This is a sermon on the book of Esther, to round out the St. Matt’s 2019 series on the Old Testament. Esther is a book that only appears once in the lectionary, and so this was a fun adventure: trying to tell the whole story, capture the attitude of the book, and address how we might approach its narrative today. To be honest, it is probably better to listen to the sermon than to read it. We read portions of Esther 3 & 4 to set the scene. The gospel lesson was Jesus’s last commandment from the Gospel of John: Love one another as I have loved you. (Featured Photo Details – its not mine)
For the past year, at St. Matt’s, we have been exploring the Old Testament as a library of sacred texts:
stories about how God covenanted with a people, walked with them, cared for them, learned to understand them, and remained faithful to them no matter what. We’ve been doing this to try and understand the remarkable collection of stories that make us who we are—and made Jesus who he was. These stories orient us to our past, to our future, and to our present—and to our neighbors in faith—by giving us a sense of the long and varied relationship between our God and the world.
This is the last Sunday that we’ll be with this series, and we have chosen to end with the story of Esther. This is a perfect place to end—perhaps because Esther is a book so unlike all the other books in the Old Testament.
You see, as it happened in the days of King Ahazerus of All Persia—the same Ahazerus who ruled over one hundred and twenty-seven provinces from India to Ethiopia–
as it happened, King Ahazerus had a banquet and got very drunk.
On the seventh day of his banquet, he decided that his queen needed to come to his feast and show herself off.
Queen Vashti said no: so Ahasuerus deposed her, took her crown, and sent out a decree to all of Persia demanding that all wives everywhere honor their husbands.
About a year later, though, when Ahazerus isn’t so mad anymore, he remembers what it’s like to have a queen–and that it was kinda nice–so his advisors tell him to find himself a new one from among all the virgins of the land.
Enter: all the virgins of the land–including Esther, the niece and adopted daughter of Mordecai, a Jew who has a role in the King’s secret police.
Esther is taken into the harem, and given one year of cosmetic treatments, so that she can spend just one night with the King, upon which he will decide whether or not she should be queen.
When it is her turn, Esther charms the king with humility and grace. Right then and there he makes her the queen, but she never reveals to him that she is a Jew.
Anyway—some other guy named Haman gets promoted, and now he’s Mordecai’s boss. He’s a bit full of himself, and has decided that everyone needs to bow before him and do obeisance.
Mordecai is like, nope, not gonna do that—I don’t bow to mere mortals.
This is we where began reading: Haman is so mad about this that he pays Ahasuerus to kill all of Mordecai’s people. So, Mordecai goes into mourning, putting on sack cloth and ashes and keening at the citadel gate.
Hearing this, Esther reaches out to him through an attendant, and they have this desperate exchange.
This is a deeply emotional and serious moment in a text that is otherwise quite exaggerated and comedic. For a moment, all the silliness of the dopey king and the hilariously egomaniacal courtier fall away as these two oppressed people try to save their lives and the lives of all their kindred.
Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for a time such as this.
It doesn’t stay serious for long, though: Esther calls an impossibly long fast, and afterward arrays herself in all her royal robes, and goes to the king while he is holding court.
Ahazerus seems to be in a good mood that day, so without drama, Esther invites him to a special banquet—just him, and his very powerful and special courtier, Haman.
Haman is so blind to his own desire for honor that he revels in the idea that she has invited only him to her special banquet for the king.
But on his way to the citadel, he passes Mordecai, still covered in dust and ashes at the gate. Mordecai annoys him so much that he goes home and summons his whole household, and I quote:
“recounted to them the splendor of his riches, the number of his sons, all the promotions with which the king had honored him, and how he alone had been invited to Queen Esther’s special banquet for the King—but, none of this means anything to him because Mordecai still exists.
So, he makes a five-story tall gallows for Mordecai to be hung on—five stories tall—and then happy bounces off to Esther’s banquet.
Once Haman arrives, and everyone has had plenty of wine, Esther makes her move. She reveals to the king that she is a Jew, and that Haman has bought the right to kill her and all her people.
Angry and horrified, the King stomps off. Haman rushes to Esther to plead for his life, but when the king returns and sees him groveling before Esther, he thinks that Haman is making an advance and he has him executed immediately—on the very gallows that Haman constructed for Mordecai!
Mordecai and Esther are honored, and they dramatically reverse the decree that Haman set down and the book ends with a letter from Esther detailing how this event is to be always honored as the festival of Purim.
It is quite a story….
Purim has been celebrated among Jewish communities for at least two thousand years, and so anything I say about this book today is not even going to scratch the surface.
It is confounding as Hebrew literature, because it is missing a number of the usual plot devices of its contemporary stories.
Esther and Mordecai are not particularly focused on keeping the law, nor do they worry about their diet or do any particularly Jewish prayer practices. The Hebrew version of this book never actually mentions the name of God.
Interpreters, very early on, noticed this. Some communities inserted more stories, to make it conform better, but other Rabbis said that Esther is actually a book about how God is at work even when we don’t see it happening.
The lack of God’s name in Esther invites us to see how God is between the lines of all things, and how God’s salvation can come from more than just dramatic miracles.
God’s apparent absence instead shows us that God also functions outside our own religious language.
This is also a satirical story—it’s a comedy about the absurdity of evil. It caricatures evil as ridiculous, drunk, and ultimately doomed.
For us, who in a world where events like this have actually occurred–to Jewish people and to many others—recognizing the comedy in the original text might feel highly problematic.
So I want to point out at least two ways in which the farce of this story does some very important work.
- In Jewish communities, and other communities experiencing attempts at annihilation, this comedic rendition of the absurdity of evil is a way of resisting destruction by insisting on enjoying one’s identity. Painting evil as absurd is a kind of resistance in and of itself.
- In Christian communities and other communities who have attempted to annihilate, it serves as a reminder that God is always with the oppressed, even if miracles do not occur, even no voice from heaven says, “I’m God and here I am”: God is still among the suffering, in their courage, in their resistance, in their identities and vocations, and working for their salvation.
And so when we approach the story of Esther, we can see it as an invitation: an invitation to see God where we might have assumed God was absent, an invitation to notice God working for the oppressed, and finally as an invitation to our own unique “moments such as these.”
Each of us will have a moment—or many—where our particular identities and experiences are exactly what is needed to stand up for what is right.
Esther stumbled upon her power, but she chose to take ahold of it. She could have chosen to remain hidden and safe, but she recognized that a life without her true identity, her true self, was no life at all.
When we see death, when we see destruction, when we see hate, when we see annihilation—like Esther, we will be called upon to speak up, to do something.
When those moments come, I pray that we choose the new commandment that Jesus left with us: that we choose to take up the power of love, that we choose to reveal our true identities as those who love one another—and the other. I pray that none of us will be asked to risk our lives, or face evil on this scale, but I pray that when the time comes, we will know that have become exactly who we are for moments such as these.
