The Sacred Story for this week comes from 1 Samuel 1:9-2:10 - we’ll engage together with the story of Hannah, the first Prophetess of our Summer Sermon Series on Prophets, and look for our own songs of hope together.

This week I was watching a video of author Austin Channing Brown speak about her life as a black child and trying to figure out what is race. Even at the age of 8, she was noticing things. She began to notice that language, our words, have different meanings to different people – that we have underlying and often unacknowledged assumptions that shape our communication and our understanding of different things and ultimately impact us in different ways. Not even big words like justice, but the words that speak of routine life. When I say “we’re going to have macaroni –what do you picture? In my house…it means the blue box…Velveeta if we really want to make a meal out of it and Martha Stewart’s gruyere recipe if it’s a special occasion and I’m feeling boujee. For Austin, macaroni means something very specific and that something is definitely baked in the oven and not on the stovetop. Yams. Maybe you imagine a root vegetable that can be prepared EITHER savory or sweet, you’ve got options. But 8-year-old Austin is only expecting something candied.

Our words are weighted, not only with our own assumptions but those of our larger culture and of generations. How we define and imagine what it means to be…

Professional…

Or powerful…

Or a prophet…

When you think of a prophet, who do you picture? What do they look like? What do they sound like?

Being steeped in these sacred stories since my childhood I picture someone wild like John the Baptist, loud like Jeremiah or Amos, confrontational like Moses, one in a powerful public position like Nathan, which apparently also leads me to an image that seems exclusively male.

In the Talmud, a sacred Jewish text of Rabbinical teachings to accompany and interpret the Torah, there are 55 people identified as prophets. 48 of them are male, but 7 of them are female.

Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Abigail, Huldah, Esther, and Hannah.

Actually, the text says that there were many more prophets than even these, but these are particularly recorded because their prophecy holds eternal relevance for generations and/or they note a particular ecstatic encounter with God. It brings to mind the words at the end of the Gospel of John, “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”

So I began to wonder how I had missed these verses in the Bible that explicitly speak of prophetesses and what was missing from my understanding of a prophet and thus God’s work in the world as a result.

Perhaps these missing stories are what allow us to hold onto our one-dimensional picture a prophet primarily as someone screaming on the sidewalk corners carrying a cardboard sign that the end is near, speaking in cryptic riddle language that supposedly predicts the future, and condemning humanity for its sin. To be sure, these caricatures echo some kernel of truth, but just because you’re loud and angry and extreme, doesn’t make you a prophet.

I was always taught that a prophet is someone who serves as a messenger or mouthpiece of God, like a conduit for the divine voice to the people. And since God relates to us in covenant and in promise, this message can be critical and harsh when that covenantal relationship is being broken, but that it holds at its heart a reminder of our true identity as beloved people, a community that creates life out of life and an invitation to return to, to remember that truth.

But because of the limited scope of prophets that I was presented with…that role of messenger, took shape in my head as looking a particular way. It was explicit and concrete, like literal words regurgitated from God to human. It looked more like an eloquent Toastmasters speech, even in the raw moments behind the scenes of the public face where I know the prophets also wrestled with God often.

Hannah - Three Jewish women, seated, reading the scriptures_ one of them breastfeeding - J Nash after Sir David Wilke.jpg

Something about the story of Hannah opens up the idea of this message, this ecstatic experience of God, as something more mystical than all that. Like the well-known names, here is a prophet that is also calling the people back to their identity and relationship in God and this expansive vision of God’s redemptive work in the world …but also IN communion with Godself, experiencing something intangible but powerful of God’s presence and promise that creates this wider awareness. She is reminding others and she remembers herself. And that’s where the women in particular begin to reveal new holy things to me.

Like other prophets, Hannah lays her soul bare before God – with all her emotion, naming her anxiety and pain and desperate yearning, bringing all of this into the place of worship and the presence of religious leaders. She has been bullied and shamed, her femininity and her entire value have been a matter of debate within her household, she is tormented and saddened, and she doesn’t tidy it up to be more palatable for others. At first, Eli the priest responds to this with shame, which would dismiss her voice altogether, but Hannah is assured of her own dignity and her authority to approach God with her whole self and no longer cares about looking foolish in pursuit of God’s presence. Ultimately, it will reveal God in new ways to those who witness it. Yet in this experience of suffering, even as those who love her try to comfort her, she feels utterly alone and forgotten. And so she prays to be remembered by God.

And God DOES remember her. It doesn’t say that God remembers her bargaining, her desperate offering, or her vow. God remembers HER.

And in her being remembered she has the vision to recognize and to speak to God’s remembrance of her whole community and all of creation. God’s commitment to Hannah, is reflective of God’s commitment to the world as she gives voice to this for the sake of the community. As a prophet, Hannah discerns the significance of her life and gifts and experience for the blessing of others and the movement toward divine justice. Rabbi Abraham Heschel, who stood arm in arm with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, wrote, “Prophecy is not simply the application of timeless standards to particular human situations, but rather an interpretation of a particular moment in history, a divine understanding of a human situation.” Hannah recognizes that this moment and experience which holds incredible significance for her but is also significant beyond her and beyond what she can personally foresee or imagine. Her blessing is not just that she’s a pass-through from a prophet like Samuel, she has her own sacred voice to raise as well and she shares it with others. Hannah recognizes her place in the larger story and work of God toward transformation, redemption, salvation.

For a time that work is mothering, raising and weaning the child entrusted to her for a time – playing peek-a-boo at bathtime and wiping runny noses. This is her holy work for a season. She stands firm in the importance of it and her partner, her spouse, Samuel’s father Elakanah, for his part honors her voice and this work and tends to his own holy call within their family.

Ultimately, God has blessed Hannah to see the interwoven nature of the personal and the communal and so she shares what has been entrusted to her for the sake of God’s work in the community, even her own child, bringing him to serve as a Nazirite, a consecrated role to serve God and the people, to draw them near to one another.

Which sounds a lot like another woman who is surprised to become a mother and also has her son dedicated at the temple for what will eventually be a different kind of prophetic and priestly work. The two respond with song and it seems that even hundreds of years apart, the tune itself must have been carried in the rhythm of creation. Mary, the mother of Jesus, picks up Hannah’s refrain as they both sing of a world being turned right side up:

Of pointing to God as our ultimate source of value and impact

Of disrupting the ways of power propped up by violence and indignity to usher in a new kind of strength that doesn’t rely on subjugation.

Of a world in which both oppressors and oppressed are liberated and transformed.

Perhaps you too have heard this song on the wind and in the streets. Perhaps you too have come to God, raw and desperate. Perhaps there was something, some twitch or shift, or sigh or dream just beyond your consciousness that brought you back to yourself and reminded you that you are not alone or forgotten and that you are valued with gifts to share. Perhaps you still yearn for such an experience or awareness.

And this is why we sing - because the song is not ours to keep but to share for the hope of the world. As much as it moves us in our singing, it also moves mountains when we give voice to it in community with one another. This is why we tell our sacred stories because we turn the page and suddenly see that the story, God’s story, is also about us and the world around us, even as we can’t always quite pin the connection down or see how the thread will play out over time. The story not only includes us like a passing mention but involves us in its movement forward. God holds us – together to ourselves, to one another, and to God’s enduring promises. Amen.

A Song of Hope