Each and every person here has probably taken one. Often after the purchase of a large ticket item, such as an appliance or a car, comes a phone call from the retailer asking for just a few moments of your time. Sometimes hotels or rental car agencies will ask you to fill one out. Sometimes they are simple postcards on the table of restaurants, sliding down between the menu and the napkins. But no matter what form it takes, we have come to expect the opportunity to give feedback in a customer satisfaction survey. The questions may have something to do with the item or service you purchased but more often than not they are questions to gauge your level of satisfaction with the experience of your purchase. Was the sales staff knowledgeable and courteous? Were you greeted promptly and with warmth? Did the product or service live up to your expectations?
Most of us, if truth be told are more likely to be willing to complete a customer satisfaction survey when we have a complaint than when we have a compliment. I once read that politicians and those doing surveys make the assumption that for every person who bothers to write or call there are another 1000 constituents or consumers who feel the same way but did not bother to write or call.
When I had been out of seminary for about a year, I received in the mail what was essentially a customer satisfaction survey from the Academic Dean of the Seminary I attended. Looking back I think I was so relieved that it was not an appeal for money that I was more than happy to fill it out and mail it back. The seminary was trying to find out from its most recent graduates, how well they had done in preparing us for parish life so that they could make adjustments to the practical pieces of a senior seminar that taught such stimulating things as how to fill out a parochial report, how to work with vestries, how to apply to the Bishop to officiate at a remarriage, and how to organize a stewardship drive. In other words the nuts and bolts stuff of parish life that is not glamorous but is important. The survey had about a dozen statements about the tasks of ordained and parish life and then asked us to tick a series of boxes with answers that ranged from “not prepared,” to” somewhat prepared,” to “very well prepared” for each one. Being a huge fan of the customer satisfaction survey, I dutifully checked all the appropriate boxes. I should clarify that overall I felt well prepared and that most of the boxes I checked on the survey fell into that column. I understood, and still do, that well prepared is not about knowing everything for none of us ever will. Rather, well prepared in anything whether it is parish life, or family life or work or school may have more to do with knowing where to find what we need than it does with knowing everything there is to know. None of us can do that and no seminary, or graduate school or book can teach any of us everything. Seminary, life and life the life of faith was as much, if not more, about formation as it was about education and both of those continue to this day.
At the very end of the survey, there was one open ended question. And it was this. What is the one area/topic/ task or issue have you had to address in this first year of ordained ministry that you wish that seminary had better prepared you for? I did not hesitate to fill in the answer and it was only one word: fertility. Despite all that we had talked about in seminary about the issues around life and death, children and aging parents, addiction and money and sex and illness I was unprepared for the vast number of couples I talked with in that very first year who came to seek the churches wisdom and help as they faced the emotional, spiritual, medical and financial challenges associated with fertility. And it has continued to this day. People who have reached a time in life when they feel prepared to be parents and then find that some things, most things in life, are not ours to control. Fertility is but one of them.
There are many stories in scripture that deal with issues of fertility and most are of women, said to be barren or of great age who pray to God for a child, often wishing for a son, as a sign of their blessing and favor with God. Hannah was no exception to that pattern and today we hear two parts of her story as our lesson is read and as together we sing the Song of Hannah. Her story is one of pain and suffering but also of deep devotion and of vindication. Hannah’s prayer is finally answered in the conception and birth of Samuel but not before she promises him to the service of the Lord. Hannah’s prayer and Hannah’s song remind us that prayer and praise are always linked in the life of faith. Hannah’s story therefore is not just a story for women or for those who long to be parents, or anyone who has suffered, or those who feel their prayers go unanswered. Her story is for all of us, young and old, male and female, rich or poor, those of us who have children and those of us who do not. Ultimately her story is one of hope and longing for God to be known in her life and her faithfulness to God in and through and beyond that moment. So for us, for all of us, she is a model of persistence against all the odds and she stands along side all those who have patiently waited for God to hear them and those among us and throughout the world who still do.
Hannah made her prayer and promise to the Lord in a time of great distress. Even as she longed for a child and felt the pain of her infertility, so too was she able to sing Gods praises in her distress. She did not blame God for her lot in life but she does make a promise – a promise that she fulfills and it is this. If she is granted a male child she will offer him to the Lord. In other words, the very child of her dreams and prayers she will indeed give back to God. Not in some abstract sense, but Hannah will leave her son in the service of the temple for his entire life. So what she longs for most, she will simply give away. Give back to God who gave in the first place. And she will do so with joy in her heart.
In Hannah’s prayer we hear echoes of the prayer of another woman whose pregnancy was not borne of waiting and prayer but came as a complete and utter surprise, and that is Mary the Mother of our Lord. Mary most likely would have learned the prayer of Hannah so that when the news was delivered to her that she was to bear a son and he was to be great and called the Son of the Most High that prayer, that we have come to call the Magnificat, leapt from her heart and her mouth. Echoing Hannah’s prayer it rejoices in a God who has lifted up the lowly and filled the hungry with good things.
The disciples who gathered around Jesus outside of the temple were looking for signs of God’s presence for even though he was in their midst, the disciples were not sure what to ask him. In that awkward exchange in the Gospel of Mark the first words out of one of the disciples mouth are “Look teacher, what large stones and what large buildings.” Jesus had just finished, as we heard in last weeks Gospel, telling the story of the widow and her offering of two small copper coins, all she had to live on. And this? This is the best reply the disciples can make? Hey, nice story about the money and the generous widow, now check out this building! Are they kidding? The disciples are so concrete in their understanding that much of what Jesus said they missed. They begin by admiring the building and he starts to talk about the end of time. “Not one stone will be left here upon another: all will be thrown down.” Echoes of Hannah’s prayers and of Mary’s too. Time is wasting and everything is about to change, says Jesus, and when you see all of these things, war and famine and earthquakes it is not the end but the beginning, the start of something new. Birthpangs he calls them. The actual pain required to bring new life. It was true for Hannah and for all the other women of scripture who longed for a child. It was true for Mary the mother of our Lord. It was true for those early followers of Jesus as they struggled to make sense his teachings. And it is true for us as well as we live in world where we try to sing Gods praises even as we try to make sense of the seemingly senseless acts of violence and neglect that are all around us. The shooting of a man a line waiting to buy the latest Sony play station model comes to mind, but so too does the genocide in Darfur. How can we make sense of such senselessness?
Hannah sang a song in response to God presence. The disciples were confused most of the time Jesus was with them and hid in fear after his death, until buoyed up by the Holy Spirit for the work of ministry. And my hunch is that we fall somewhere between he two – not quite ready to sing, but not hiding either. Aware of both the presence and absence of God in our own lives and in the world around us and not sure what to do about save for one thing. To gather here and to offer our praise, to bring our own longings before the God who knows them before we do, and to trust that a new order will come in the birthpangs of a new creation. We need to be prepared, to be about the work of preparing our hearts for God to enter and dwell in us.
If Hannah were asked to fill out a customer satisfaction survey, and if they disciples were asked to fill one out, if we were asked to fill one out, I wonder which columns would get checked – “somewhat prepared,” “prepared,” or “well prepared”? But there is no customer satisfaction survey in the church, only ministry to which we are all called and for which we prepare day by day as we sing Gods praise and break the bread and admit our failings and forgive one another and offer our prayers. Only together and only then will be truly prepared for our life and for the ministry that is ours in Jesus Christ. |
