Preaching Notes for the Twenty-Fifth Sunday After Pentecost, Year B (November 15)
The Rev. Dr. Dawn Chesser
1 Samuel 1: 4-10
In last week’s notes on the Old Testament reading, I wrote about how much I admired the strength and resourcefulness of both Ruth and her mother-in-law, Naomi. I’ve been thinking a lot about the relatively few women whose stories have been preserved in the Judeo-Christian tradition. As I noted last week, the overshadowing power of the patriarchal system has shaped the faith in some ways that I, as a woman, find painful and oppressive. I continue to wrestle with the continued cultural privilege given to men in virtually every country in the world, even though more than 3000 years have passed since Hannah offered her desperate plea to the Lord. But God provides, even in the midst of our struggles; and so this week I have the pleasure of writing about the amazing story of another woman of faith – Hannah, the prophet Samuel’s mother,
I will set aside the disturbing fact that our faith heritage seems to have had no trouble with a man having multiple wives and concubines. I will overlook that a woman who was unable to conceive is described as one whose womb has been closed by the Lord. I will ignore that it was because of this that Elkanah had sought additional wives so that even though his wife was brokenhearted over her inability to have children, he didn’t have to be. I will let it slide that Elkanah is so insensitive that he appears not to understand why she is weeping and refusing to eat and wonders why she does not consider him enough for her, even though he obviously does not consider her to be enough for him. I will even refrain from commenting on the fact that the priest Eli apparently couldn’t tell the difference between agony and drunkenness when confronted with a distressed woman and wasted no time in shaming her for her presumed intoxicated state.
I will excuse all these difficult and revealing parts of the story in order to give my full attention to the amazing faith of Hannah, especially her perseverance in the face of extremely difficult odds. Because it seems to me that this aspect of her witness can serve as a source of inspiration for women today, just as the witnesses of Ruth and Naomi do.
While there are many things to admire about Hannah, what I find most compelling is her audacity before God. In some ways, she reminds me of Job, in that she has simply reached a point of being beyond frustrated with her situation. She doesn’t just want God to help. She expects the Lord to hear her and to respond. She’s not going to sit back and try to be sweet and patient and wait for others to come around to see her point of view. She going to get in there and pour it all out before the Lord—all of her years of pain, all of her sadness, all of her anger, all of her frustration over the oppressive position in which she is caught. She’s even willing to try bargaining with God if it will help.
I can’t help but think about what happens when woman behave like Hannah today. When women cry out, they are called hysterical. When women raise their voices in passionate anger, they are told they sound shrill. When women criticize an establishment that favors men, they are accused of being negative or labled as troublemakers. When women lead with strength and competence, they are branded (I’ll use a polite term here) as uppity.
Hannah would not be subdued by the cultural pressure to hold a status quo that privileged one group over another. She refused to sit back and accept abuse and shaming. She refused to suffer in silence. She stood up for herself before her rival Peninnah, her husband Elkanah, the priest Eli, and even the Lord God. And because of this, the Lord heard her unforgettable prayer and responded by restoring not just her womb, but also her whole life. So powerful was her restoration that her story and her prayer were written down and preserved for us to remember her still, all these millennia latter.
We would do well to be a little more like Hannah. Especially those who find themselves on the underside of the struggle for equality. It isn’t right that entire groups enjoy privilege simply because of their gender or their skin color or their religious heritage or their sexual orientation or their age or their wealth.
And let us not forget that Jesus came into this world to stand with those who were on the struggling side of life. He came to save the least and the lost and to restore hope to the many whose lives are threatened daily by the prejudicial actions of others. Jesus came for the Hannahs of the world in every generation.
Our struggle as women today may not be as severe as it was in the time of Hannah, at least not where I live. But the struggle continues. There is still a long way to go before women will reach full equality with men in the United States and in the church of Jesus Christ. And there are far too many places in the world where not much has changed, where women continue to be treated as second-class citizens, where their bodies are used and sold and their full rights as human beings withheld.
May we in the church be as audacious as Hannah. May we not shame women for demanding what is rightfully theirs. May we stand up with Hannah and with all those who have courageously fought for the extension of human rights to all people.
Hebrews 10:11-14 (15-18) 19-25
This week, the author of Hebrews continues to drive home his deep conviction that Jesus Christ’s offering on the cross has removed the need for priests to offer sacrifices in the temple to take away sins. But he adds a couple of things to his argument that offer the United Methodist preacher a prime opportunity to expound upon John Wesley’s theology of grace when he writes that by his single offering, Christ “has perfected for all time those who are sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14, NRSV). Douglas Wingeier notes that “by perfection, the author of Hebrews does not mean moral flawlessness but rather being wholly dedicated to God, completing what God has given one to do. ‘Going on to perfection’ became a key element in the theology of John Wesley, who believed that persons, though they still made mistakes, could become ‘perfected’ in love” (Douglas E. Wingeier, Keeping Holy Time, Year B. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002, 366).
John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, described God’s sanctifying grace as an ongoing process of being transformed by God’s love over the course of our lives. For Methodists, sanctification has to do with intentional discipleship:
Through God’s sanctifying grace, we grow and mature in our ability to live as Jesus lived. As we pray, study the Scriptures, fast, worship, and share in fellowship with other Christians, we deepen our knowledge of and love for God. As we respond with compassion to human need and work for justice in our communities, we strengthen our capacity to love neighbor. Our inner thoughts and motives, as well as our outer actions and behavior, are aligned with God’s will and testify to our union with God.
We’re to press on, with God’s help, in the path of sanctification toward perfection. By perfection, Wesley did not mean that we would not make mistakes or have weaknesses. Rather, he understood it to be a continual process of being made perfect in our love of God and each other and of removing our desire to sin. (
Recently I was re-watching a favorite movie of mine: 28 Days, starring Sandra Bullock. In the movie Bullock plays the part of Gwen, an addict who is forced to spend twenty-eight days in a rehab clinic in order to avoid jail. At first she is a reluctant patient, but over time she begins to heal. One of the ways they test whether healing is taking place at the rehab facility is to offer equine therapy. Namely, each patient must learn how to get a horse to lift its foot so the hoof can be checked.
I grew up with a horse, and I know that the trick to getting a horse to lift its foot is to shove it ever so gently so that its balance shifts away from the foot you want it to lift. But there is also an aspect of trust that must occur between the horse and the person before a horse will lift its foot. That is the point of the equine therapy in the movie. The instructor tells the patients that the horses can tell when “their insides don’t match their outsides.” If the horse senses that people are not trustworthy, it will not cooperate with them.
This becomes a point of pride for Gwen. As she progresses through the program, she never succeeds at the task. She is sent home before her insides have completely matched up with her outsides, and she must continue to do the work of recovery on her own. The movie ends with a touching scene. She has successfully walked away from the temptation to begin drinking again and she spots a police horse standing unattended. She approaches the horse, talks to it, and tries to lift its foot. Nothing. So she looks up to heaven and asks God for help and tries again. Her success is a sign that her insides are finally matching her outsides.
This is a good example of what we mean by sanctification as United Methodists. It is when our commitment to love God, neighbor, and self becomes more than a mantra. It becomes a lifestyle, expressed in everything we do. As we grow towardperfection, our lives become more aligned with God’s will for us. Of course, we know we are always in recovery from sin, and never completely free from it, but we work the program. If we make mistakes, we don’t fall completely off the wagon. Rather, we ask for forgiveness, get back up, and try again.
Mark 13:1-8
What is it that drives the current fascination people have with doomsday scenarios? From the incredible popularity of televisions shows about a zombie apocalypse to the teenageobsession with dystopian novels to our seemingly endless appetite for end-of-the-world movies, it seems like everybody is entertained by visions of worldwide annihilation. Maybe the upside is that this prediction of imminent destruction coming from Jesus could make for a very on-trend message!
But it isn’t just this generation. It seems that every decade has some self-proclaimed prophet spreading the latest prediction about the end of the world. Everyone thought the end would happen when the millennium changed. Fears abounded as we approached the date on which the Mayan calendar ended. People worry aloud that earthquakes, wars, famines, fires, and floods surely must be signs that the end is near. And here we have Jesus talking about prophets that will lead people astray, and rumors of war, and nation rising against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and earthquakes and famines and the end thatis still to come.
But before we get any further into interpreting this dire prediction from Jesus, it is important to back up in the text a for a moment and recall that right after the story of the healing of blind Bartimaeus, which was the Gospel readinga few weeks ago, Jesus and his disciples had entered the city of Jerusalem to the sounds of a roaring crowd of people who had thrown cloaks and palm branches on the road as he passed by. The lectionary skips over that part of the story this time of year because we traditionally read that text in worship the week before Easter, on Palm Sunday. But if you read straight through without skipping that part, Mark has it that after the parade Jesus stopped in briefly at the temple, and then he and his followers retreated to Bethany to rest for the night.
The next morning, they returned to the temple, where Jesus spent the next few days teaching and drawing big crowds of people. It was in that very temple that he threw out the moneychangers, and where he had gotten into a series of heated exchanges with all sorts of people, from the chief priests, scribes, and elders who officiated there, to the Herodians, and the Pharisees and the Sadducees. They had argued about the nature of Jesus' authority, and tested him on his knowledge of Jewish law, and tried to trap him into breaking civil law. If you have been following Mark the past couple of months, you have no doubt read and maybe even preached on many of these stories. Jesus had held his own through all of this, and his teaching continued to mesmerize and delight the crowds of people who came to listen to him.
So I imagine that at that point the disciples must have been thrilled to be associated with this popular and zealous teacher. They were filled with a sense of pride and triumph, imagining that their man, their candidate, was about to take over Jerusalem. They were still on a high from all the singing and shouting that had taken place when Jesus had come into the holy city, and their pride was overflowing when they recounted how Jesus had smacked down all those chief priests and elders right there in their very own temple.
Boy, those disciples were on a roll! They thought that all the momentum was on their side.
So when they came strutting out of the temple feeling all proud and victorious and saw those huge, stone blocks lying around, they imagined them as building blocks to their own grandiose futures and the new power structure they would soon oversee. Soon they would be building their own grand castles to live in! Soon they would be the priests at the biggest Temple in town!
Jesus, however, knew that he was about to be arrested, tried, and crucified. He also knew that the enthusiasm of the crowds was fickle, the way popularity and fame always is, and that the priests whom he had challenged weren’t going to stop at a simple argument, but were bound and determined to take him out. After that happened, the dreams of his disciples were going to come crashing down. He had tried, three times, to warn the disciples about what was coming. Three times the disciples had listened to Jesus telling them how he was going to be arrested and executed in Jerusalem. Three times they had failed to hear a word.
So now here they were, continuing to live in their fantasy world and getting an eyeful, up close and personal, of the splendor that a powerful person like Herod could make possible, power that they imagined would soon be theirs. While they were all excited, basking in the light of their own mistaken dreams and visions, Jesus took the opportunity to give them a little reality check.
Never one to mince words, he seized the moment. Right there and then, just when they were gazing dreamily at the magnificent buildings and those massive, newly cut stones lying all around, and picturing themselves ruling, at the front of some of those glorious buildings that were about to be constructed, Jesus said to them, “You see all those great buildings? Not a single stone here will be left in its place. Every one of them will be thrown down.”
Now, at last, Jesus managed to get his disciples’ attention. “What?” They said. “These stones? Oh Master, tell us, when will this happen? What other bad things are going to happen? Tell us all what we should be looking for, so that we can take some preventative measures!”
And Jesus said, “There will be all kinds of things happening: I will not be around then, but there will be plenty of people running around and claiming to speak for me, but they will only lead people astray. There will be wars near and far, and earthquakes, and floods, and famines. But remember, all these things are like the beginning of the birth pangs.”
The beginning of the birth pangs.
That’s the key line. It is critical because Jesus did not view his death as the end of everything. He always said that three days later he would rise to life again. And neither did Jesus think that the destruction of the temple was a catastrophic event. He looked on it somewhat the way we would look at it today when an old, outdated building is torn down to make room for something new.
Jesus saw the destruction of the temple as a demolishing of an old way to make way for the new. Jesus saw his own death as a kind of birth. He saw the end of the world as an opportunity for the ushering in of a new order. In fact, according to both Matthew and Mark, the central theme of Jesus’ preaching was the proclamation thatthekingdom of God was at hand. It was underway. God’s kingdomhad already displaced all of humankind’s kingdoms. The kingdom of heaven had already come to earth.