(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on November 18, 2018, Proper 28)
The Story of a Semicolon
Mark
Wingfield, pastor at a Baptist church in Dallas, Texas, recently got his first
tattoo. He got it not to fit in
with the younger generation or to make himself look more hip or approachable. He got it because he wanted it. Because he needed it.
Etched
now onto his inner bicep, where he can see it every day, is the tattoo of a
semicolon. Originating in Project
Semicolon, an initiative that endeavors to share love and hope with those who
wrestle with depression, suicide, addiction, and self-injury, the semicolon
tattoo has a simple message for Mark.
It means: “‘Your story is not over.’ It’s not a period, which ends a sentence; it’s a pause that
says there’s more to come.”[1]
A
year ago, Mark began to endure a neck pain so agonizing that he couldn’t escape
suicidal thoughts. Surgery and
follow-up procedures addressed the pain, but had other repercussions, including
the immobilization of his right hand and arm for months and a chronic spinal
fluid leak that results in a never-ending headache. But it was not simply pain and disability that Mark has
confronted: “What injury and illness and depression steal from you most of
all,” he observes, “is perspective—the ability to understand that there’s more
to be written in your story.” As a
pastor who had proclaimed the good news that there can be growth in suffering,
gain in loss, resurrection in death, he nevertheless struggled to see past the
pain and despair of his present circumstances. Suffering had constricted his vision. For him, the semicolon is a bodily
reminder of what he does not always feel: that God is with him and his story is
not over.
The Barren Wife
Bears a Child
At
the beginning of today’s scripture, the narrator twice discloses Hannah’s
condition, so that there is no mistaking what this story will be about. “Hannah had no children,” he shares
first (1 Sam 1:2). Then moments
later, “The Lord had closed her womb” (1:5).
You
know the underdog storyline in Hollywood, where a dark horse rises against the
odds and comes out on top? We see
it in The Mighty Ducks and Karate Kid and Rocky and countless other films. Well, the nearest equivalent in the Hebrew Bible would be
the story about a barren woman.
Just as surely as the Mighty Ducks would win the championship and Mister
Miyagi would coach Daniel to karate victory and Rocky would become assume his
position among the boxing elite, the barren wife would in time bear a child.
So
at the start of today’s story, the audience already knows the end. The question becomes not “Will she bear
a child?” but “How will she endure the waiting and the hardship in the
meanwhile? And how will this child
come?”
Her Distress Is
More Than Barrenness
For
Hannah, it must have felt like her story was already over. To set the tale in motion, the narrator
begins with a repeated scene.
“Year by year,” he says, Hannah would go to Shiloh with her husband,
Elkanah, and his other wife, Peninnah.
There they would offer sacrifices to God, and Peninnah would antagonize
Hannah (1:6-7). We don’t know what
Penninah said or did, but whatever it was, we can imagine it only rubbed salt
in the wound of Hannah’s barrenness.
I don’t think it’s an accident that the narrator repeats himself and
reminds us a second time that this is happening “year by year.” Rather I think he’s suggesting Hannah’s
growing sense of despair. Another
year without child. Another year
humiliated by the other, fertile wife.
As it was, so it shall be.
To compound her misery, her husband just doesn’t get it. He cares less about her sorrow than he
does about his own standing in her eyes.
“Am I not more to you than ten
sons?” he asks her pitifully (1:8).
It’s little surprise that all Hannah can do is hurry off to the
sanctuary, where she bursts into tears before the Lord (1:9-10). As prayer pours forth silently from her
lips, the priest Eli chastises her, “How long will you make a drunken spectacle
of yourself? Put away your wine”
(1:11-14). It seems Hannah can
find no relief.
She
responds to Eli with an honest confession: she’s not drunk, she’s
depressed. Or in her words: “I am
a woman deeply troubled….I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and
vexation all this time” (1:15-16).
The common interpretation is that Hannah is upset she can’t have
kids. But I think the narrator has
shown us it’s more than that. Her
distress is more than barrenness.
It’s the yearly humiliation by Peninnah. It’s the misguided sympathy of her husband. It’s the mistaken judgments of men like
Eli. It’s the feeling that her
story is over.
Her
prayer, of course, is for a child.
But I believe that it’s also deeper than that. She’s at the end of her rope. She’s exhausted her options. There’s no life left for her worth living.
The
Precariousness of Prayer
The
word prayer originates in the Latin word precarius,
which refers to something obtained through earnest request. As the Latin word precarius suggests, prayer inherently springs from uncertainty. Prayer is precarious. Prayer
means coming to the end of your rope.
Running out of options. Not
seeing a clear way out. Prayer is
what you do when you don’t know what to do. As Paul suggests, the purest form of prayer may be the
wordless kind, the kind where you’re reduced to sighs and groans, where you
don’t even know what to say, much
less what to do (Rom 8:26).
What’s
fascinating about Paul’s description of prayer, is that he extends this imagery
of groaning and sighing into the metaphor of childbirth.[2]
Jesus uses the same metaphor in
our gospel scripture today, where he envisions a time of great distress, a time
of conflict and chaos, rumor and war, but then turns this trouble on its head,
saying: “Do not be alarmed….This is but the beginning of the birthpangs” (Mark
13:8). Like Paul, Jesus draws a
special connection between this metaphor of birthpangs and prayer. At the end of his spiritual forecast,
he concludes with the invitation, “Keep alert and pray” (Mark 13:33). Just one chapter later in Mark, when
Jesus enters into his own moment of great uncertainty and distress, he models
this message, praying and again inviting his followers to pray (Mark 14:32, 35,
38).
In
her own precarious moment, Hannah prays.
When she finishes, she leaves the sanctuary transformed. The narrator remarks that finally she
eats and drinks and that her face is no longer downcast. From a practical standpoint, this change
makes little sense. She hasn’t
conceived yet. Her rival Peninnah
will be waiting for her with the same insults as before. The situation hasn’t changed. But somehow in her prayer, Hannah has
changed. Maybe not a lot. We don’t have many details. But she has changed enough at least to
eat and carry on. Enough to manage
a smile and push forward. Later
when she names her child Samuel—which can mean something like “God hears”—we
discover how prayer changed her.
It was simply trusting that God had heard
her, that God was with her, that her story was not over. Through prayer, what looked like a
certain end, became a beginning.
What felt like death throes, became in fact the birthpangs of her soul.
I
have friends like Hannah, who have not been able to bear children
themselves. I know they’ve prayed
like Hannah. For me, their stories
complicate this story, because I know that the ending is not always conception
and birth. Instead it’s
adoption. Or a calling into youth
ministry. What I find remarkable
in each case, is that my friends do not despair forever. In their moment of distress, it may
genuinely feel like there is no life left worth living. But through tears, through pouring out
their soul, through prayer—they encounter a God who hears, a God who is with
them, a God who affixes a semicolon to their trouble and promises that their
story is not over.
To See the End as
the Beginning
The
temptation in a time of distress is to despair. When we’ve run out of rope, when we’ve exhausted all our
options, when we don’t know what to do, the temptation is to say “game over.” “That’s all she wrote.”
The
good news of Hannah’s story, which echoes in the faith of Paul and in the life
of Jesus, is that uncertainty does not spell the end. In fact, it’s often precisely in these precarious moments
that we draw near to God. It’s in
these precarious moments that we find ourselves truly praying, entrusting
ourselves to a God who hears us, who is with us, who provides for us. True, we have no guarantee of what
exactly will happen next. It could
be more suffering, as it certainly would be for Jesus at his next Passover. But as it did for Jesus, so it does for
us: prayer gives us eyes to see that what seems like an end is actually a
beginning. What seem like death
throes are actually birthpangs.
Prayer
Loving
God,
We
live in a precarious world,
Where
sometimes it feels
Like
we have run out of rope,
Exhausted
all our options,
Come
to the end of the road—
Instead
of giving up
Or
gripping harder,
We
pour our spirits
Before
you,
Trusting
that in your love,
Each
period can become a semicolon,
Each
end can become a beginning.
In him who shares our birthpangs, Jesus
Christ. Amen.
[1] Mark
Wingfield, “A Tattoo That Says, ‘Your Story Is Not Over,’” https://baptistnews.com/article/a-tattoo-that-says-your-story-is-not-over/#.W-q25XpKjUo,
accessed November 13, 2018.
[2] Discerning
within history a collective groaning and sighing, he casts this hopefully as
the birthpangs of creation (Rom 8:22).
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