1 Samuel 1:4-20 1 Samuel 2:1-10
Hebrews 10:11-14 (15-18) 19-25 Mark 13:1-8
Lectionary Link
In our appointed readings from the Hebrew Scriptures, we have an account of the marvelous birth of Samuel to Hannah. In place of the Psalm, we have the famous Song of Hannah. Apparently childless women in her time were treated as those who had been cursed by God so as not to fulfill their societal and family expectations. A married woman was expected to have children and not to be able left her open to hidden and not so hidden scorn and derision of her society. Hannah made a bargain with God, "Give me a child and I will give that child back to you." Hannah bore the boy Samuel and gave him to the service of God at the shrine in Shiloh with Eli.
The song of Hannah is about her rescue from her social shame of being childless and it includes rebukes for those who disparaged her former condition. It is a song of judgment against the proud.
It certainly can be seen as a model for the Song of Mary, another woman who had a miraculous conception and birth. Mary's song is also a song of judgment against the proud and powerful.
The Song of Hannah and the Song of Mary accompany the arrival into the world of two history changing people, Samuel and Jesus. The songs appear in literature of communities which are assessing significant changes which have taken place in their past and they attribute the changes to the arrival of these two figures, Samuel and Jesus.
Samuel arose as a prominent Judge of Israel, who combined the roles of prophet, judge, and priest in his roles. He lived before Kings Saul, David, and Solomon and before the Temple was built. He interrupted the priest lineage of Eli, because the sons of Eli had corrupted the practice of the priestly leadership of Israel. Samuel was one to reestablish creditability to leadership in Israel and he is the crucial prelude for the age of a divinely established monarchy in Israel.
The writers of Book of Hebrews and the Gospel of Mark reflect upon the meaning of the changes which had happened within the people who were followers of Rabbi Jesus and who had become dispersed throughout the cities of the Roman Empire.
The were assessing what they had lost and learning how to cope with the loss and also find new meanings for living forward into the future as vulnerable communities within the Roman Empire.
What had the writers of the New Testament lost? They had lost their sacred homeland, sacred city, and sacred Temple. Jerusalem and the Temple had been razed in the year seventy. The holy city and environs were uninhabitable. All the communities associated with Judaism, including the Jesus Movement had become dispersed and forced to re-define their lives in new places.
For the writer of the Gospel of Mark, the Risen Christ was presented in story form as an oracle to the disciples. The Risen Christ as an oracle in Mark gave words of assurance. "Yes, the Temple and Jerusalem are destroyed and because of this crisis there will be lots of people giving proud and certain answers for why things have happened and they will want your loyalty for their claims of being God's chosen leaders. Don't listen to them; what has happened is only another example of what has always being happening in the changes of natures and the changes in human societies. To live with change is to always be living with birth pangs."
Birth pangs is a metaphor for living in the world of change. It is the combination of joyful hope and the pain of the not yet.
Without a holy city and a holy Temple, the writer of the Book of Hebrews wrote about the spiritualization of the Temple and the priesthood. The Temple had always been in the invisible heaven, the priest had always been the heavenly Advocate Christ. The heavenly Temple as a worship center and the heavenly priestly advocate Christ, had to have earthly history for the meaning to unfold within human experience. When earthly models of Temple and priest get altered by events of human war, the center of worship and the priestly is still eternally retained only to find new and other expressions within the visible world.
In the new Christly era of the Jesus Movement, the body of each person is a Temple of the Holy Spirit. The collective body of believers is a nomadic, movable, and portable temple of people who are called to be priestly in the various locations throughout the world.
The birth pangs of changes have given birth to new meanings of temple and the priestly and they were painful because it included the destruction of the Temple and the holy city of Jerusalem, and the loss of the priesthood.
As those early members of the Jesus Movement endured their birth pangs of changes forced upon them by outside forces, and gave birth to new ways of making worship completely portable and of expressing priestly vocations, let us do the same with the current birth pangs forced upon us by the changes in our lives.
Let us endeavor to find ourselves as the temples of the Holy Spirit, and let us find ways to be the priestly intercessory persons to which we are called in the places where we find ourselves. Amen.
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