Birthpangs

Texts: 1 Samuel 2: 1-4; Mark 13: 1-8

Hubble captures the birthpangs of an enormous new star

 See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE7cijPMH7w

On third Sundays I offer commentary on the scriptures

 and a guided meditation instead of a sermon.  Yesterday's meditation led to thoughtful sharing by the congregation.  We celebrated, for instance, recent progress states have made toward marriage equality.

COMMENTARY on 1 Samuel 2: 1-4

Today’s stories are about birth pangs.  The Hebrew Bible reading points back to a story that is mainly about birth pangs that did NOT happen, not for a long time.  The book of Samuel opens with the plight of poor Hannah, the better loved of Elkanah’s two wives but the wife who had mothered no children.  Perhaps more charming or more dutiful, more tender or beautiful or wise, Elkanah’s favorite wife had nevertheless failed to produce a child. Elkanah did not seem to hold Hannah’s barrenness against her.  But apparently her desperate dream of a child made him feel peripheral.  “Am I not more to you than ten sons?” he wanted to know.  Apparently not.  To make Hannah’s life more miserable, as Elkanah sulked, Hannah’s fertile sisterwife taunted her.  

So Hannah stopped eating.  She wept bitterly.  Each year Hannah made proper sacrifices at the Temple and prayed and prayed and prayed for a son.  She even promised God she would dedicate a future son to the service of God.  One day, Eli, the Temple priest, assured her that God would give her a baby.  As soon as the child was born and the birth pangs ended, Hannah named the boy Samuel, which may mean something like “God listens.”  And as soon as the child was weaned, Hannah made good on her pledge and took the boy to the Temple and left him there, to be trained by Eli the priest in the service of God. Late Samuel became the great judge, prophet, leader of Israel.

This story troubles me.  How unfair to long for something desperately—only to have to give it away upon receiving it.  How unfair if life has only brief periods of fulfillment in between the longing for something and the losing of it. 

I want to ask Hannah, mother to mother: “Was it worth it, Hannah?  Was it worth it to give your whole heart to that child whom you held so briefly? Was it worth the tortuous years of waiting, the dangerous months of pregnancy, the agonizing hours of labor pangs—only to deliver that child to the Lord’s priest as soon as little Samuel was weaned?  How could you bear to do that, Hannah?  Did your God really agree to that kind of deal with you?  Or did you create in your mind that kind of God?”

Of course, I realize all parents have to do what Hannah had to do: acknowledge that our children are really NOT our own.  The parent’s role is to love in such a freeing way that separation can eventually happen.  Strangely, in a story that emphasizes Hannah’s distress at her barrenness, there is no reportage of any sorrow she felt for being parted so soon from her son. Maybe that’s owing to a patriarchal bias of those writing this story.  At any rate, after giving Samuel to Eli’s care, we hear the song of Hannah praising the God who heard her prayer. “My heart exults in the Lord,” she sang somehow.

Life is full of longing, loving, and then turning loose. Any deep relationship has developed through losses, by which I mean through changes in the relationship.  We have to give up some things we want if a relationship is to grow.  We must shed some superficial roles in order to take on deeper ones.

GUIDED MEDITATION

I invite you to think about a strong, enduring relationship in your life: a relationship you have with a parent, perhaps, or sibling, or partner, or close friend.  This is a complex relationship that has changed and deepened over the years.

SILENCE

Consider to what extent, over the years, some aspect of that relationship had to be discarded.  Maybe you used to do something together that you no longer do.   To offer a simple example, maybe you used to read bedtime stories to your child, and that part of your relationship is over.   Any mature relationship has undergone change, has required you to let go of some earlier ways of relating, to change some pattern of communicating, for instance, to do things differently and feel about one another differently.  How has the loss of an old way of relating given way to some different and possibly deeper way of being in relationship? 

SILENCE

Thank God for the way that you’ve been able to turn loose of the old in order to be open to something new and perhaps deeper.  

SILENCE

Consider now how your relationship to God has perhaps involved periods of longing—and periods of loss. Perhaps you used to experience God in a way that you do not today.  Maybe you had to give up some earlier conception of God. That may have felt like a loss at the time. But has that loss enabled you to find some new depth in that relationship?  Why or why not?

SILENCE

Let me guide you through this body prayer to express what words cannot.  

1.     Stretch out your arms in front of you, like a child reaching out to be picked up and taken into a parent’s arms. Take a moment to long for God, to yearn for a sense of God’s presence.  Don’t try to decide if you are experiencing God in this moment.  Just let yourself desire God’s presence.  Long for God. 

2.     Place your hands on your heart.  Silently let this simple gesture express love for God.  Maybe there is no real emotion in this moment.  But this gesture might express a prayer to love God more deeply. 

3.     Finally, extend your arms with hands held as if you are holding something in them. Let your hands appear to drop something from them.  If you dare, pray that you might turn loose of the parts of God that may have served a younger you but no longer do.  Give up the false God to keep the true God. Give up aspects you have attributed to God that are keeping you from growing.  Thank God there are great depths to plumb in this relationship with the Ultimate One.  

SILENCE

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COMMENTARY on Mark 13: 1-8

The Gospel reading is about a figurative birthpang.

Jesus and his disciples had arrived in Jerusalem and had visited the Temple.  Unlike Hannah, who intentionally journeyed to the Temple to leave her son as a living sacrifice to God, the clueless disciples had traveled to the Temple unaware that Jesus would soon make of himself a sacrifice.  Instead of intuiting the loss they’d soon experience and the change that is always a part of transforming lives and systems, the disciples remarked instead on the seemingly permanent foundation stones of the Temple.  How solid those enormous stones must have seemed.  How reassuring, in periods of change, are the old structures and institutions.  Yet Mark’s first readers were probably hearing these words just after the Temple had been destroyed.

This story told Mark’s first readers that Jesus’s prophecy came true.  And I hear Jesus saying today what he said then: All that you assume is permanent can topple.  Your economic, political, social, or religious systems are changing drastically.  You see these great institutions you take for granted?  They will soon be gone.  You see that cliff?  You may be driving off it.  “Not one stone will be left upon another.”

Mark’s Jesus, who has been critiquing the religious and political powers of the day, reminds us that the old has to be cleared away before the new can move in.  “Do not be alarmed,” Jesus told Peter, James, John, and Andrew.  “This seems like the end of something; it’s the beginning.”

In this post-election season, many perceive increasingly obvious shifts in the foundations of our community and country and culture.  Which frightens many people.  They see old ways and values dying.  Some want to secede from the union to avoid coming changes!  Some think a return to a romanticized mythic era is possible.

One major announcement this past week might have spelled “apocalypse” for some folks.  You heard this very week the news reports of the latest sign of the end of life as we know it.  You know the latest portent of the last days:  Hostess, the snack maker, that purveyor of sugar and artificial preservatives and early onset diabetes, is going out of business.  Twinkies will be no more.  The end is surely near.

Or maybe our world will survive, might even have a better chance to thrive, without Ho Hos and Ding Dongs.

Mark’s Gospel recognizes these pains for what they are:  birthpangs.  Not death throes.  Birthpangs are the beginning of life, newness.   

What mother would say that her baby was not worth the pain of childbirth? Certainly not every change is life giving.  Not every ending leads to a better tomorrow.  But much of the pain and change we fear has potential to help us mature, evolve, grow, give birth to something new and good. 

The chorus of Kate Campbell’s song “Crazy in Alabama” recalls a time when folks in our racially segregated state thought the world was going to end.  Today we thank God for those changes.  Kate Campbell recalls it this way:

And the train of change
Was coming fast to my hometown
We had the choice to climb on board
Or get run down

It was crazy there were grown men fights
Over segregation and civil rights
Martin Luther King and the KKK
George C. Wallace and LBJ
And when the National Guard came in
I thought the world was gonna end
It was crazy in Alabama.

(www.katecampbell.com)

Those were birthpangs, right here in Alabama.  Our parents “thought the world was gonna end.” But what had to end was segregation and inequality. 

Consider some irreversible changes taking place in our culture today: economic change, political, social.  Something decisively different is emerging—economically, politically socially, culturally.  How do YOU feel about this change?   How do your friends and family feel about this change?  If you have some fear about this change, can you find some reason for hope?

SILENCE

CONGREGATION SHARES

Think now about the shift in our religious life. The stones upon which Western Christianity was built are crumbling.  Which is not to say Christianity is dying.  But a tectonic shift is happening in our religious landscape.  How would you describe the changes happening in Christianity today?  How do you feel about these changes?  How do others feel?  Where is God in this time of upheaval?  Where is hope?

SILENCE
CONGREGATION SHARES