Sermon: Uncool

Texts: 1 Samuel 1:4-20; 2:1-10

Date: November 19, 2006

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, EagleHarbor Congregational Church

            Whatever else you might say about Hannah, I think you’ll have to agree with me that she was really uncool.  Not cool.

            You know what cool is.  Who comes to mind if you think of someone really cool?  I think of George Clooney slightly raising one eyebrow and even more subtly raising one corner of one lip while standing around on a red carpet with his hands in the pockets of his Armani tuxedo pants.  That’s cool.  I googled on the phrase “the epitome of cool” and perused a few of the 866,000 responses.  There were a variety of people mentioned but they seemed to share some of the same qualities.  Very much in control, not needing the approval of others, talented, generally well-off, self-possessed, unruffled by events or emotions, sort of looking down on the people who are looking up to them. 

            If that’s what cool is, Hannah is totally uncool.  She was barren, which was really uncool in her day; the only way women had any kind of status in that society was to be either a virgin (and thus a saleable commodity) or to be married with children.  The other wife, Penninah, the “fertile myrtle” of the household, mocked her unmercifully, especially when they made trips to the temple to make sacrifices.  She couldn’t wait to point out that the portion of meat dealt out to her and her brood of children dwarfed Hannah’s little lamb chop.  Hannah was bullied and scorned by her to her face and probably by lots of other women behind her back.         Hannah might have still been able to act cool if she could have acted like she didn’t care about her barrenness and about the obnoxious teasing that went with it.  Being cool has a lot to do with not giving a hoot what other people think, and covering up any deep unhappiness.  But Hannah went into the temple to pray and completely lost it.  She got in there where people could see her and started to weep, to sob and moan.  She was praying silently, but moving her lips and looking crazy or drunk.  That’s what the priest thought she was—sloppily drunk and making a spectacle of herself.  So uncool. 

            She could have just made accepted that the way things were was the way things were.  She had a husband who loved her; why couldn’t she just be content?  The way her raw desire for something more is on display just is not cool. 

            And then there was this apparent belief that praying was going to make a difference.  I don’t know if it was considered uncool in her day and age to pray.  It probably wasn’t as unhip as it is in our time and place.  The majority of people around here don’t consider prayer a very sophisticated activity, wouldn’t you agree?  I doubt that many of the people to whom we describe our problems suggest prayer before suggesting other ways to solve a problem.    A little whispered prayer as I lay me down to sleep or a quick grace before Sunday dinner is OK--but throwing yourself down before the altar and sobbing out a desperate prayer for healing as if something is going to change?  So uncool.

            Hannah’s decided lack of hipitude doesn’t change after God answers her prayer with a son.  She actually keeps the vow she made in her prayer to give the boy up to priesthood.  A cool person would have told God she was just kidding about that silly old vow and hung onto that child, her heart’s desire.  Further, she sings this outrageously joyful and triumphant song of praise to God, making as much of a public spectacle of her joy as she did of her grief a few years earlier.  She boasts about God’s wonderful power to “lift up the needy from the ash heap.”  She tunefully mocks the arrogant folk who think they know the end of the story without accounting for God’s ability to bring about surprising changes in human life.  So uncool.

            I’ve never really been one of the cool people—I’m listed on none of the 866,000 websites containing the phrase “the epitome of cool.”  But I know from cool.  I know Hannah is not it as sure as I know I am not it.  But at least one thing distinguishes Hannah from me—I don’t think she wanted to be cool.  And to be honest, I kind of do.  Want to be cool.  Do you? 

            I don’t think of this as one of my better features, this little itch left over from being an adolescent to be cool.  It’s one of the ways I am, to borrow Tex Sample’s words, “seriously unredeemed.”  I re-noticed this unredeemed part of me a few weeks ago when John and I got invited to a party with some really cool people and I got all “woo-hoo” and yearned for a time machine so I could go back and rub it in to a few select cheerleaders and jocks of the Plains High School Class of 1977. 

            A desire to be cool that flares up now and again might be nothing but a minor annoyance.  On the other hand, it could really impede a person’s spiritual growth.  Wanting to look all hip and cool could put our practice of Christian faith in such a small box that it becomes nothing more than a weekly one hour hobby—and even that hobby-faith will be considered so uncool by our neighbors that we might strive to keep it out of the public eye.

            I’m not at all sure a person could be really cool and be a Christian.  I mean, I’m not sure a person could be judged by our society as cool or seen as cool and still be practicing Christianity.  That’s because so much of being cool in our day and age tied up with being self-possessed, self-made, self-taught, self-sufficient, sophisticated and relatively unemotional.  And a genuine faith journey in our tradition pretty much calls for the opposite. 

            Taking Hannah as the epitome of uncool faith, we see right away that being self-sufficient and self-possessed are out.  Hannah doesn’t see herself as complete.  She has a deeply-felt need that she brings out into the open.  It’s more important for us to focus on her feeling of need than on her infertility—it’s not as if we should think, as people in her culture did, that women and men who haven’t had children are flawed.  It’s the need for God that is highlighted in her story that bespeaks a genuine journey of faith.  It’s a burning need, a confession of self-insufficiency.  Abraham Lincoln once said, “I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.”  Christianity is more of a hobby than a lifestyle if the need for God is lacking.  It doesn’t have to be a physically based ailment or flaw that drives a person to God.  It could be recognition of one’s own powerlessness over sin, or a hunger for connection with a force bigger than ourselves.  So uncool—and so Christian.

            Hannah’s faith that God is involved with the affairs of this world, demonstrated by her faith in the power of prayer, strikes another blow at cool self-sufficiency.  It suggests that there is an aspect of the universe that no amount of human fact-finding will comprehend.  Prayer reaches outside the realm of everyday experience to a dimension of wisdom and healing we cannot fully understand.  In our culture, being scientific is cool.  Believing only in what can be quantified and measured is cool.  Reaching into the mysterious realm of God in prayer for guidance, strength and healing that cannot be proven, quantified, and measured is so uncool—and so Christian. 

            Hannah’s emotions being way out there fly in the face of our conventions of cool.  So much of being cool in our culture is having a firm grip on your feelings: keeping them bound up, not shedding a tear, not getting angry even at the most outrageous injustice, not acting excited, not expressing even our love very openly lest it be rejected.  You can’t laugh too loudly, can’t act wounded even if you are wounded.  One name in the annals of “epitome of cool” is the name of John Travolta’s character in the movies “Get Shorty” and “Be Cool”: Chili Palmer.  Chilly.  Sometimes people joke about mainline Protestants such as ourselves being “the frozen chosen.”  While it’s embarrassing for me personally and maybe for you, too, I think it’s good that we shed some tears in this sanctuary.  Not to mention laugh and hug and even get irritated and generally be ourselves in all our sloppy emotional glory.  It’s so uncool—and so Christian.

            It’s good to see Hannah cut loose and sing this tremendous song of praise in a reading this close to Thanksgiving.  Hannah gives God all the credit and the glory for turning her life around.  She loudly proclaims God’s ability to rescue and resurrect.   Looking at Hannah’s song brought back a memory of meeting a very uncool stranger years ago when we visited the place Franklin D. Roosevelt spent his summers.  This woman who was on the tour with us praised God for everything, loudly, over and over.  The station wagon she was driving was painted with slogans praising the Lord.  She sounded like she hadn’t uttered a sentence without praising the Lord in years.   She struck me as comical, if not bizarre, even though we’re in the same family of faith.

As I think about her now, I have to admit her nerdy public gratitude is probably much more pleasing to God than what passes for cool nowadays.   When it’s cool to be unemotional and cool to be self-made, gratitude can get pretty anemic.  We might be deluded into thinking we earned all the good things we enjoy, or might be satisfied with letting others think we did.    Perhaps we offer our thanks to God privately, but we don’t go public with what we believe God has done for us nearly often enough. 

            Patrick D. Miller has written an article about praising God that speaks convincingly of the ripple effect of praise.  He made a study of many of the psalms and hymns of praise in the Bible, including Hannah’s song.  It’s a wonderful thing when God turns someone’s life around.  If that new life or resurrection is expressed in an act of praise, the power of that act of God keeps spreading out into the world.  Miller writes,

This creates an unending litany of testimony, an ever-widening circle of praise. At the center of that circle is the one who prayed in agony and now testifies and praises in trust and joy. That testimony and praise takes place before the whole congregation, who are also called to praise because of what God has done for this suffering one. But such doxology is not confined to the immediate congregation. It reaches out to the ends of the earth. The proclamation and praise of the God who delivers in this fashion encompasses even the dead and draws in generations yet unborn. Thus, a wave of praise rolls out from God's deliverance of this one person. The doxology of the lamenting petitioner is public praise, which can and should elicit an astonishingly wide echo of praise. The utterly desolate and isolated individual, a worm, nothing, mocked by everybody, has moved to the center of a universal circle of the praise and worship of God.[1]

Ranier Maria Rilke wrote a poem that also hints at the way praise rolls out through time and space beyond the person praising:

To praise is the whole thing!  A man who can praise

Comes toward us like ore out of the silences

Of rock.  His heart, that dies, presses out

For others a wine that is fresh forever.

When the god’s energy takes hold of him,

His voice never collapses in the dust.

Everything turns to vineyards, everything turns to grapes,

Made ready for harvest by his powerful south.

The mold in the catacomb of the king

Does not suggest that his praising is lies, nor

The fact that the gods cast shadows.

He is one of the servants who does not go away,

Who still holds through the doors

Of the tomb trays of shining fruit.[2]

When we hear a great song of praise like Hannah’s, it is like a tray of shining fruit held out through the doors of her tomb.  Hannah calls us to praise God for all God’s goodness to us, a praise that will nourish the faith of others in our circle and keep rippling out.  Praise!  So uncool—and so Christian. 

            I’m never going to be cool, and maybe with God’s help I can finally get over wanting to be.  Because isn’t it so much better to take our needy, unsophisticated, passionate, dependant, grateful souls out to walk with God that to keep our souls locked up in the ice box of cool? 

[1] Miller, Patrick D.  “In Praise and Thanksgiving” http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/jul1988/v45-2-article3.htm

[2] Rilke, Rainer Maria  Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke: A Translation from the German and Commentary by Robert Bly  New York: Perennial Library, 1981, p. 207