of faith and hope.

Dr Harris-Perry’s story reminded me of the resiliency of life. Even when we can’t promise safety and certainty, we bear life into the world, as a response to our cries and hopes we bring before God. We pour out our hearts before God, our perfect offering of hope for what we hope the world can become.

Do you think your ancestors could have dreamed of you? Of the lives you are living and the good things you are bringing to life in the world?

In this passage, the illustration of Hannah’s offering is giving birth to a child. And for Hannah and the other women in our biblical narratives, that was THE way to find security and success in the world. Some would say things haven’t changed so much for women today, as we acknowledge that matters relating to women’s sexuality and fertility remain important, sometimes painful, and political.

When I speak of bearing life into the world, I’m not talking about giving birth to children. All of us create things of beauty, hope, and life—things we then have to offer up to God. Whether it is art, or commerce, or relationship, or service, the things we do can be life giving and hopeful when we offer them up to God without reservation or condition.

Or they can be for self profit only. Think of the way Peninah viewed her children as if they were proof of God’s favor to her—she had the potential to bear life into the world, and instead she bore selfish competition that did not speak hope to the world. 

Eli’s sons had the power to bear life. They could have cared for the community that came to the temple, offering help and comfort to those bringing offerings. Instead, they took the best part of the offering for themselves, making themselves rich off the work and hopes of others and doing nothing to contribute to the world around them.

I’m reading a book right now by Miroslav Volf, and he brings up the illustration of the architect Albert Speer. He was less than 30 years old when Adolf Hitler offered him the role of chief architect of the Nazi Party. Speer decided he was “above all an architect” and when Hitler offered him the opportunity to “design buildings the likes of which had not been seen for two thousand years”, he said yes. He was bringing something into the world, but it wasn’t life. He participated in the Nazi crimes, using slave labor to build his grand buildings, contributing to the deaths of millions. 

We are all bringing something into the world. Are we bringing life to the world that we offer to God? Or are we only seeking fame, or power, or something else? Volf writes about Speer, saying, “That singular devotion to his career made him an exceptionally good architect. But that greatness also contains the monstrosity of his life because that same singular devotion also made him an exceptionally bad human being. It is possible to succeed in our highest aspirations and yet fail as human beings”. 

Being ‘all in’ is only laudable when it’s bringing life, when it is looking to God. 

I’m really convicted by Hannah this week. I realize I’ve been able to get by with half-hearted offerings because I have privilege, we have privilege, to be half-hearted. We have often part-way committed to working in the world without inconveniencing ourselves. Hannah was the one person in that story who did not have the privilege of half way. She didn’t have the fertility of Penninah or the access to power of Eli’s sons. As she wept, she asked to not be forgotten by God. She offered the life she could bear.

There are too many Hannahs in the world, asking not to be forgotten by God. Asking not to be forgotten by us. Will we remember them?

What if we, as a congregation, were “all in” here, at Calvary, the way Hannah was? What if we committed to offering all of ourselves, especially the life we bear into the world? What if we committed to our life in faith together, recognizing that when we are here together to support each other, when we serve and volunteer together, when we support and commit to support the ministries that bring life, we can participate in where God is bringing life in our neighborhood, our city, our world. If each person in this sanctuary, and watching or listening to this service contributed what they could, no matter what it was, just think about what Calvary would be able to do to bear more hope, more love, more life into the world? 

For all the great ministries of service you support, we often have more great ideas that don’t come to fruition because we don’t have the follow through or commitment to see them done. What if we were all in?

The world is praying to not be forgotten. May we remember. And bear life and hope to them, the perfect offering to God.

Amen