Hannah’s likeable song

Fun fact: the Song of Hannah (2:1-10) has its own Facebook page.

It’s true. It is listed as an “interest” and you can ‘like’ it, if you’re on Facebook and you want to.  Although only 2 people have done so – which isn’t so bad when you consider that the Magnificat (Mary’s song) has 0 likes.

On the other hand, when I clicked on “Friend activity” I saw that a whole lot of my friends have ever mentioned the Magnificat on Facebook, and none have ever mentioned the Song of Hannah.

Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that I have remarkably churchy Facebook friends.  I’ve always found it interesting that Hannah’s song has so much in common with Mary’s, yet is so much less known.  I mean, sure, Mary is more famous than Hannah. But why don’t we pay more attention to Hannah?

• Why do you think Hannah isn’t better known?
• What similarities and differences do you see between Hannah’s song and Mary’s (you can look at Mary’s in Luke 1)?

Who do you think you are?

There’s a show on NBC calledWho Do You Think You Are? that traces celebrities’ ancestry back to identify interesting people and stories in their past.  The idea is that knowing where we came from tells us something about who we are.

This is true in my own experience – knowing about my family helps me know how I came to be me. And it is true for us as Christians – knowing about our Christian family story helps us know who we are as people of God.

But I also think it’s worth remembering that our families only get to decide part of who we are.  Some of it is up to us, and God can do new things in anyone’s life, no matter what kind of family we come from.  Look at Jesus, for instance – it’s important to a lot of people that he is descended from King David.  But King David himself was descended from Ruth and Boaz – who had an unusual if still godly marriage – but who themselves had quirky/scandalous ancestors.

Ruth was a Moabite, remember, and the Moabites came from the children Lot’s daughter had with Lot.  That beginning meant that Moabites were often looked down on. But Ruth still chose to follow God, and became one of David’s ancestors.  On the other side, Boaz was descended from Perez, who was one of the sons Tamar gave birth to after she tricked her father-in-law Judah into getting her pregnant because he wouldn’t let her marry his son.  Also not what most people are looking for in a founding ancestor. But Boaz also chose to do the right thing, and by marrying Ruth, made it possible for God to put David on the throne a few generations later and unite Israel under one king.

Family matters. But it’s not the whole story.

• How do you think your family has shaped who you are and how you think about yourself?
• What parts of you are different from your family?
• How do you see these two parts working together – the part that comes from your family and the part that doesn’t?

Questions

There is a lot of controversy about this chapter.

Is Naomi’s plan a good one? Why does she send Ruth to do this? What exactly happens between Ruth and Boaz? Was Ruth right to obey her mother-in-law? Was she right to change the plan in the moment? Should Boaz already have “redeemed” Ruth? Was he right to wait and see if someone else did? Why do you think the plan made Boaz act?

There are a lot more questions we could ask, too. But eventually a person has to make some guesses about things, no matter how mysterious.

• What do you think happened in this story?
• Which character do you think is most right in this story so far? Is there anything you would do differently if you were one of the characters?
• What other questions do you have about this chapter?

Man of God

Yesterday we learned that this story takes place “in the days when the judges ruled”.  And we know that the book of Judges described that as a time when ‘everyone did what seemed right in his own eyes’.  We also know that that didn’t necessarily bring out the best in people – even the political and religious leaders were engaged in horrible things like stealing and killing.

So it should be even more remarkable to us to read that Boaz saw a strange and attractive young woman picking grain in his fields, learned that she was alone and unprotected, and decided to protect her. In any other field, the landowner or one of his harvesters might easily have harassed or hurt Ruth, since she had no male family to take revenge if something happened to her.  But Boaz acted like a man of God – he told his workers to be kind and gentle with her and leave extra grain for her to gather, he gave her food to eat and even to take home to Naomi, and he tells her to stay with them and gather grain in his field all season, where she will be safe and have enough.

• Why do you think Boaz chose to act like this when he could easily have done something else?
• What do you think it means to be a man of God in our society today?

Foreign women

As we’ve been reading, you may have noticed that most of the biblical authors don’t seem to be fans of the men of Israel marrying foreign women.  Sometimes there are laws about it, sometimes there are just prejudices, sometimes a parent simply prefers that their son marry someone who will help him be true to their family’s traditions.  But in general, foreign women are looked at as dangerous – people who will betray Israel, like Delilah, or lead Israel to worship foreign gods and therefore to destruction.

Then we have this story.  In the midst of all this concern for “purifying” Israel, this story quietly stands up and says “You know, foreign women aren’t inherently evil. Some of them are pretty darn great.”  No fuss, no ranting, no rules – just a story that shows a foreign woman doing EXACTLY what a woman of Israel should do.

• Why do you think the editors included this story?
• What does this story tell you about how we should treat people from other countries today?

 

I am not afraid

Psalm 27:1 is probably one of the most familiar psalm verses out there, for those of us who go to St. Clare’s, because it is the text for one of our favorite hymns. We sing “The Lord is my light and my salvation” frequently at both 9:00 and 10:30. It’s comfortable.

Which is why I decided to bring in a new voice for today’s post.  The church where I grew up is reading the psalms and blogging about them for Lent, and I thought this reflection about Psalm 27:1 was really excellent for all of us to read.  The woman who wrote it is a therapist, but the questions she asks are questions I hear a lot about how to be a friend or a brother or sister, not just how to be a therapist.  Her questions are our questions to think about today.

You can find the reflection here on the original blog, or below.

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As a mental health therapist, I spend much of my day listening to people describe fear. Most of the people I treat are young children living in poverty. They have typical anxieties: social exclusion, detentions, whoopings for bad behavior…. They don’t always immediately volunteer other details: that they were evicted in the night, that their mother drank a bottle of tequila while they slept, that their parents assault each other during arguments. Many have parents in prison. So many lost a parent to homicide this year that I considered starting a group.

    Sometimes I am afraid: ‘How can I help, really? What if I falter and someone gets hurt? How can I absorb all these hard times and still be of use? Why should I put more energy into this moment?’ I read the verse “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?… of whom shall I be afraid?” (27:1, KJV) and it makes me feel brave. For all they go through, many of the children I work with have a stronger faith in God than I do, and if asked most would probably say they’re never afraid of life?!? They are so strong; I see God in each of them. We just push through it.

— Elizabeth Richmond

(Reposted from Reflections from St. Paul’s, Cleveland Heights, reflectionsfromsp.blogspot.com, 2/28/2012)

 

Whatever. – ORANGE

Let’s take a vote: who wants to skip talking about this story and just go for ice cream instead?

Sadly, the only way we get to do that is if it’s not in the Bible, and nobody asked us what we thought about that. So we will have to think about it, even though it is an awful story about awful things that no one likes to think about.

So let’s start, not at the very beginning, but at the very end, with 21:25.

In those days Israel had no king; all the people did whatever seemed right in their own eyes.

Despite what the Outback commercials will tell you, “no rules” doesn’t lead to “just right”.  If you think about it, Israel has been heading toward this horrible event ever since Joshua died.  At the beginning of Judges, it didn’t seem so bad – there were periods of badness, but periods of being guided by judges who were really good, like Deborah. But by the end of the time of judges, the judges are like Samson – more concerned with himself and with military glory than with guiding the people back to God’s ways.

Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that this is where we end up.  Total chaos does tend to lead to, well, total chaos.  With no guiding force, even the Levites (who are supposed to be the holy people) descend into murder and rape and dismemberment and think nothing about it.

Thank God the story doesn’t end here.

• How do you think Israel got to this point?
• What warnings might this story have for us today?
• Do you see any hope in the story at all right now? Why or why not?