How We Got to This Place

Sermon

This Esther story has all the elements of a Hollywood blockbuster—palace intrigue, feisty women, steamy sex, political shenanigans, gruesome violence. Its only drawback is that it is also filled with so many names, relationships, and convoluted plot twists, it takes half an hour just to set up the situation. Not only that, but God doesn’t even get a mention in the book. I, however, have loved this story since I was a little girl. What’s not to love? A beautiful young woman courageously saves her people from annihilation. As an English major, I deeply appreciate its workmanship—irony, reversals, complex characters, parallel plots. In Jewish congregations, a short version is read as a melodrama every year during the festival of Purim, complete with booing and hissing when the name of Haman, the king’s evil counselor, is read. It’s part of the festival in which Jews celebrate coming through the pogroms and holocausts they have endured for generations, surviving by their wits and the skin of their collective teeth.

In the prequel I gave before I read the scripture lesson, I mentioned that Esther’s guardian, Mordecai, has incurred the wrath of her husband-the-king’s closest henchman. Mordecai won’t bow to Haman, so Haman pays a bribe to the king’s treasury to wipe out all Jews. As one does. In today’s lesson, Mordecai approaches Esther to save the Jews by appealing to her husband. Buried in all that Biblish is Esther’s response to Mordecai’s news, “So sorry to hear; let me know how all it turns out.” To which Mordecai snaps, “Don’t think you will escape, just because you’re queen. You were born a Jew, raised a Jew, and you will surely perish as a Jew.” Whether or not she personally acts, he tells her, deliverance will come to the Jews. Mordecai may have been scrupulous about not pronouncing the name of God, or maybe this is a folktale that isn’t Jewish in origin, but it is a theological statement when he tells her that in the passive voice: deliverance will come, rather than, “God will save.” In other words, God’s care is made concrete when humans act. And so, Mordecai says of Esther’s royal privilege, For such a time as this. She has a unique opportunity to act, to speak up for her people, because she has privilege. Rather than feeling guilty about it, or hiding behind it, he tells her, she must use this privilege as God’s agent.

Up to this point in the story, Esther has been a model wife for a king in the ancient world. She’s beautiful and memorable enough to a king, with a hundred concubines, for him to elevate her to queen. And now Mordecai asks her to step out of that role. You might remember there was a predecessor queen to Esther: Vashti. It was Vashti’s departure from the expectations of submissive womanhood that precipitated the cattle call for nubile young women that got Esther to the palace. Vashti’s crime was to object to being used as token of the king’s virility at his own birthday party. When she says, “Not tonight, dear,” the guests (all men) construe this as a threat to national security. If the king is not ruler in his own home, their wives might think they aren’t rulers in their homes. Vashti is banished, the equivalent of a death sentence. Esther has heeded that warning and knows the cost of a breach of protocol toward her husband: death.

She doesn’t exactly say “yes” to Mordecai, but she does ask for three days of communal fasting to come up with a plan. What ensues is a suspense-filled scene in the throne room as she approaches her husband to ask for a private dinner to discuss what’s on her mind. The king is happy to protect his little woman and accepts. Except Esther can’t quite say anything yet, so she asks for another dinner, but this time with Haman. You remember Haman. He’s trying to kill every Jew because one would not bow to him. At the second dinner, Esther reveals Haman is trying to kill her, along with all the Jews. The distraught king goes into the garden to think how to save his beloved and comes back to find Haman in an apparent assault attempt on the queen. He’s executed, the Jews are saved.

As a folktale, the king comes across as pleasure-driven, self-indulgent, and easily manipulated by his evil first minister. Vashti is drawn as a willful diva. Esther is typecast as the passive little woman, allowing men in authority over her to do as they wish. But Esther finally acts, and you have to believe she’s doing so under Vashti’s shadow. Vashti isn’t mentioned again after her banishment, but this masterful storyteller invites us to see the parallels between these two women’s stories. In the full arc of history, we are only a few years past the #MeToo movement, let alone the sexual misconduct scandals of national political figures. In the ancient world of this story, for Vashti to resist her husband was an act that reverberated shock waves through the empire. Esther’s intercession also ultimately had empire-wide reverberations, as the plan concocted to save the Jews results in revenge on their captors. But the parallel stories diverge on this point: Vashti flouted convention as a solitary player; Esther acted within the support of her community. Esther’s resistance is more calculated and more subtle than Vashti’s. She takes her time and charms the king and his minister like a Mata Hari. And she acts, not just on her own behalf, but for the sake of a people. Genocide is central to the narrative of Esther, but the subtext about women and their bodies cannot be ignored. And I think we can gain insight into our century’s narrative of women from this ancient tale.

Cindy S Lee in her book, Our Unforming, writes “Our suffering is and has always been collective, but we have lost sight of this truth in the church when we disconnect our faith from our responsibility to take care of the suffering and oppressed.” Like Esther hiding in the harem, avoiding the news of impending genocide. Lee quotes liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, who writes that, while our sorrows are deeply personal, they are also universal. Or, as MLK said, “Until all of us are free, none of us are free.” This is why Esther must act on behalf of her people. In the Korean church, suffering is expressed as han, specifically unresolved, unjust suffering. Han is suffering shared and experienced by a community. We tell stories like Esther’s to remind ourselves that, just as we do not suffer alone, neither do others with whom we. We have a part to play, just as Esther did, in sharing and alleviating the suffering of others. We are what makes concrete the goodness of God. Until humans decide to act, this story tells us, God’s goodness is unrevealed.

My husband, Scott, tells the story of meeting the parents of a young martyr named Rachel Corrie. Rachel was the 25-year-old woman from Olympia, Washington who in 2003 tried to save a Palestinian family’s house from being bulldozed by the Israeli military in the West Bank.  Wearing a florescent orange jacket, she was killed on the spot by a tractor doing demolition. Scott met her parents while he was pastor of the church in Ashland. What hit him the hardest was to hear Rachel’s mother say that, when she was raising her three tiny daughters, she had planned to keep a diary so she could write down some of the amazing things they said every day. But, like many mothers, she was so absorbed in the dailiness of life that she didn’t have the energy to do that with any regularity. One morning, though, when Rachel was two, she said something her mother just had to write down in her journal. Rachel asked, “Momma, is brave part of growing up?” There it is. Sometimes that kind of thing appears in a child from the beginning.

Maybe Vashti was a Rachel Corrie.  Maybe being courageous just came naturally to her.  It didn’t come naturally to Esther, but she had Vashti’s shadow to inspire her. In life, we explore and challenge our boundaries our whole life long. If you think you aren’t cut-out to stand up to tyranny, racism, child abuse, misogyny, the story of Esther says, “Think again.” How we got to this point is not so much not enough Vashtis, women standing up alone to say “no” to the abuses visited on them. Important as that is, what we need are more Esthers, more Rachel Corries, people acting in solidarity with others, on behalf of others. Rachel alone was mowed down, but she was not in Gaza alone; she went as part of the International Solidarity Movement. Esther did not act alone; the whole Jewish community suported her. Like Rachel facing the bulldozer alone, she faced Ahasuerus alone.  And like Rachel she was part of a community’s solidarity.

I want to encourage you not to believe that your only two choices are either “hope” or “hopeless.” There is something deeper and more powerful than either of those. When your actions are motivated by love, what you do is deeper and more powerful than either hope or hopelessness. Action motivated by love is not an exercise in spitting into the wind. Yes, I am aware that we are just days short of one of the most stressful presidential elections of most of our lives. So much is at stake, no matter how the vote tallies go. It may seem like this is mindless pap that I’m feeding you. But I’m telling you now, it’s time to prepare for life after the election, no matter who gets elected. For such a time as this.

Scott and I just saw the 2004 Tom Hanks movie, The Terminal. The movie’s premise is that a man from one of those tiny post-Soviet “Stan countries” is stranded in the airport, barred from entering the US as a tourist and unable to leave, because his country no longer exists, due to a coup that took place while his plane was in the air. Hanks’ character spends over a year in the terminal, waiting for the appropriate bureaucratic complications to be resolved. It’s a darling story of bravery, of relentlessly playing by the rules to defeat oppression. In the process, Hanks’ character makes friends, does good deeds, rights wrongs on behalf of vulnerable others. It struck me as a 21^st Century folktale of what Esther faced, without the genocide.

We as a church community are in a unique position to make a difference in our world, perhaps like Tom Hanks, perhaps like Jesus, who came to be an example of how to be Human for such a time as this. When you become your best Human, when you act out of love toward others, when you create beauty in the world, when you live with the smallest planetary footprint you can muster, you are as courageous as Vashti and Esther. Do those ordinary things you love to do. And do them because of love. Love for your family or neighbors or vulnerable others or God. Maybe you make music or art. Or tell the family stories to your grandchildren. Or pet sit for someone in the hospital. Or advocate for houseless people. Or refrain from over-consumption. Or cuddle newborns. Or listen to the tales of others. Do the things you know how to do, not just for yourself, but out of love for others, for the love of God. For such a time as this, now, more than ever.