Twenty-Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

By Elizabeth Propst '23, MDiv II
Seminarian in the Memorial Church of Harvard University
 

(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Nov. 17, 2024)

Good morning.

Morning people watching online. Morning to those listening on the radio. I will confess this pulpit is a little intimidating. In theory, I know that this big, weird wooden umbrella hails from a time where there were no microphones and it was meant to project sound outward. But I've always imagined sitting out in the congregation watching the person here, that if the preacher ever headed in a direction that God didn't like, that maybe it would just... Like a divine mute button. So, hopefully, not today. Will you pray with me? May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts draw us nearer to You in love, oh God, our Rock, and our Redeemer. Amen.

I don't know about you guys, but the apocalypse feels like old news by now. In my own case, it hit close to home earlier this year. I grew up in Buncombe County, as did Kelly, the county in Western North Carolina that was hit most severely by Hurricane Helene. Though my family and our home was okay, other than six boxes of my books that were on the floor of my dad's flooded wood shop. And other than my parents having to shower with the FEMA emergency water rations for about a month and the subsequent smell, we were okay. But thousands of people lost everything. My mom sent me dispatches day by day, just narrating what it felt like to be in the city. Helicopters, sirens and chainsaws, trash collecting in the streets, people gathering at the public library, which for weeks was the only place that anybody could get WiFi or a cell signal, to communicate with their families to tell them that they were okay.

My mom went on supply delivery runs for folks in communities that were hardest hit. And on one door, she knocked on the woman who opened it just embraced her and started sobbing and said, "I'm so lonely, and I'm so afraid." And it's not just Western North Carolina. If you turn on the news, you see such a mass of suffering and hatred and fear that it feels impossible to comprehend. We have no shortage of fire, or famine or flood, or drought or war, nation against nation, a nation against itself. And it seems that the only thing that could possibly turn our situation around, the single stupid simple thing needed for our salvation, is for the powerful and the comfortable to give up some tiny shred of their power and comfort. And yet the present moment and history indicate to us that this is not likely to take place. And so, we are left with the uninspiring choice it seems, between continuing to scream into the void or resigning ourselves to the murder-suicide of the human race. And so, we are left this morning with these two readings and this world to confront.

On first glance, I confess I don't find either the Gospel of Mark or the story of Hannah to immediately offer a way forward in this world. The Gospel of Mark, in which Jesus foretells the apocalypse to come at the end, just says, "But it's okay. These are the birth pangs, guys." This is all we're going somewhere. There's a direction. Trust. We're going to be fine. And it's been 2000 years since Jesus predicted these things that have been taking place for those 2000 years, and the birth pangs are taking a while. The labor is longer than we would like. In the story of Hannah, too, the story of a woman apparently praying and receiving a miracle, I find it hard to see what this offers for us in our own actions. I personally am not of the camp that God strikes bargains. I don't really in my faith, base my choices or my actions on the idea that if I just want something hard enough and I'm good enough about it, that it will happen.

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So, what can we do with these two readings? By looking more closely at them, could they still hold some hidden corners of hope or of mercy or of love? In the case of the story of Hannah, the book of Samuel, 1 Samuel, comes at a hinge point in the narrative of ancient Israel. It's the hinge point between chaos, tribalism, and the monarchy, which begins when Samuel, the son of Hannah, anoints the first king, Saul. So, this first chapter here, the story of Hannah, marks the exact inflection point between a nation that has been experiencing the most virulent violence imaginable. If you've ever read the book of Judges, which immediately precedes the book of 1 Samuel, you know that the cycle and circle cyclone of harm done to the human body is almost beyond belief.

But as I said earlier, the story of Hannah seems to be a simple one. The story that we expect to see about female piety and motherhood in the Bible, in which a very sad but very pious woman faces off against a catty rival. But she's really nice about it, and she steps back, and she just prays to God, and God ultimately rewards her because she's been so pious and so ladylike. But if we look more closely at the actual text of what the story of Hannah is saying, about how it portrays the character of Hannah and her struggles, we begin to wonder if maybe this is not how the story is meant to go.

We get the sense, reading this in our English translation, that what Hannah is feeling is sadness. But almost nowhere in the actual Hebrew of this text is she described as sad. Instead, it's made clear that what she's feeling most of all is rage. We're told that her rival used to provoke her severely to irritate her, but the word that they use in Hebrew, the word for provoke, appears numerous other times across the Hebrew Bible. And in pretty much every instance, it's the word used to describe how God feels when God sees humans committing evil acts.

What she's feeling then is not just provocation by this rival wife, Peninnah, who has offended her somehow. Rather, she just looks at Peninnah and sees the injustice of a woman who has children while she has none and rages about it. Similarly, when she speaks to the priest, Eli, at the temple and says, "I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation." In reality, it would be more accurate to translate what she says as "I have been speaking out of the abundance of my anger and of my complaint." And the word she uses for complaint is the word used over and over again in the Book of Job when Job, an innocent, righteous man, has been needlessly suffering and raises his complaint over and over again to God. What Hannah is feeling when she goes to the temple is not a desire to throw herself on the mercy of the Lord. She's going to call God to the table. She is ready to cut terms. She is mad. She has been wronged.

The Hebrew 2 conveys her internal landscape as a place of violence, of fracture of suffering. We're told that her experience irritates her, but in reality, that word conveys a violent crashing. Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, it's used to describe the roar of the ocean during storms or the sound of thunder in the sky of God's voice. Elsewhere, her husband, Elkanah, unhelpfully says, "Why is your heart sad? I'm worth like 10 babies." But the word sad there and the construction of why is your heart sad actually means like why should your heart be breaking apart like this? Why should your heart be trembling so? Elsewhere it says that Hannah was deeply distressed, but this would be more accurately translated as her soul was bitter and fierce in her. So, what she's experiencing is not this easy-expected narrative of female suffering as something mournful and quiet.

Instead, we're given the sense that Hannah's inner landscape is a painful, resentful, caustic place to exist. She can't eat. She can't bear to talk to her husband. She can't bear to exist around other people. She cannot be in relation with others. And so, when her prayer is answered at last, the message of this does not seem to be, if you're really pious and you're really patient and you wait around and you're good enough, God will miracleize away all of your problems. In fact, we're told later in the Book of Samuel, that Hannah's anger doesn't really go away, and this irritation and resentment she feels against other people endures. In the next chapter of the Book of Samuel, she lifts a prayer of Thanksgiving to God and she has this snippy line where she's like, "Thank you God for giving barren women children and for making fertile women suffer and languish away."

She has another line which seems to bite back at Eli, the priest who assumes that she's drunk because she's praying. She says, "Thank you, God, that I have been lifted up over the arrogant and that their mouths have been silenced." She has this sense of schadenfreude and triumph over those who she sees as her rivals, that don't really seem pious or calm or ladylike in the way that we would expect. So, the miracle that seems to take place here is not that a perfect woman is given a baby because she was perfect enough. Instead, the miracle seems to be that divine renewal and divine grace can and does and will come into the world through people who remain deeply wounded and broken. Hannah doesn't set aside her rage. She comes back into relation with her husband. She reenters into the community that she found it so hard to be within, but she didn't have to give up those feelings for God to bless her. She's never fully cleansed of him. They sit with her always.

So the message is not that if we want to be saved from our violence, we have to be perfect. The message is that God loves us and wants us to be near. Our brokenness and our belovedness are not interrelated. Our belovedness endures regardless of how well we act.

Looking at the Gospel of Mark, we turn to the 13th Chapter, which is often called the Little Apocalypse, which makes it sound cute. It's like a cute little baby apocalypse with squishy apocalypse cheeks. Jesus tells the disciples walking out of the temple that bad times are a-comin’, and it's going to be no good. And at the end, the Son of Man will descend on clouds. This will all have been, as I said, birth pangs, and we will throw a big party in Heaven.

Like I said, I don't find this reading, the literal reading that we might take of this apocalyptic text as something that gives me much hope. Certainly not when we look at the situation we're in; waiting around doesn't do what we need it to do, waiting for miracles. Waiting for Jesus on a Pegasus with an AK-47 to descend on clouds and tell us that this has all been for something is not going to save lives now that are in need. But this literal reading of what the apocalypse Jesus tells us about is also perhaps not all that this story could hold for us.

Right after this passage that we heard today about the 13th Chapter of Mark, right at the beginning. "Then Jesus says, "The end times will be like this. It's like a man going on a journey when he leaves home and puts his servants in charge each with his work and commands the doorkeeper to be on watch, therefore, keep awake. For you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening or at midnight or at cock crow or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And so I say to you what I say to all: keep awake."

This is not a warning that we should be all on our guard because the day of Judgment is coming and Jesus is going to find us wanting. The word door here is the person, the doorkeeper, who is keeping a door. The word door in Greek is often used as a metaphor for opportunity. And what seems crucial here spatially is that God is on the threshold. God is waiting to come back into the world. And the responsibility we have been entrusted with amidst chaos, amidst entropy, we are the keepers of the door. We're not just sitting in the house waiting for Jesus to barge through. We are the ones who are responsible for opening the door to divine love, which so desperately wants to break back into the world.

But the Gospel of Mark in this apocalyptic scene tells us, is not that we are condemned to suffer until God has decided that we have deserved a respite. Rather, the Gospel of Mark grapples with what it means to live with absence, with the idea of hopelessness. And at the end here in this apocalypse, Jesus says, "It's going to suck, but I want to come back to you." The love of God wants to break into the world. And what it will need to look like is you opening the door for that to happen. It needs to look like you keeping watch for the unexpected places, the unexpected people, the unexpected choices, where you can be the one who brings that love into the world, who realizes that love, who incarnates Christ over and over again.

So, what might these two positions on these readings offer us? What would this look like amidst apocalypse, the to believe that broken people can yet to do good, and to understand that it's our responsibility not to take apparent absence as license or as cause for despair, but rather as the ground of our responsibility. What does it look like to open the door for the love of God to come back into the world?

There are a lot of things, I think, that we can look at from this perspective and see as miracles. There are a lot of places in this crappy world where people are choosing to do something totally radical that we take for granted, which is to be kind and just and merciful in a world that tells us we don't have to be those things. We can get away with a lot. We do not have to be kind. We do not have to be merciful. And yet, even though there's no reward, even though they might not see their actions working on the world in the way they would want to, every day, people choose to be those things. And that, much like Hannah, choosing to return to the community seems miraculous.

My mom sent me, as I said, dispatches as Buncombe County was recovering from the hurricane. And as I was looking at the text for this sermon and thinking about what the miraculous love of God breaking into the world looked like for me, I looked back at some of the dispatches that she sent to me. On one of the first days after the hurricane, as the helicopters and the chainsaws and the sirens were still blaring and the trash was piling up in the street, and hundreds, thousands of people were realizing they had lost everything, my mom had a bunch of frozen blueberries that she made a blueberry crumble with, walked around to the neighbors. It turned out it was one of our neighbor's birthdays. Blueberries are his favorite dessert. "And [inaudible 00:17:16] blueberry based," he said.

And so, my mom handed out big scoops of blueberry cobbler on paper plates of the entire neighborhood. And as she walked back home, heard the strains of Happy Birthday, straining through the air, along with the sirens, along with the chainsaws. My mom sent me a picture of the surviving boxes of my books, moved to a safe, dry, new basement. She wrote, "Your books have been moved safely out of their new home, but they're a little sad due to the loss of their brothers and sisters. You'll just have to get more."

And about a month ago, my mom sent me a pilgrim dispatch, almost. The tiny narrative of a walk that she went on. She sent about 10 pictures, short little captions with them. She began by writing, "I went on a dangerous mission this morning to see if the Goodwill on Tunnel Road still stands. I know that it's not your favorite of the Asheville Goodwill's, but it was your gateway thrift store. She sent pictures of what was the busiest road in our city, five lanes, right by the mall, a nightmare to drive on, let me tell you. And it was completely, totally empty. Not a car in sight. It was covered in mud. You couldn't see the pavement markings on the road. And much of the pavement itself, vast swaths of it had just vanished, swallowed into thin air. It seemed like just holes in the ground had opened up underneath what had been the loudest, most vibrant, most city-y part of our home.

The sidewalks were piled five feet high with debris that had been shoved there by bulldozers over the past couple of days. Shelves and chairs and pillows and clothes and power lines and trees that had been uprooted, and mud and mud and more mud. And in the middle of the road, there were a bunch of forty-foot-long solid steel shipping containers that had just floated in from God knows where and piled up on each other in the middle of the road like driftwood. She sent me pictures of all of this destruction, an emptiness as she walked through this place that had felt so familiar and so homely and now felt so strange and so far away.

But the last picture she sent showed a bedraggled but unflooded Goodwill, with its blue and white sign rising over one of the piles of debris. And you could still see the fluorescent lights were on somehow inside the building. And as I looked back at this photograph, thinking about this sermon, I just thought about my mom striving to love across emptiness, to invite me back to our home, to tell me that the places that I loved, that make up part of who I am are still here. And I was struck by what it must have felt like to her maybe, to imagine what it felt like to stand there silent, except for the birds and the breeze. A place we had never heard silent before. Never free of cars. But she just stood there and took a picture for me and listened to the bird song and the breeze.

And in the picture, if you look at the Goodwill, all around it, the trees behind it are just starting to turn into their autumn colors. Blue and red and yellow and gold fall in the blue. Ridge. Mountains is the best, sorry, New England. They're the best leaves. We have the best leaves. Your leaves are okay. But there in the picture, a place that had been devastated, red, yellow gold. And my mom taking a picture of it to send to me, to invite me home, to invite me to continue to see how the love that we felt for our home endures. It's not exactly good news. It's not exactly bad news; it just is. But the love behind it is all that I think we really need. Amen.

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