Pour Out Your Heart 1 Samuel 1:1-28 There was a church downtown that had an early chapel service on Sunday mornings. It was a small but faithful crowd that generally included at least a few visitors from the homeless community people who, a few minutes earlier, were sleeping in the doorway. Some came because they wanted to worship. But most came because it was a warm, dry, peaceful place where they could sit in stillness. More Bibles and hymnals disappeared from those pews than one would have imagined, but the church generally thought that whoever wanted to read one badly enough to carry it around with all of one s other belongings should definitely keep a copy. Sometimes these folks slept through worship, most of them sitting up straight with their eyes closed. Sometimes they snored. Sometimes they participated in full, coming forward for communion, singing out on the hymns, listening carefully to the sermons. And one day, when it came time for the prayers of the people, as the small congregation voiced their joys and concerns all the regular stuff: my brother is ill; my daughter s baby is due any day; my friend s marriage is breaking up; my husband needs a new job a large gentleman stood up in the back of the church and said, out loud, God, I am hungry and cold; make these people help me. So often, when we think of prayer, it is some set of formal words that sound fancy and appropriate and somewhat detached. When we re in a group setting and it s time for an opening or closing prayer, people are suddenly very busy in their purses, or interested in something on the carpet, or they simply start assaulting one another with looks that say, very clearly, don t you dare volunteer me. We think we don t know how to pray, or what to say, as if there s a special language we have to learn before we can engage God in conversation. 1
But as this needy gentlemen knew, better than the rest of us, prayer can and should be the honest, authentic desires of our hearts. And one of the most fundamental prayers is simply, help. Or in this case, make these people help me. This is a problem in a culture like ours, though, where it s important to us that we keep up the appearance that we have it all together. Whether we do it consciously or are just so consumed by the customs around us, we want everyone to know that we are capable and smart, that we are independent and strong, that we don t need anything from anyone we can do it ourselves, as is the American dream. When we think of prayer, we are sitting upright in our chairs, heads bowed, hands folded, eyes closed, silent, or perhaps whispering or we re dutifully reading along someone else s carefully crafted words. Often our prayer is somber and lifeless, or awkward and forced. But why? Why don t we ask God authentically for what we need? When is the last time any of us poured out our hearts to the One who longs to hear from us, who knows us better than we know ourselves? What is holding us back from the vulnerability required to pray honestly, with our whole selves? Do we think God or others will think less of us because we are in need at all? Does any of us honestly believe we should be able to manage all of life on our own? In our story from 1 Samuel, Hannah was desperate. She had tried to keep up the appearance that everything was okay, that the love of her husband was all she needed, that she could handle the despair she was carrying around. But she couldn t keep it up anymore. She was the first wife of Elkanah, a man of noble heritage, a pious man, a well- off man, apparently a kind man. He loved her dearly, but she was barren, and in that time and place, that meant she was an outcast. While in today s world, we know first- hand that the average child in our state costs about half a million dollars to raise, in biblical times, children were major financial assets to the family. They provided future labor from an 2
early age, they ensured the continuation of the family name, they guaranteed possession of the patriarchal estate. 1 Since Hannah, as a woman, couldn t own property, to have a child meant someone would take care of her should something happen to her husband. As a barren woman, she was incredibly vulnerable in that society. And she was ashamed. Barrenness, at that time, was often thought to be a sign of divine punishment. There was a great stigma against women who couldn t conceive; they were worth very little without children. She would have been something of a pariah. And to make matters worse, perhaps because Hannah couldn t conceive, Elkanah took a second wife, Penninah. And Penninah had already born multiple children, proving, in a sense, that her lack of child- bearing was indeed Hannah s fault, not Elkanah s, and rubbing her barrenness in her face day after day. Now we can analyze Penninah s behavior and say that she probably acted out against Hannah because she knew that she was brought on board primarily for her child- bearing ability and that Elkanah loved Hannah more and she was jealous. But it doesn t matter why. The story only tells us that Penninah was terrible to Hannah, provoking her severely, irritating her, pushing her buttons in the worst way, until, when they went to the holy place at Shiloh to worship, Hannah was so distressed that she couldn t eat: she could only weep. Elkanah meant well, but he obviously was clueless, asking, Why do you weep? Why is your heart sad? Am I not worth more to you than ten sons? While the text doesn t provide a response for Hannah, the answer is no. You re not worth more than ten sons because when you die, I will be nothing. Yes, you love me and gave me a double- portion of the sacrifice, but that certainly doesn t fix the problem. Still, I am an outcast. Still, I am vulnerable. Still, I am ridiculed. Still, the desire of my heart goes unfulfilled. 1 Roger Nam, Commentary on 1 Samuel 1:9-11, 19-20; 2:1-10. workingpreacher.org, posted 10/14/2012. 3
It s frustrating to me that most of the images of women suffering in the Bible are due to infertility; and the solution to that infertility is generally that God opens the woman s womb and grants her a child. When so many women in our own families and communities are struggling with the desire to bear children of their own, and God does not magically open their wombs and give them children, this doesn t seem like a helpful image on which to hang our hope. But if we look beyond the details of this situation, we can see two important things: first, we see that God visits the marginalized, is present in the time of trouble, and that doesn t always mean hunger or homelessness or political exile; it just means God is present with the desperate, no matter what has caused that desperation. And second, we see, in Hannah, a beautiful example of how God invites us to pour out our hearts, not just to pray the formal, appropriate prayers that have their place, but to fall on our knees and beg for God to take over, admitting that we just can t do it on our own. Anne Lamott says that the first basic prayer is help, and I think she s right. 2 Even people who don t consider themselves spiritual or religious find themselves asking God for help when things get really tough. People who have never prayed before find themselves on their knees, wondering if God can hear them. But even in those times, many of us think there is a certain way to pray, that we have to know a particular flowery church language to get our message across to God; and we see in Hannah s example that that s just not true. When she is so in despair that all she can do is weep, Hannah goes into the temple and pours out her soul to the Lord. The text tells us that she made a vow, promising that if God would only look on her in her misery, as God s servant, and remember her, that she would give her miracle child back to God. She offered all of herself to God in this prayer: her life, her future, her hopes, her commitment. The Scripture says that she prayed silently, but her lips were moving you can imagine that she was so involved in her prayer that she didn t notice anyone else, 2 See Lamott s 2012 book, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers. 4
she was so caught up in pouring out her heart that she didn t worry about what she looked like or what people might think. And as a result, the dense priest Eli comes over and chastises her for making a spectacle of herself, being drunk in the temple. But when she explains, and he realizes how deeply she has been praying, without even knowing what she was praying for, he tells her, Go in peace, and the God of Israel grant the petition you have made. And with that, having poured out her heart, she went back to her husband, ate and drank, and was sad no longer. Later, she did conceive and bear a son, and she would give him back to God, and he would be the beginning of a new era in Israel, the beginning of the monarchy. It s a salvation story for the people of Israel, where hope comes out of hopelessness, and despair turns into thanksgiving and praise, where something new and transformative comes out of the humblest of circumstances, a place that most people assumed God had abandoned. But even before all of that took place, before she had conceived or borne a son and long before he had become the leader of a new era in Israel, after she had poured out her heart to God, Hannah was at peace. I can t say that I have poured my heart out to God as often as it would have been helpful. There haven t been many days that I have knelt and wept and thrown what people might think and what I must look like to the wind in favor of offering all of me to the only One who can actually handle it, the only One who can actually carry my burdens, who has suffered more than I will ever suffer, who has the power to bring hope to the darkest places of life. Most of the time, I hold myself together and I pray appropriate prayers with kind of stiff, formal language, and then I go about trying to do everything myself, as if I don t really need God at all. But now and then, I have let all that go and knelt at an altar not unlike this one, and cried, in the most vulnerable, authentic, natural way possible, help me. And every time God has answered, Okay. Or occasionally, I m trying, but you have to let go. 5
There s something powerful about those moments, when we abandon the rules of decorum and give ourselves to God in prayer. Everything doesn t always turn out the way we wanted it to praying this way doesn t assure us that life will turn around and be ideal from here on out but it sure does lighten the load for a while. It sure can give us peace. And it can grow our relationship with God like nothing else. If you don t want to do it here, that s okay. But somewhere, at some point this week, set aside all of your preconceived notions of what prayer should look like and sound like, and pour yourself out before God. Open up your heart and let God in without putting any limits on what He can see or hear or touch. Be authentically, really yourself, and tell God what you need. On the outside, it may look like you re crazy, or drunk, or just a little off. But on the inside, what s happening is that when you open yourself fully to God, God can be fully present. And as you pray, God can begin turning despair into hope, darkness into light, humility into greatness God can do something new. But it starts with the willingness of each of us to say, Actually I don t have it all together I can t do it all myself. Help me, God. I need you. Pray with me: God, as much as we d like to show our friends and neighbors how amazingly capable we are of doing it all on our own, we know that s not true; and of course, you know that s not true. Forgive us for leaving you out, for pretending we don t need you, for putting on this charade in which we try to avoid all level of vulnerability and end up just putting up barriers between us and you, and really between us and everybody else. Help us to offer you our lives, to pour out our hearts to you without worrying what it looks like or what people might think. We know that you have the power to turn our despair into hope, that we can never do it ourselves, that we need you, in times of strength and in times of trouble. Lord, help us. Amen. Rev. Elizabeth Ingram Schindler Faith United Methodist Church Issaquah, WA November 16, 2014 6