Hannah: A Heart That Prays

1 Samuel 1:1–20; 2:1–2

Introduction: A Story That Begins in Pain, Not Answers

Before Hannah ever prays, her life is already complicated.

She is married to a man named Elkanah, who loves her deeply. Scripture goes out of its way to tell us that. But love, as Hannah will learn, does not always fix what hurts the most.

Hannah cannot have children.

In the ancient world, that reality carried a weight we struggle to fully imagine. It wasn’t just grief—it was identity. It shaped how a woman was viewed, how secure she felt, and how she understood her place in the family and in the world.

After years without a child, a second wife enters the picture. Peninnah. Jewish tradition tells us that this was not unusual—and some rabbinic commentators even suggest that Hannah herself may have encouraged Elkanah to take another wife, much like Sarah once did with Hagar, hoping that somehow God might act through sacrifice and faithfulness.

But if Hannah hoped this would bring relief, it did not.

Peninnah has children—many of them—and she does not let Hannah forget it. Scripture tells us she provokes her “year after year.” What should have been a private sorrow becomes public humiliation. Even worship seasons reopen the wound.

Every year, the family travels to Shiloh to worship. And every year, Hannah’s pain goes with her.

Shiloh isn’t just another town on the map. Before Jerusalem, before the Temple, Shiloh was the center of Israel’s worship life. It was a town about 18 miles north of Jerusalem and is where Joshua established the Tabernacle and the center of Jewish worship when the Israelites first entered the promised land. It’s the place where people came believing that God would meet them.

So this journey isn’t casual devotion. It’s faithfulness. It’s obedience. And it means that Hannah is bringing her deepest pain into the most sacred space she knows.

Elkanah tries to help. He gives Hannah extra portions of the sacrifice. He reassures her of his love. And then he says something that sounds kind, but lands hollow: “Am I not more to you than ten sons?”

It’s a reminder that sometimes even the people who love us most don’t know how to speak into our pain.

Scripture tells us that one year at Shiloh, Hannah reaches her breaking point. She weeps. She stops eating. And then she does something that changes everything.

She prays.

Not loudly. Not formally. Not in a way anyone expects. Her lips move, but no sound comes out. It is prayer stripped of performance.

And it is misunderstood.

Eli, the priest, sees her and assumes she is drunk. In the very place meant for encounter with God, Hannah is judged instead.

But she explains herself. She names her pain. She says, “I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord.”

And God hears her.

Jewish scholar Rabbi Joel Seltzer calls Hannah “a powerful paradigm of prayer,” especially during the holiest days of the Jewish year and he asks a question that feels uncomfortably relevant:

Are we still willing to pray with that kind of raw vulnerability?

Or have we become too restrained, too self-conscious, too careful?

Prayer Was Never Meant to Be Polished

Before Hannah’s prayer is misunderstood, before it is judged, before it is even answered, it teaches us something essential about what prayer is meant to be.

Prayer was never meant to be polished —but it was always meant to be honest.

And that distinction matters, especially for us as Methodists. Because we are a people shaped by liturgy.

• We pray written prayers.
• We confess together.
• We come to the table with set words spoken again and again.

And those things are not weaknesses. They are gifts. Liturgy gives us language when we don’t have our own.

It gives us rhythm when our lives feel scattered and it holds us steady when our faith feels fragile, but liturgy was never meant to replace the heart — it was meant to carry it.

Hannah helps us see that clearly.

When Hannah goes to the house of the Lord, she is not rejecting worship through the way she behaves rather she is participating fully in it. She makes the pilgrimage, she brings the offering and she shows up year after year, even when worship is painful.

That’s important to notice because Hannah does not abandon the gathered life of faith because she is hurting. She leans into it — even when it costs her and within that sacred space, Hannah does something deeply personal.

She prays, not as a public act, not as a ritual moment but as a direct, honest pouring out of her soul before God. This is not a rejection of liturgy — it is the fulfillment of it. Because the purpose of worship has never been performance; it has always been about orienting our hearts toward God and offering ourselves honestly before Him.

Jewish commentators noticed this long before Christians did. They paid close attention to the detail that Hannah “spoke in her heart.” Her lips moved, but no sound came out. From this, they taught that prayer begins not with correct words, but with kavanah — the intention and direction of the heart.

That insight actually lines up beautifully with Wesleyan theology.

John Wesley never believed prayer was about eloquence. He believed prayer was about sincerity. About grace meeting us where we are and drawing us toward holiness.

Hannah pours out her soul. She does not organize her grief. She does not translate it into theological language. She brings her pain unfiltered into the presence of God.

And here’s the key: God is not confused by that.

• God does not need us to be articulate before He can be attentive.
• God does not need us to be calm before He can be compassionate.

Hannah’s prayer reminds us that personal prayer and communal worship are not opposites — they are partners.

• Liturgy shapes us.
• But honesty fills it with life.

Without liturgy, prayer can become untethered. Without honesty, liturgy can become hollow.

Hannah shows us what happens when the two meet. She stands in a sacred place, shaped by tradition, and prays from a heart that is breaking.

And God hears her.

That matters for us. Because some Sundays, the words of the liturgy will carry us. And some Sundays, our own words — or even our tears — will. But in both cases, the prayer that God receives is the prayer that comes honestly.

Hannah teaches us that prayer is not about having the right form — it’s about trusting that God is close enough to receive whatever we bring.

• Before Hannah ever teaches us about judgment…
• before she teaches us about waiting…
• before she teaches us about praise…

she teaches us this: God does not ask us to come composed, God asks us to come real.

And that truth is not a threat to our worship — it is the reason our worship matters at all.

Why We Struggle to Pray This Way

If prayer was always meant to be honest—if God invites us to bring our real selves before Him—then an important question remains:

Why is it so hard for us to pray this way? Because honesty makes us vulnerable and vulnerability always feels risky.

Most of us did not learn how to pray in moments of deep pain—we learned how to pray in public. We learned how prayer sounds long before we learned how prayer feels. We absorbed patterns. Language. Tone. Posture.

And none of that is bad, but over time, something subtle happens. Prayer slowly shifts from relationship to presentation. From encounter to performance. From honesty to management. We begin to pray in ways that feel appropriate rather than ways that feel true.

• We learn how to keep our emotions measured.
• How to avoid saying too much.
• How to keep things from getting uncomfortable.

And so, when life hurts deeply—when grief lingers, when prayers go unanswered, when shame or disappointment settles in—we don’t stop praying. We just start editing.

• We filter our words.
• We generalize our pain.
• We keep our prayers safe.

Hannah reminds us how unnatural that instinct really is.

Her prayer doesn’t emerge from comfort—it emerges from desperation. She is not trying to sound faithful. She is trying to survive. And in that place, there is no energy left for performance. But many of us never let ourselves get there with God because we’re afraid of what honesty might uncover.

• What if we say the wrong thing?
• What if we admit doubt?
• What if our prayer sounds angry, messy, or incomplete?

So we substitute sincerity with control.

Rabbi Joel Seltzer asks whether we have become too restrained, too self-conscious to pray honestly—and that question lands because it names something real in us. Not a lack of faith, but a fear of exposure. We fear being seen—by others, and sometimes even by God.

Yet Scripture consistently tells us that God already knows what is in us. Prayer is not a way for us to tell God things that will surprise him, it is a means of grace where we can commune with our Creator in a very real way.

That’s why Hannah doesn’t pray the way she does because she lacks faith. She prays that way because she trusts God enough to stop hiding.

And that’s often where we struggle.

We want prayer to reassure us before it unsettles us. We want it to soothe us before it exposes us.

But honest prayer often does the opposite. It names what we’ve been avoiding. It brings into the open what we’ve kept buried and that’s why sometimes instead of comforting us, prayer feels uncomfortable. And yet, that discomfort is often the doorway to healing.

Hannah shows us that prayer does not begin with strength—it begins with truth. And truth, when spoken in God’s presence, does not push Him away. It draws Him near.

So if prayer feels hard, it may not be because your faith is weak. It may be because you’re standing on the edge of honesty and God is inviting you to step forward.

Scripture doesn’t leave us guessing about how God wants us to pray.

In the letter to the Hebrews, we’re given a remarkable invitation—one that assumes honesty, not polish; courage, not composure.

Hebrews 4:16 says:

“Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”

Notice what we’re invited to approach:

• Not a throne of judgment.
• Not a throne of disappointment.
• A throne of grace!

And notice how we’re told to come.

• Not cautiously.
• Not timidly.
• Not once we have the right words.

Boldly.

That word doesn’t mean loud or demanding. It means with freedom of speech. With openness. Without fear of being turned away.

Hebrews assumes something Hannah already knew intuitively—that the God who invites us to pray is not waiting to correct our tone, but ready to meet our need.

• We are not instructed to come once we’ve calmed down.
• We are not told to come after we’ve sorted ourselves out.
• We are told to come in time of need.

That means the very moments when prayer feels hardest are often the moments when prayer is most welcome. So if you’ve been holding back—editing your prayers, softening your words, managing your emotions—Scripture gives you permission to stop. God is not asking you to be impressive. God is inviting you to be honest. And that invitation prepares us to hear what happens next in Hannah’s story—because when people come boldly before God, it sometimes makes others uncomfortable.

The Danger of Judgment

This is where Eli enters the story.

Hannah is praying as honestly as she knows how. She has already done what Scripture invites us to do — she has come boldly, openly, without disguise. Her prayer is quiet but intense. Her posture is unguarded. Her grief is visible and it is misunderstood.

Eli watches her lips move. He notices that her prayer doesn’t look the way prayer is supposed to look. And instead of asking what is happening in her heart, he draws a conclusion. He assumes she is drunk.

This is one of those small details that we shouldn’t overlook — not because Eli is cruel, but because he is familiar. He is the priest. He is the one who knows the rhythms of worship. He knows what prayer usually looks like and when Hannah’s prayer doesn’t fit the pattern, he mislabels it.

You see, Eli’s mistake isn’t noticing something unusual, it’s interpreting without listening. He evaluated someone’s outward expression without any curiosity about the inward reality.

And that instinct didn’t disappear with Eli, it still shows up wherever faith becomes visible.

Sometimes we assume the people around us are more settled than they really are. They appear more confident more certain, more at peace. And quietly, we begin to believe that everyone else must have figured something out that we’re still working through.

So we learn how to look composed. We learn the rhythms. We learn when to stand and when to sit.

But Hannah’s story tells a different truth; that even in sacred spaces — maybe even especially in sacred spaces — people bring longings that are unresolved, prayers that feel unfinished, and questions that don’t yet have answers.

Hannah is not an outsider to worship. She is deeply faithful, she shows up year after year and still, her prayer is misunderstood.

Which tells us something important: faithfulness does not eliminate struggle. It simply brings it into the presence of God.

Eli represents a temptation that lives in all religious communities — the temptation to assume that outward order reflects inward clarity, but Scripture keeps pulling that assumption apart. Because what God sees is not what fits the pattern, but what is poured out honestly.

What is most impressive is that Hannah does not respond to Eli with anger or defensiveness. She explains herself plainly and names what is happening inside her.

“I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord.”

That sentence changes everything because it reveals that what looked improper was actually devotion. What looked disordered was actually trust and what looked wrong was actually prayer at its deepest level.

And when Eli finally listens — when judgment gave way to understanding — his posture changed.

That moment becomes a quiet lesson for the people of God in every generation.

• Be careful not to confuse appearance with arrival.
• Be careful not to assume that faith always feels settled.
• Be careful not to limit grace to what looks familiar.

Because the same grace that meets Hannah meets everyone who comes honestly — whether their prayer is confident or hesitant, polished or unfinished.

Remember what that verse we read in Hebrews tells us:

“Let us approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”

• Not because we are certain — but because God is gracious.
• Not because we have it together — but because we need mercy.

Hannah comes boldly not with answers, but with honesty and God does not reject her. Which means the safest place for real prayer — for unfinished faith, searching hearts, and unpolished trust — should be right here. Not because everyone has arrived but because God meets people in the middle of becoming.

And if Hannah’s story teaches us anything, it’s this:

• You don’t need to resolve everything before you pray.
• You don’t need to sound certain to be heard.
• You don’t need permission to bring what is real into God’s presence.

The throne is a throne of grace and the invitation is already open. God is already listening.

Conclusion

Hannah’s story doesn’t end where many stories would.

• It doesn’t end with her explaining herself to Eli.
• It doesn’t even end with her receiving what she prayed for.
• It ends with a quiet, holy truth: God heard her.

And

• It wasn’t because her prayer was eloquent.
• It wasn’t because it followed the expected form.
• It wasn’t because she knew how the story would turn out.

God heard her because she came honestly.

Hannah poured out her soul before the Lord, and Scripture tells us that God remembered her. That word—remembered—doesn’t mean God had forgotten. It means God acted in faithfulness. It means her prayer mattered. It means her honesty was received.

Later, Hannah will sing. Her song is confident and bold and full of praise. But that song is born out of tears. It is shaped by waiting. It rises from a prayer that was once barely whispered.

Which tells us something important.

• God does not wait for our faith to be fully formed before He listens.
• He does not require certainty before He responds.
• He does not need our prayers to be polished to be powerful.

He simply invites us to come.

And that invitation still stands.

• If your prayers feel incomplete…
• If your faith feels unfinished…
• If all you can do is bring what is real and trust God with the rest…

That is enough. Because the God who heard Hannah still hears prayers poured out in honesty still meets people in the middle of becoming and still responds to hearts that come without disguise.

So as we leave today, may we carry Hannah’s courage with us. Not the courage to have all the answers but the courage to pray anyway.

To pray boldly. To pray honestly.

To pray trusting that the throne we approach is, thanks to the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ, a throne of grace.