After she presents Samuel to the priest, she offers a prayer or song, one that seems to be a model for Mary's song/prayer known to many as the Magnificat. The same themes of reversal that Mary sings are found here. The power of the mighty is broken while the feeble are strengthened. Those who were full now struggle to find food while the hungry grow fat.
Jesus also speaks of reversal in his ministry, of the first being last, of sinners and prostitutes going into the kingdom ahead of the devout.
Oddly, despite the Bible regularly trumpeting this theme of reversal, religion seems most often to be focused on the status quo. In virtually every culture history has known, religion ends up a partner in maintaining the status quo. Despite the Bible's words on bringing down the powerful and lifting up the poor and oppressed, religion, including the Christian Church, very often becomes an ally with the rich and powerful, as well as an enemy of the poor and oppressed. Christian theologians once provided religious defenses of slavery. One esteemed theologian from my own Presbyterian seminary was still arguing that the Bible supported slavery years after the Civil War. More recently, the South African practice of apartheid was formally sanctioned by church theology.
It seems that there is a strong conserving tendency in the human creature's innate religiosity. But God's reign does not arrive via conserving, but via radical change, by everything being made new.
Just about every Sunday I pray, "Thy kingdom come..." But often it seems there is an unspoken caveat. "Just keep things pretty much as they are."
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