Are We Drunk

Are We Drunk?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 15, 2015

Scripture: 1 Samuel 1:4-20

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I wrote most of this sermon before the terrorist attacks in Paris last Friday. I haven’t changed it, but I think that in times like these, times of grief and fear, times of anger and outrage, the message I crafted before the attacks is if anything more important after the attacks.

It’s a really important story, but it may be one you aren’t very familiar with. It is the story of the birth of Samuel. Samuel is a very big deal in the Old Testament. He is the prophet who essentially creates the kingdom in Israel, anointing first Saul then David as king. Now, there is a pattern to the births of several major characters in the Bible. They are born to women who, biologically speaking, can’t conceive children. These women turn to God for help. God hears their prayers and, as the Bible puts it, “opens their wombs” so that they bear a son. That son turns out to be a major figure in the history of Israel. The first of these women is Sarah, wife of Abraham. God blesses her very late in life with the son named Isaac. Mary is the last of these women, and her conception is even more miraculous than is Sarah’s because with Mary, as Matthew and Luke tell the story, no man is involved in Jesus’ conception at all.

We met another of the women of the stories of divinely assisted conception in our reading just now from 1 Samuel. Her name is Hannah. She is married to a man named Elkanah, who has another wife besides Hannah. So much for the supposedly biblical idea of marriage, but I digress. The other wife has had children, but Sarah hasn’t because, as the text says, God has “closed her womb.” So she goes to the central place of Israelite worship before David moved the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem and David’s son Solomon built the first temple there. That place isn’t a temple, it’s a tent, called the Tent of Meeting. There’s a priest who is in charge there whose name is Eli. Hannah prayed to the Lord her God that she might conceive and bear a son. She prayed silently, but she moved her lips, apparently mouthing the words she was saying silently to God. Apparently that wasn’t how people normally prayed at the Tent of Meeting, for Eli promptly assumes that she is drunk. “How long will you keep on getting drunk? Get rid of your wine,” he says to her. Hannah explains that she hasn’t been drinking but was “praying here out of great anguish and grief.” That, by the way, is a good reminder to us pastor types not to jump to conclusions about or parishioners, for we’ll probably be wrong about them, but again I digress. Eli blesses her, she has relations with her husband, conceives a child, and gives birth to the prophet Samuel. It’s a really good story, and it tells us that Samuel will be someone special even before the text gets into stories about him.

Hannah apparently is the first person we come to in the Bible who prays individually rather than collectively. That alone makes her pretty remarkable, for personal, individual prayer became such a strong part of the Christian tradition. Hannah is then a good model for us. She hurts. She grieves her inability to do what women in her time and place were mostly supposed to do, namely, bear children, especially sons. She prays to God for relief from her distress. Good move. She is a great biblical model for at least one primary thing that we should do in our times of troubles. She turns to God. She models turning to God for us. We’d be well advised to follow her lead in this regard.

Yet there is more to Hannah’s story that can inform our own spiritual lives than just turning to God in prayer when we face difficulties. For one thing Hannah prays individually, but where she does it is important too. She doesn’t do it at home, not of course that we can’t or shouldn’t pray at home. Not at all. But in this story when Hannah is moved to turn to God in prayer she leaves her home and goes to a special place. She goes to her people’s central place of worship, that Tent of Meeting I just mentioned. In other words, she goes to church. She doesn’t go to any place anything like our contemporary churches, and she isn’t attending anything like a worship service, but she isn’t just at home either. She is at a place her religion considered sacred. She went to a place where she would feel closer to God. She went to a place of prayer and worship. She’s a good model for us in this regard too. We know, I suppose, that we aren’t actually closer to God in church than we are anywhere else, for God is present everywhere and always. Still, I don’t know about you, but I often feel closer to God in church than I do anywhere else. That makes church a particularly good place to pray. But there’s a broader lesson here too. Many people have places where they feel the presence of God more strongly than they do elsewhere. For many people in our part of the country that place is somewhere in nature. In the mountains. On the sound. In the San Juan Islands. If you feel closer to God in some natural setting, then that setting is a particularly good place to pray. Not because God will hear you better. Just because you feel closer to God there.

And there’s one more thing about what’s going on in Hannah’s story that is perhaps a bit less obvious to us. Our text says that Hannah is unable to conceive a child because “the Lord had closed her womb.” The story believes that it is God’s fault that Hannah is childless. Now, that doesn’t make much sense to me. I don’t think that God directly causes the things that happen on earth, either globally or in our individual lives, at least not as directly as this story supposes. Our story here expresses one of the foundational beliefs of the ancient world that produced the texts of the Bible. In that world people did believe that everything that happens on earth, both globally and in the personal lives of the individual people, was the doing of God or of one or more of the gods. Hannah apparently believes the same thing. God, her god Yahweh, is, for her, the cause of her distress. We may not believe that God causes anyone distress like that, but for purposes of this story we have to accept that Hannah believes that God does and that God did in her case.

So what does she do? I might expect her to get mad at God. To say to God OK, if that’s how you’re going to be, forget it. I’m done with you. You’re being mean to me, so why should I give you anything? Why shouldn’t I hate you? I mean, that’s how we humans often react to people we think are doing us wrong, don’t we? Sure we do. I’m sure lots of people have reacted to God that way when things in their lives have been hard. It’s a perfectly understandable reaction. It’s understandable, but it’s not at all what Hannah does. Instead she turns toward, not away from, the One she understands to be the source of her grief. That is a profound expression of the nature of faith. God is God even when we think God has somehow turned against us, not that God ever actually does that of course. I suppose Hannah hoped that God would listen to her and change God’s mind about her. Indeed in this story Hannah does become pregnant and bear a son, but somehow I want to ask: Would Hannah have turned against God if, as she surely understood the matter, her prayer hadn’t been granted? I don’t think so. I at least like to think that Hannah’s faith would have remained strong to the end of her life even if she had never borne a son.

Now, like I said, I don’t believe that God causes things on earth nearly as directly as Hannah apparently did; but I think there’s still a lesson for us in the way she turned toward God not away from God. We hear all the time that people give up on the faith when their prayers aren’t answered the way they want. Yet we can learn from Hannah, I think, that that’s precisely the time to turn toward God with more prayer, not to turn from God with less prayer, or worse, no prayer at all. I don’t mean that if we just keep praying God will eventually do what we think we want God to do. No, not that, but something else.

I once read a message on a church reader board in Monroe that sums it up really well. It read “Prayer doesn’t change God. Prayer changes us.” That reader board message from a church with which I would probably disagree on almost everything reminds us that we so misunderstand prayer. We think the purpose of prayer is to get God to do what we want. Or to get God to give us what we want. Maybe that’s why Hannah was praying the way she was, but even if that is true it doesn’t change what prayer really is. Prayer really has one purpose and only one purpose. That purpose is to bring us closer to God and to make us feel like God is closer to us. Not to bring God closer to us, because God is always as close to us as God can be, closer, as it says in the Koran, than our carotid artery. No, not that; but to make us more aware of God’s intimate closeness to us at all times and in every circumstance. Maybe when we become more powerfully aware of God’s closeness we can find the resources we need to bring about the thing we’re praying for. Or maybe we find the spiritual strength to live without the thing we’re praying for. Either way, what prayer mostly does is bring us close to God and make us more aware of God’s closeness to us.

Praying has become sort of an odd thing to do in our culture, so many of our people have given up on faith. It has become so odd that when people see us praying they may think we’re drunk. They may think a sober, rational, sensible person wouldn’t be doing such a thing. Well, they’d be wrong about that. Prayer is the central practice of any life of faith. That’s why we pray when we’re alone. That’s why we pray together here at church. That’s why we teach our children to pray. To our secular culture it can seem odd at best and intoxicated or even deranged at worst. So be it. We people of faith know its power. We people of faith know its benefits. Not that we get everything we pray for, for we don’t. Not even that we have to use words to pray, for often silence is the most powerful form of prayer. No, we’re not drunk when we pray as Eli thought Hannah was. We are in fact as sober as we can get. So let’s keep on praying, shall we? It is what God wants of us. It is what we know we are called to do. We know how powerful it is. So let us be together in prayer, today and always. Amen.