"Hannah: Portrait of a Prayerful Parent "

A Sermon for Mother's Day Preached by
The Rev. Jean Niven Lenk

I found on the internet the following list of “Things My Mother Taught Me”:¹

My Mother taught me LOGIC..."If you fall off that swing and break your neck, you can't go to the store with me and get that toy."

My mother taught me about the WISDOM of YEARS..."When you get to be my age, you will understand."

My mother taught me about ANTICIPATION..."Just wait until your father gets home."

And my mother taught me about JUSTICE..."One day you'll have kids, and I hope they turn out just like YOU."

It is Mother’s Day, the day we set aside to celebrate mom. Mother’s Day always falls on Sunday, which gives us preacher types the opportunity to find meaningful connections between motherhood, God, and faith. But I always approach the confluence of Mother’s Day and worship with a bit of hesitation. First, I am sensitive to the fact that honoring mothers excludes women who have not borne children, either by choice, circumstance, or through physical inability, and I am reluctant to focus on one group of people at the expense of another.

I am also sensitive to the reality that some of us have complicated or broken relationships with our mothers, or with those who call us mother. And some of us have lost a mother, or a child, or the mother of our children, which makes today’s celebrations more painful than joyous.

And, in my case – and that of every other pastor who is also a mom – preaching a sermon extolling the virtues of mothers feels a lot like, well, self-promotion.

And so this morning, I would like us to look at a very special example of motherhood from the Holy Scriptures. There are nearly 400 references to mothers in the Bible. In fact, one of the earliest human titles in the Bible is that of "mother." It appears in Genesis when God creates woman, who is named Eve because she is the “mother of all living things.”

The stories of many women in the Bible have been passed down through the generations as examples of faithful, often selfless, motherhood. There is Sarah, the wife of Abraham, who is called “Mother of the Nations.” God promises her a son, and even though she laughs at the prospect, at the age of ninety, Sarah conceives Isaac.²

There is Jochebed, who is willing to give up her beloved baby boy Moses and have him raised by Pharoah’s daughter in order to spare him from Pharaoh’s edict of death for Hebrew male children. Because of her selfless sacrifice, Jochebed’s son grows up to be the liberator of Israel.

There are Eunice and Lois, mother and grandmother of Timothy. Together, they team-teach Timothy the Holy Scriptures, steeping him in the knowledge of the great Old Testament prophets and judges as well as the wisdom found in Psalms and Proverbs. Timothy is only about fifteen when he leaves these two important women in his life and goes with the Apostle Paul to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And of course, the most beloved and best known mother of all is Mary of Nazareth, whose name almost never appears in the New Testament without reference to her being the mother of Jesus. God chooses her as the vessel to bear God into this earthly world, and she stands as an example of Godly devotion and faithfulness.

But this morning, I’d like us to take a closer look at the story of Hannah, whose story is told in First Samuel. As we read in our scripture lesson, Hannah is heartbroken because she longs for a child but has been unable to conceive. In Hannah’s day, such a condition was considered a curse from God and carried a heavy social stigma because a woman’s worth was measured in large part by her ability to procreate. To make matters worse, her husband Elkanah has another wife, Peninnah, who has borne him several children, and Penninah causes Hannah even greater pain by taunting her barren condition.

Elkanah loves Hannah, but he can’t understand her agony. “Hannah, why do you weep and why do you not eat and why is your heart sad?” he asks. “Am I not better to you than ten sons?” Sometimes husbands, even loving ones, don’t understand what is deep in a woman’s heart – but God does.

In turn, Hannah knows her God and her prayer book, and the book of Lamentations tells her to: “Pour out your heart like water before the presence of the Lord; lift up your hands to him for the life of your little ones.”³ And that’s exactly what Hannah does. In the first prayer of a woman recorded in Scripture, she pours out her request to God. Weeping bitterly, she releases all her pent-up anguish, grief, and disappointment to God; her groanings are so deep in her heart that no words come out of her moving lips. Hannah knows she can be honest with God and knows she doesn’t have to “have it all together” before she goes to God in prayer. She knows that God will meet her right where she is, at her point of need, and will listen to the outpourings of her soul.

God does hear Hannah’s prayer and grants to her the desire of her heart. In time, a son is born to Hannah, and she names him Samuel, meaning “asked of the Lord.” Hannah nurtures her little boy until he is weaned, about three years old, and then the time comes for her to fulfill her vow and take him to the temple to live and serve God.

Every time I read this part of Hannah’s story, my heart tugs a little. How hard it must have been for Hannah to relinquish her precious little boy, her beloved first-born son, the one she had prayed for and wept for. But through the dark night of her soul and her prayerful outpourings, Hannah has come to know God; from the depths of her pain, she has learned to trust God. And just as she trusted God to answer her prayer for a child, so she now trusts God with what matters to her most. Listen to the prayer she offers to God, in the Bible translation by Eugene Peterson entitled The Message: “Hannah prayed: I'm bursting with God-news! I'm walking on air. I'm laughing at my rivals. I'm dancing my salvation. Nothing and no one is holy like God.”⁴

Hannah can sing this song of joy even as she leaves her little boy at the temple, because she knows that it is to God her beloved Samuel truly belongs; she is only giving back to God what has come from God in the first place, and that faith in God and faithfulness to God enables Hannah to hand Samuel over to the Lord’s service in the temple.

Once a year the family will travel to the temple in Shiloh, and each time Hannah will take with her a robe she has made – each a little bigger than the last – for Samuel to wear. We can imagine her hemming the robe with love, saying with every stitch a prayer for God’s protection, and for God’s purpose to be accomplished through her son’s life.

Hannah’s fingerprints – perhaps a better word is or “prayerprints” – Hannah’s prayerprints are all over the life of Samuel, and we can also see the hand of God at work in Samuel’s life. As we can read in later chapters, “Samuel grew and the Lord was with him and let none of his words fail.”⁵ He becomes a prophet – God’s chosen spokesperson – and he is also a priest and a judge of Israel – the only man to have all three responsibilities in the entire history of Israel. And God blesses Hannah with five more children.

Whether we are now parents or grandparents, or future parents, or serve as parental figures to children of any age, we can learn much from Hannah and her faith. We can’t put our children in a protective bubble to keep them safe from the world. We can’t control all the forces that try to undo our careful training and nurture. We can’t always pick them up, kiss the hurt, and make everything better. But we can scoop them up and give them to God, from whom these precious gifts come in the first place.

And so, on this Mother’s Day, to all of us who have a child in our lives, my prayer is we remember that, like Hannah, we can go to God and pour out our hearts and trust that God will hear us and meet us at our point of need; may we remember, like Hannah, to be God-ward in our focus during both the joys and sorrows of our lives; may we, too, be able to sing from the depths of our souls, “Nothing and no one is holy like God.” And may we remember, like Hannah, that we can entrust our children to God, who loves them even more than we do. Amen.

¹http://www.homiliesbyemail.com/Special/Mothers/motherresources.html -- adapted.
²Genesis 21:2,3
³Lamentations 2:19
⁴1 Samuel2:1-2
⁵1 Samuel 3:19