Jeanette Renouf

My dear friends,

“Faith grows not only by what we receive, but by what we recognize.”*

We have been reading Hannah’s story. Today she keeps her promise to God and gives the son she so desperately wanted over to Eli to be raised in the temple. How heartbreaking that must have been for her. Samuel becomes, what in Hebrew literature is known as, the last honest judge, and he appoints David as king of Israel. David, who becomes the ancestor of the Messiah, Jesus.

As I reflect on Hannah’s story, I am reminded of how many women in the Bible moved the Biblical story forward by their actions. Very often their actions violated the laws of men, and they were judged to be bad or evil. God told Adam not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. God did not tell Eve. Perhaps it was her task to eat of the fruit and move the story forward out of the garden.

The mother of Moses went against Pharaoh’s edict and put her son in the Nile to be rescued by Pharaoh's daughter, who also went against her father’s edict and rescued this Hebrew baby boy.

Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz; Sarah, Hagar, and Isaac; Rebecca and her sons, Esau and Jacob; the stories go on and on. Even to Mary the mother of Jesus. How many people in her village would believe that this unmarried woman conceived a child and was still a virgin? Then to claim that he was a special child of God, the chosen one. Mary was yet another woman who gave up the son she loved. Those of us who have lost sons or daughters to illness, accident, murder, or war know the heartbreak of losing a child.

Jesus seemed to commend the women who broke the rules of the men: the woman at the well, the woman taken in adultery, the woman who anoints his feet, the woman who hemorrhaged and touched his tunic. Then we have Mary Magdalene, who again men have judged as evil, being the first to proclaim the risen Lord.

Perhaps it is time to reconsider the stories of some of these “bad” women in the Bible. We often say the Spirit acts in wondrous ways. Can we recognize the Spirit at work in the actions of these women who broke the rules?

“Faith is about making all things new. All things—not just a few.”

Peace and love,
Jeanette Renouf

*Quotations from Ladder to the Light; An Indigenous Elder’s Meditations on Hope and Courage by the Rt. Revd. Steven Charleston.