Big Faith Breaks Through Hannah and Breaks Down the Old Order Proper 28 Nov 15 2015

+Last week and this week’s gospels are set inside and just outside the Temple. In the days of Jesus the Temple in Jerusalem was the most magnificent structure anyone had ever seen. Some of the stones were 40 ft. long…. JUST ONE STONE. Most of the western wall, plus some of the northern wall, from a later incarnation of the temple, still exists today. Even these remnants, small in comparison to what the disciples are marveling at in today’s Gospel, are pretty impressive. When I prayed at the Western Wall back in 2012 I was moved to tears, thinking about all the prayers offered inside that place, when it was standing and outside, at the remaining walls, after it’s destruction.  It’s an amazing and formidable place. To the disciples--- fishermen, tentmakers and stonemasons from rural Galilee--- it must have seemed equally incredible.
But it wasn’t just the sight of the Temple that blew them away, it was Jesus’ outlandish claim that it would be toppled, that those 40 ft. long stones would be destroyed. Ludicrous, it was just plain ludicrous!
And ludicrous is exactly what Jesus was going for. Along with awesome, incredible, amazing and unbelievable.
Now, remember, this part of the Gospel comes toward the end of Jesus’ earthly life…it was early in Holy Week, probably Monday or Tuesday…Jesus’ description of the temple falling as a foreshadowing of his death wasn’t some “long in the future prediction”…it was happening… soon! Today’s Gospel was written through the lens of Holy Week yet we read it through the lens of the coming Advent as well as the lens of the seeming apocalypse taking place in our world right now.
Welcome to pre-Advent, my friends. As I’ve mentioned before, Advent used to have six weeks, just like Lent, so these two Sundays before the official start to Advent have much the same feel as our Advent readings: lots of end world imagery, lots of violence, lots of chaos. You see Advent isn’t about 24/7 Christmas music on the radio, or making your list and checking it twice, Advent is all about a beginning emerging out of an end, it’s about a new creation, it’s about turning what we know inside out and upside down. Advent is about the coming of a savior, of The Savior.
Advent is about new birth.
And giving birth isn’t pretty. It involves ebbs and flows of pain, fear, hope and peace.
Birth is mind-blowing, overwhelming and scary.
Giving birth changes everything.
Just like the coming of Jesus.
Once Jesus arrived and even now as we anticipate Jesus coming again, the world order is being changed.
With the Coming of Jesus comes a clean slate, a fresh start, a beginning to the creation of a new world where Love replaces Hate, Courage replaces Fear, Tolerance replaces Intolerance, Hope replaces Hopelessness and what we’ve known is turned inside out and upside down.
But getting there is just like childbirth---painful, scary, messy and at times, overwhelming.
Preparing for the messiah requires perseverance, fortitude, grit, spunk and persistence. It also requires faith.
Big Faith.
The kind of Big Faith found in Mary, the mother of Jesus, the kind of Big Faith found in Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, the kind of Big Faith found in Sarah, Judith, Esther and Tamar and the kind of Big Faith found in Hannah.
The Big Faith of the matriarchs I just mentioned isn’t big in the usual sense. It isn’t loud, it isn’t flashy, it isn’t all that apparent to the casual observer. What makes their faith Big is the breadth and the depth of it. You see these women really got it.
They understood that professing one’s faith means nothing if the faith isn’t lived. They understood that shouting their faith from the rooftops meant nothing if deep within their homes, deep within their souls they weren’t living it.
Hannah had that type of faith. Her life wasn’t easy…. each and every time her husband made the obligatory sacrifice at the temple she was subject to the disdain and the disgust of his other wife---the one he didn’t love so much, but the one who was fertile.
If you’ve ever wanted—desperately wanted---to have a child and were unable to you know the anguish, the deep in your gut anguish of not being able to do so. That was the anguish of Hannah.
When confronted with such a burden, such anguish you have two choices:
bitterness or grace.
Hannah displayed some bitterness early on in today’s reading but she let go of that fairly quickly when she decided, once and for all, to turn the whole mess over to God. It’s a show of great grace, it’s an example of Big Faith when Hannah stands up for herself—and her faith—by telling Eli that what he assumed was drunkeness was, in reality, fervent and faithful praying. Hannah, in the same vein as the Woman with the Hemorrhage and the Woman at the Well teaches the judgmental male in the story a thing or two.

That’s actually what makes faith Big.
Faith is Big when those who witness it are changed by it.
Eli was changed by Hannah’s faith, Jesus was changed by the faith of the woman at the well, the woman with the hemorrhage and the woman who birthed him, to name a few.
In this ever darkening world, where evil appears to be gaining a terrifying foothold, we must---we absolutely must--- have a faith that is so Big people are changed by it.
We need to have a faith so big that when people see us negotiate the changes and chances of this world—like the horror three years ago that was Sandy Hook, the continued horrors of Ferguson, Baltimore and Mother Emmanuel AME church and now the new world war we appear to be embroiled in most recently acted out in Beirut, Paris and Baghdad—we must have a faith so big that we face the encroachment of darkness, evil and fear with grace, dignity and hope in the promise of a new life, a new Jerusalem, a world where the mighty are brought low and the low are lifted high.
We need to have a faith so big that our very being can’t contain it.
We need to have so big, it spills over onto all those we encounter.
A faith so big it can’t help but be shared.
 So welcome to this season of pre-Advent, the season of expectation, the season of apocalypse, the season when Big Faith comes to us in the unexpected person of a peasant baby who turns everything, from that magnificent temple in Jerusalem to the cafes of Paris, the dust, dirt and grime of refugee camps, the inner cities of Baltimore, Chicago, St Louis and Buffalo to you and to me, inside out, upside down and finally the right side up that is the world God envisioned and we achieve in God’s name.
Amen.