I Samuel 1:21-28; 2:18-21, 26
“Keeping Our Promises”
December 30, 2012 - Sunday after Christmas

         Have you ever asked God for a parking space? There’s a video of an Israeli driver looking for a parking place in Tel Aviv. He drives around and around, getting more and more desperate. Then he stops, rolls back the sun roof and looks up to heaven. In Hebrew he says, “Good morning, our father in heaven. All I want is a parking space. If you give it to me, I will put on phylactery and tassels, I will keep kosher and observe the Sabbath, and I will be become a baal teshuva, a master of repentance, the whole package.” Bargaining with God, he was following a great Hebrew tradition.

         Our text this morning is the end of a bargain with God. At the beginning of I Samuel we meet Elkanah, a man with two wives. One of them, Peninnah, is making babies like a bunny. The other, Hannah, was childless. Peninnah taunted Hannah about this until she cried and didn’t even want to eat. So the next time they went to worship at the sanctuary in Shiloh, Hannah, like our Israeli driver, offered God a bargain.

         Chapter 1, verse 11 records the deal, “O Lord of hosts, if only you will look on the misery of your servant, and remember me, and not for­get your servant, but will give to your servant a male child, then I will set him before you as a nazirite until the day of his death. He shall drink neither wine nor intoxicants, and no razor shall touch his head.”

         Like the miller’s daughter promised Rumpelstiltskin her first-born daughter for his help in spinning gold out of straw, Hannah promised God her first-born son in return for relief from her shame and misery as a childless wife. And, like the miller’s daughter, we might expect Hannah to try and get out of her promise. In the video, our Israeli driver glanced down from his rash prayer and saw someone get in a car and pull out of a space just ahead. He turned back up to God and said, “Never mind, I can take care of this myself.”

         That Israeli just brushed his promise to God aside. The miller’s daughter escaped her promise to Rumpelstiltskin by guessing his name. But Hannah already knew God’s name. She addressed Him as “Lord of hosts,” and she didn’t dare break her promise when God made good and gave her a son.

         For the past four weeks leading up to Christmas we’ve seen how God kept the promises He made through His prophets by giving us His Son, Jesus. We celebrated that wonderful act of promise-keeping on Christmas, praising God for fulfilling His promises to save and refine and delight in and shepherd and comfort us. Now it’s time to consider whether we will keep our promises to God.

         As the text begins in verse 21, Hannah’s husband Elkanah had confirmed and taken Hannah’s promise as his own obligation. He meant to bring the little boy to the priest in the place where God was worshipped. Hannah bargained just a little more with Elkanah to have the child with her until he was weaned. Then in verse 24 she kept her promise and took him up to Shiloh, where the house of the Lord stood then.

         In verses 27 and 28 Hannah told Eli the priest that she had prayed for this boy, so now, “as long as he lives, he is given to the Lord,” which is what his name Samuel meant, “given to the Lord.”

         There are all sorts of parallels between Hannah and Mary the mother of Jesus, as our other reading from Luke shows today. Chapter 2 verse 26 says “the boy Samuel continued to grow both in stature and in favor with the Lord and with the people,” just like Luke 2:52 says Jesus “increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and with humanity.”

         The other major connection with Jesus is that, like Mary in Luke 1:46-55, at the beginning of I Samuel 2 Hannah sang a song of praise to God with many of the same themes as Mary’s song. She praised God for bringing down the proud and rich and for raising up and feeding the poor and the hungry.

         Hannah’s bargain turned out well. Should you and I start horse-trading with God? Make a few bargains and promises to get what we want? Like many theological questions, the answer is not simple, not just yes or no.

         Hannah’s promise began with faith in God’s promise. She promised to give back the son God promised her through Eli in verse 17. She approached God in faith that He is gracious. And in fulfilling her promise, there is no sense she is doing the Lord a favor. Instead she sings about the holiness and power of God, “There is no Holy One like the Lord; no one besides you; there is no rock like our God.” Her focus is not on what she does, but what God has done.

         Like Robert Frost’s lonely rider stopping by the woods on a snowy evening, you and I have promises to keep. But they are not a tool for getting what we want out of God. Like Hannah’s fulfillment of her promise, they are a way to acknowledge and celebrate and enjoy what God has done for us.

         Hannah didn’t lose Samuel when she gave him to God. Our text paints the sweetest picture of a mother’s constant love. She went up every year to visit him, taking a little coat she had made, presumably a bit larger each year as he grew. We hear tenderness in Hannah’s relationship with her first-born. And God gave her three more sons and two daughters. She kept her promise because God kept His promise and more.

         We don’t make and keep promises to God to wring special favors out of Him. We remember what He has done for us and make and keep promises to honor that fact. God’s best promise was to give us a Savior, and He more than kept His Word when Jesus came to live and die and rise again for us. That’s why we keep our promises.

         You and I have promises to keep. Some of the deepest and richest aspects of our lives revolve around faithfully keeping promises. You made, or your parents made for you, promises when you were baptized. When you become a church member, you stand before the congregation and make promises about being a faithful part of this body. You get married and offer solemn and precious vows to each other and to God. You bring your children to be baptized or dedicated, and like Hannah and Elkanah or Mary and Joseph you give your word to bring them up knowing the Lord.

         Other promises are key parts of our lives. You buy a house or go to college and you will likely make a commitment to pay that money back over many years. You get a job and promise to abide by the rules of your employer or the ethical standards of your profession. You join any sort of club or organization and agree to its by-laws. We have promises to keep.

         All our promises are ultimately based, like Hannah’s, on God’s faithful keeping of His promises. You and I don’t always keep our promises. We will fail our Lord. We will fail our spouse. We may fail our children, our church, our friends, our employers, every­one. Our own strength of will and character is not enough to let us keep every promise we make, no matter how hard we try.

         The answer is not to swear off promises, like some people I’ve known, making a promise not to make promises. No the answer is to always make and seek to keep our promises in the light of God’s promises. We will fail. But the gracious and constant promise of God is to forgive us in the grace of Jesus Christ. And as we read from Colossians 3:13 this morning, we also ought to forgive each other when promises are broken.

         Kids used to have paper routes. Some of my friends did. They made a promise to get up early every day of the week, rain or shine, school or holiday, and get papers out on the driveways or doorsteps of their customers. If you were a parent of one of these children, you did your best to make it his or her responsibility. You wanted your child to learn to keep these sorts of commitments.

         But no kid could do a paper route without a parent. You show her how to set the alarm to get up early. When she sleeps through it, you go in and wake her up. You provide the bicycle she rides or the shoes she walks in to make deliveries.

         And some mornings when your young newspaper entrepreneur is not well or it’s raining hard or very cold, you get up yourself and drive her to make deliveries. When she misses a house and has gone to school and an angry customer phones, you run over to deliver the missed paper. And when she’s really sick or on a camping trip or a youth group event or a sleepover, guess where you are? Out at 5:00 a.m. dropping papers on doorsteps, doing your child’s job for her, keeping her promise.

         That’s how God is with us. We make our promises, our sacred vows, and try to do our very best to keep them. But in the end, we absolutely depend on His grace. All our promises rely on the gracious truth that Jesus came to live a holy and perfect life, in favor with God and humanity, and to keep all those promises for us when we can’t.

         Like Hannah, let’s not be afraid to make good, holy, thoughtful promises. As a new year comes on, you may be considering some resolutions, which are actually promises to yourself and to the Lord. Go ahead and make them. Make some good ones, ones you really want and plan to keep. Promise to eat less and lose some weight, to spend less and save more, to watch less television and read a good book.

         Even better, promise to spend more time in prayer, to join in “Around the Word in 90 Days” and read the greatest chapters of the Bible, to increase what you give to your church, or to volunteer to serve people in need. Make some sincere and sacred promises before the Lord. But please don’t see them as bargains with God to get what you want. Don’t be ready to brush them aside when things go well or to give them up in frustration when things turn sour.

         Make and keep your promises in thanks and praise to Him for how He’s kept His promises to you. First, renew and keep your covenant with the Lord to trust in and follow Jesus. Or if you never have, then make that basic and beautiful promise right now. Accept Jesus Christ as Savior and commit to being with Him, like Samuel, as long as you live. And He will be there, keeping His promise to forgive you and to strengthen you to keep your own promises.

         Review other promises you have made, at home, at work, and here in your church. Offer yourself again to the Lord, ready to keep your word and serve Him in whatever way He asks. And the grace of Christ will always be there, keeping the Lord’s promise to be with you forever. He will turn the keeping of  your promises into joy and blessing, and, if you fail, He will keep His promises to you.

         That’s how it was for Hannah. She dared to make a promise founded on God’s promises, and the song that came out of it all began, “My heart exults in the Lord!” May you and I have the same daring to promise great things to God, because He has kept His great promises to us. As we do, may this coming new year be filled with the exultation of our discovery of just how great God is, that “there is no Holy One like the Lord.”

         Amen.

         Valley Covenant Church
         Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
         Copyright © 2012 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj