The beginning of the birth pangs

All Saints’, Dorval

Remembrance Sunday (Proper 28), Year B

November 14, 2021

The CREDO speaker, the Very Rev’d Miguelina Espinal Howell, with her family

In September of 2019, I attended a session of CREDO, a conference for Episcopal clergy, in North Carolina. On the first day, one of the presenters told a portion of her own life story in some detail, a story I now share with you with her permission.

She described the struggles she and her husband had gone through to have children, and how after years of heartbreaking and exhausting fertility treatments, they had chosen to adopt two little boys through the foster care system. With their lives newly full of the joyful chaos of parenting two toddlers, they then discovered that – surprise! – they were pregnant, too. And, despite all the odds, and repeated medical crises that threatened both the pregnancy and her life, this one stuck, and she delivered her third son, her healthy miracle baby.

There were many smiles and sighs of satisfaction around the room as the speaker wrapped up her story. But as she took a sip from her water glass and prepared to move on to the next section of her presentation, I met the eyes of one of my fellow attendees sitting across the table. This colleague and I had known each other for years, and I was well aware that after getting pregnant over and over again and never sustaining a pregnancy past nine weeks, she and her husband had recently accepted, given their ages, that they were never going to become parents through the “traditional” process.

“That was a lot to listen to for someone with your history,” I said. “Are you OK?”

She assured me that she was, and thanked me for my concern, and we went on listening as the speaker connected the story she had told to her experience of God calling her and working in her life.

But this experience is representative of both the power and the danger of telling stories like those of Hannah, in our scriptures and in any context where we are talking how God acts in human lives. Hannah’s happy ending, and the song she sings to celebrate it, is powerful. She joyfully welcomes her miracle baby, whom she then dedicates to God to fulfill his prophetic destiny within the history of Israel. There are many sermons that can be preached about the meaning of these events. And yet always present in the background are those hearers who have faced the same heartache as Hannah, uttered the same desperate prayers, and have watched as those prayers go unheard, year after year, until it is too late, and they know that they will never sing the victory song.

The process of having children – or trying to have children – is one of the experiences most widely shared by the human race, and also one of those over which, despite huge advances in medical science, we have the least control. We don’t know when it will happen, or whether the process will be simple or complex. We don’t know whether our children – if we conceive them – will be healthy, or whether they’ll share the traits that we particularly like in ourselves or those we particularly dislike. We don’t know what it will be like to raise them, or what path they will choose as they grow up into independence of us and make their own way into life.

As many of you know, in addition to being a priest I’m also a birth doula, and last weekend I attended the birth of the first actual clients I’ve had in Montreal. The details are not mine to share, but suffice it to say that there were many moments when my role was to acknowledge – as I do with everyone to whom I talk about birth – that there was no way of knowing what was going to happen, or how long it was going to take, but that I (or my backup) would be there to support them, no matter what.

And so my ears perked up at the last line of today’s Gospel reading, as well, when Jesus uses another obstetric image to describe the crises that he is prophesying. “This is but the beginning of the birth pangs,” he says.

Indeed, today we hear only the first eight verses of the chapter; it goes on for another 28 verses, in which Jesus foretells persecution, and the destruction of the Second Temple with the ruinous wars that accompany it; promises the return of the Son of Man; and enjoins his listeners to be ever-watchful and keep awake. But even the rest of the chapter is only hints and sketches. As Jesus acknowledges elsewhere, only the Father knows the day and the hour, not even the Son. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.

It’s a cliché by now to say that between COVID, climate change, and all the other interlocking crises in the world, it feels like we are living in the end times. Whether that is more true for us than for all the other humans throughout the past several thousand years who have felt that they were living in the end times, is impossible to say. Certainly those followers of Jesus who took him literally when he said, “this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place,” were disappointed.

And we have a very understandable human impulse to want to know the end of the story. We want to be assured that everything will work out in the end, that the desperately wanted child will be born and will have a divine destiny, that we will be able to sing a triumphant song exulting over our enemies and rejoicing in God’s deliverance.

I believe with all my heart that we will, ultimately, be able to sing that song: but it may not look like what we hope for, or on the timeline we expect.

The assurance that God does give us is the same one that I give my doula clients: that God will be with us, no matter what. Even when this is only the beginning of the birth pangs, and the labour may be long and arduous. And, conversely, even when the birth pangs of a long and arduous labour are in fact the thing we most fervently desire, and are being denied for reasons we cannot begin to understand.

After all, in the reading from I Samuel, the moment when Hannah’s “countenance was sad no longer,” is not when Samuel, her miracle baby, is born; but rather after she has poured out her heart to the Lord and has been heard, and had her prayer affirmed by Eli. She is comforted, and goes back to her quarters and eats and drinks with her husband. She knows that God is with her, no matter the outcome of her prayers.

Jesus reassures us, even in the midst of wars and rumours of wars, “Do not be alarmed.” And the writer of Hebrews reminds us that God is in solidarity with us, now and always, through the priesthood of Christ:

Therefore, my friends, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh), and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful.

He who has promised is faithful. We stand at the beginning of the story, not knowing how it will go, not knowing whether our much-desired outcome will come to pass, not knowing how long it will take or how much pain we will have to bear to get there. But God is faithful, and will be with us in every moment, until that yet-unimaginable moment when we sing our song of victory.

Amen.