Hannah's Story: Anxiety & Vexation

A sermon on 1 Samuel 1:2-20 & 2:1-10

Hannah’s Story & Song: ANXIETY & VEXATION

In Hannah, we hear the echoes of many women in Scripture:

of Sarah, who laughed at the notion of pregnancy in her old age after decades of disappointment;

of Rachel, who waited and waited for children 

as her sister and sister-wife Leah, and the women who were enslaved, Zilpah and Bilhah, 

bore child after child;

of Naomi, whose sons died, and so she confessed: Call me bitter, I was full, but am now empty. 

Even of Elizabeth, cousin of Mary (mother of Jesus), whose husband Zechariah laughed at the 

prophesied pregnancy because it was so unbelievable after so many years of barrenness. 

She is so present in Scripture: the barren woman.

This is harsh, 

this phrase, 

this word, 

this reality: 

barren. 

Empty, but not merely empty - empty with no hope of life. 

Barren is a stark, harsh landscape, a bitter place where life is unimaginable.

Can you imagine that word being used to describe your inner self?

Some don’t have to imagine. 

This word on the page pierces the broken place in your heart because it describes too well your own sorrowful journey.  I know this is true - statistics tell us that 1 in 4 women will “struggle with infertility”, 

that’s slightly softer language for a still sharp reality. 

With numbers like that, there is more than one person listening today who is not sure if they can keep listening. 

This ache in our Scripture is too real and the hope of this story may be too supernatural, too impossible. 

I am so sorry. 

I am sorry for your hurt and sorry that it’s named now and I wish I could say - 

just keep listening, it will get better! 

For Hannah, for the Bible’s barren women, it will, it does get better - but I don’t know what that actually means for you today. 

This sermon might offer a faithful hope, but, a faithful hope can often still feel like a dull ache.

I hope to offer perspective on the distance between the answered prayers of Scripture 

and the seemingly unanswered prayers in our hearts - 

and some days, 

that perspective might feel healing 

and some days 

it feels barren.

It’s ok to say: today, I cannot do this.

Faith is a whole life journey and we don’t have to wrestle with all the things all the time.

There are days where faith looks like saying: I can’t even bring these questions to you today, God. But I know you will be there when - if - I ever can. 

What is “the Lord who brings death and brings to life” saying to all of us through the women who longed to give life, and had to wait, and wait, and wait and wait? 

Certainly this woman is on the sacred page because she persists in our world. 

Sometimes when we see our own longing in Scripture we can take a deep breath and believe: 

God brought her through it, perhaps God might also bring me through it. 

That may be encouraging, but it poses a challenge, too, a deep and difficult one: 

Each of the women in the Bible who prayed the same longing as Hannah eventually, after long and grueling waits, did become pregnant. 

But the difficulty of this narrative, 

the challenge of the one who longs for a child and hears that terrible word: infertile, 

and sees the first half of their story in Scripture 

is the fear that 

the second half of their story is not like Hannah’s. 

Perhaps we see ourselves in the longing and are left wondering: 

“Is my faith too small? Is that why Hannah got the desire of her heart, but I have not?” 

But how could we even begin to compare faiths - between anyone, but especially between ourselves and the ancestor on the page? 

Hannah makes a commitment that’s not even available to us:

there’s no modern comparison to Hannah’s promise to set her child apart as a Nazirite. 

And while this surely is sacrifice and faith on Hannah’s part, there are other factors at play: 

Hannah’s sister-wife is her rival, 

Hannah’s inability to have children has lived alongside Peninnah’s abundant fertility, 

their husband does not know how to heal their divide and instead exacerbates it by giving more to Hannah than is her due. 

Hannah’s prayers and vows are made in this context of dysfunction, and so her ability to dedicate her long-awaited child to the temple is all mixed up with imagining his childhood in a home full of half-siblings 

whose mother is his mother’s rival, 

whose father has stoked the fires of rivalry with preferential treatment. 

It is a sacrifice to promise her child to this life, yes - but not only a sacrifice. 

It’s complicated. Hannah is complicated. Her life is complicated - 

her longing is simple, ancient, shared by many - but she is as complex as we are. 

We could look at her story and see through that complexity to a simple, strong faith:

“Look how God answers the prayers of those who deeply believe!” 

But Hannah herself does not claim to pray in deep faith, rather she says she prays out of anxiety and vexation.

There’s so much about Hannah’s world that we cannot fathom, but we might be able to understand what it feels like to pray for something out of anxiety and vexation.

Our anxiety might be different from Hannah’s on the surface, but the depth is this: 

My circumstances are exhausting. I can’t rest within my soul. The things in life that communicate to others that  I am loved and successful are absent or difficult to detect. 

For Hannah, that was a male child. 

She carries a bitterness that mirrors Naomi’s - in their cultures a woman’s highest achievement was producing a male heir; the birth of a son was a clear sign of divine blessing of the mother.

The lack of that blessing was a source of anxiety for Hannah. 

Each month she would isolate alone as the sign of her barrenness returned and the cycle of anxiety would repeat:

a flickering hope of “maybe this time”, 

a long wait, 

a familiar yet always shocking disappointment. 

Some of us know this exact anxiety. 

But for others, the exhausting circumstances are different:

we watch worriedly as work opportunities and dollars dwindle, 

we check-in apprehensively with a friend for signs of returned addiction, 

we hover nervously over a loved one’s frightening diagnosis, 

we peer fearfully at headlines that follow a predictable, but still shocking, cycle 

of destruction, disaster, division and disillusionment. 

No matter how far we are from the barren woman, anxiety is closer than many of us would care to confess. 

Hannah prayed out of her anxiety and vexation.  

Vexation - the feeling of anger, grief, wrath, sorrow. That feeling of injustice and helplessness and resentment 

as you see others receiving what you long for.

Even with all this wrapped around her soul, even through those layers of bitterness Hannah prays.

This is the prayer of the faithful, the prayer that is heard - not by the high priest who sees the anxiety and vexation and assumes the worst, but by the Lord, who sees all and loves and listens and remembers. 

This is the prayer of the faithful - we are not called to

anxiety or faith, 

vexation or hope - 

we are called to honesty within ourselves 

and before God, 

we are called to dig deep into our grief and own it 

and pour out our souls before the Lord. 

Often, our anxiety and vexation is that someone might detect we hold those very things within, that someone might sense our outward calm competence is hiding a lot of other things - 

Hannah’s story calls us out 

to pour it out 

and call it faith. 

Hannah’s next prayer, her prayer of praise, is presumably different from the one seen by Eli but heard only by God. 

Reflecting on God’s faithfulness, she proclaims: 

My heart exults in the Lord;

    my strength is exalted in my God.

She goes on and on, her praising words ringing a song of reversal: 

 The bows of the mighty are broken,

    but the feeble gird on strength.

Her fortune is reversed and so she sees and proclaims that our God is a God of reversal: 

The Lord makes poor and makes rich;

    The Lord brings low and exalts.

God is a God who sees anxiety and hears vexation and is not afraid or angry about those things within us but does reverse them.

 The barren has borne seven,

    but she who has many children is forlorn.

The Lord brings death and brings to life;

    he brings down to Sheol and raises up.

Does this story give us a prayer formula so that our own deep longing, anxiety, vexation might be reversed like Hannah’s?

You know that’s not so. 

How simple faith would be if we had only to name the ache and have it be undone - though fulfilling is not the same as undoing, is it? Hannah will always carry her years of longing. 

In all of God’s wisdom and sovereignty, Hannah’s deep longing for a child coincided  with the way the world was about to turn. 

Hannah lived in the time that the judges judged, but that time was coming to an end - the monarchy is on the rise - and the child Hannah has longed for will play an integral role in this historic shift. 

The wise theologian Frederick Buechner famously wrote:

"The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” 

I wish I could offer a different hope to the barren. I wish I could take all the pain away. I can’t. 

But I can praise with Hannah that it is God who gives life - when our prayers resist being answered  it is not because of our failings. 

I can praise with Hannah that the prayers of the faithful are marked with anxiety and vexation. 

And I can praise with Hannah and with all of you the mystery of it all - 

that we called to continue to pray the long unanswered prayer, because as we follow that longing, we learn about our calling. 

Why do we long so much for something that eludes us? 

What does this say about who we are created to be and what does it teach us about the God who creates us and creates the longings within us? 

What is the deep gladness within us?

What is the gladness waiting on?

How can we touch it even now? 

And how is that place of deep gladness also a place where we can meet the hungry world?

Amen.