Esther: A Story for our Time

I remember a Sunday School lesson about Queen Esther when I was a little girl. The message I got from it was that Esther got to be Queen because she was good and did what she was told. Reading the story of Esther as an adult I see that this is not really a story suitable for children. It is a story about women who are victimized by the men in their life and a story of racism putting at risk the lives of an entire people. 

The story of Esther starts out by telling us that the king held a party where the men of the kingdom drank heavily for seven days.  When he was drunk, the king started bragging about how beautiful Vashti, his wife was. “Is she really that beautiful?” the men asked. “I’ll prove it to you,” says King Ahasuerus. 

Vashti is commanded to come before the party-goers wearing her crown and nothing but her crown. Other passages in this short book of the bible talk about the robes people wore, but robes are conspicuously absent here. How else was the King to prove her beauty other than by demanding that she wear nothing when she appeared?

Vashti refuses to come before the men. What else can she do? Refusing to attend could mean her death. You risked your life if you went to the King without being invited. Imagine how much more dangerous it was to not appear when the King commands it. Not going might lead to Vashti’s death, but so might appearing naked before the men of the kingdom. Once the King sobers up, he won’t be happy and like a lot of tyrants into of blaming himself, he will blame Vashti.  The Queen chooses the option that allows her to keep her dignity. 

The King’s advisers tell him he must put Vashti aside for refusing the King’s command. Otherwise this deed of the Queen will be known by all women, causing them to look with contempt on their husbands and rebel against their demands. Perhaps, while he is still half drunk King Ahasuerus renounces Vashti as his wife. We are not told if she survives this renunciation, but just that the King begins to regret losing her. Meanwhile he has sent a letter throughout the Kingdom declaring that every man should be master in his own house. 

His advisors come up with a new plan to help the King get over his loss. They will gather the most beautiful virgins in the kingdom into the haram, woman who will undergo months of beauty treatments before being brought to the King’s bed. The King is to choose one of these virgins as his new wife. 

Now, lets be clear this book tells the story of vying for political power. One way to have influence was to get a family member into the royal household. Young women often understood this and were willing to offer themselves for the sake of their family, others were used as tools without regard for their happiness or their need to love and be loved. 

The virgins, after being taken to the King’s bed are taken to a after taken to a second haram where they stay for the rest of their lives. They never again go to the King again unless he remembered them and asks for them by name. Gone is the chance to have a home and family of her own. 

The orphaned Esther is taken into the haram and finds favor with the King. She becomes Queen, but her married life is nothing like we imagine. After a while the King loses interest. When Mordicai asks for her help to save the Jews she tells him that the King has not called for her in over a month. The King was willing to perpetuate injustice on an entire ethnic group for financial gain. The Jews in the Kingdom were to be killed.

The rest of the story is about how Esther finds the courage to go to the King and convince him to change his mind. It was not without risk, and we see her reluctance to go. She is afraid that it might end in her death. She asks her uncle Mordecai to get the people to fast and pray for her. 

The key message in this book is spoken by Mordecai. “Do not think that in the King’s palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another quarter, but you and your father’s family will perish. Who know? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.”  

As I thought of this story this past week I could see in it echoes of what is happening right now. It is a story of how heavy drinking leads to actions that one regrets. It is a story of young women being used and abused. It is a story of how a young woman finds the courage to act and stand against the power of those who have no principles. Esther did not have any real power of her own, but she did what was in her power to do. She did what she could and saved a whole people because of her courage. 

A message something like this was preached at Hope United Church on July 29th. We read the story in the bible of how King David takes another man's wife, and then arranges to have her husband killed before this message was preached. Please ignore any spelling and grammar mistakes. When I write books I hire an editor, but I am on my own for the messages written to share in church. 

Some time ago David Clendenin wrote an essay that caught my attention. It was called Befriending our Brokenness: Lessons from the life of Maurice Sendak.  

Sendak was born into a family of Polish Jewish immigrants and grew up in lower class Brooklyn. He was a sickly child, who spent many hours alone in bed drawing pictures. The Holocaust cast a terrible shadow of death upon his family. Growing up gay in that time and place was also very difficult. He said, “All I wanted was to be straight so my parents would be happy.”   

Sendak was lucky in many ways.  He lived with a partner he loved for 50 years. He earned international fame by writing books. One book in particular which many of you will have heard of:  Where the Wild Things Are.  

In spite of the huge success, and the praises and prizes he received, the happiness he knew in love, Sendak never got over the feeling that he was deeply flawed.  He said, people say awfully nice things, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re a stinky person inside. He said this feeling of being stinky stuck to him from childhood regardless of the success he enjoyed. 

The first time I read through the Old Testament I loved it. I loved it because it spoke of seriously flawed people, stinky people, that God was somehow still able to use. The hero’s of our faith were often not very heroic. This is certainly true for King David. 

The things that touched me as an adult were not stories that we tell to children. To children, we tell stories of how little David battled the mighty Goliath and won.  We might talk about how David was chosen even though he was the last person anyone but God would choose. With children we do not talk of how David stays home while sending his troops off to fight a war just because it was the spring of the year – the time when Kings go to war.  We do not talk about what it means to ravage another country.  We do not talk about how he plotted the death of a man whose wife he lusted after and made pregnant.  These parts of the biblical story are for adults.   

The bible is a book, which cannot be compared to other ancient books.  It does not follow the practice of ancient people who divinized their kings and sanitized their faults, presenting a picture of a king who was God-like.  Instead the bible invites us to see its characters as flawed people who make personal mistakes and live as part of a culture that is also flawed.  

We are not asked to see everything in the bible as happening because it was God’s will that it happen.  It was not God’s intent that people go to war just because it was spring and the time when Kings go to war.  It was not God’s design that David arrange the death of an honourable man after David sleeps with his wife and makes her pregnant.  The Bible presents the story as it is, the good, the bad, and the ugly and asks us to see in it a God who is at work to redeem and save in spite of human failure and sin.  

This is good news for some of us who grew up feeling very stinky. We love how God is able to take flawed and broken people and use our lives for good. 

If the bible told the story of super hero’s who never made a mistake and never said or did the wrong thing then the bible would not have the power it does to touch our lives and transform us.  But the story of how God can take flawed people and help them do great things in spite of their brokenness has the power to stir us to do greater things then we ever felt we were capable of.  This story has the power to help us go through the painful process of being reborn and finding a new identity as children of God who can make a difference in the world.   

In my ministry I have met many beautiful people that I would have liked to be more like.   It always came as a great surprise to find that a fair number of these physically and spiritually beautiful people do not have a positive self image. Some feel like stinky people. This feeling of stinkiness does not come from who they are today, but it comes from the experiences of childhood and youth that stuck to them like glue.    

In my life I’ve meet many difficult people. Some of those difficult people have even been in the church.  Many had a story of great wounding, a story that they often never tell to anyone else.  They try to tramp the pain down and keep it secret, but it has been my experience that the more people try to hide their story the more it comes out indirectly in words and actions that hurt other people. Their woundedness causes them to wound other people. 

Part of the hero’s quest that God calls us to, is a quest to learn to love the unique individual that God has created each one of us to be. Part of the hero’s quest is to work with the Spirit of God to heal those parts of us that are wounded and broken. We need to do this, not only for ourselves, but for those around us.  Wounded people help create other wounded people, and this sense of being a stinky person is passed down from one generation to another.    

There is sin in our world, and by that I mean that we do not always live in the way God intends every minute of the day.  We do not live always in the light of God’s love. No one does. Not me. Not you. Not biblical characters like David.  We all cause hurt in the world by the things we say and do.  When we recognize this we need to do what David did.  We need to confess our sin before God with all honesty and seriousness and open our hearts to the Spirit of God that we might receive power to change our lives. We need to try to make amends for what we have done that has brought hurt into the world.  

We are both sinners and the sinned against.  We have been wounded by our own sin and the sin of others, and in ways both intentional and unintentional we have wounded others. Some of the sin that wounded you and me has been brought into our lives by people we have never met. It comes to us through the generations, it flowed to us through our parents and grandparents who were wounded by the people in their lives. We can name some of the ways our lives have been warped and wounded, but other wounds lay beyond our ability to recognize and name them.  They have woven themselves so completely into the fabric of our lives that we are incapable of  recognizing how our lives have been warped.  

By grace we are saved through faith. We start there and recognize our need to open our hearts to God the healer who can be at work in us to make us a new creation, with an increased ability to bless and not wound the world around us. 

God has no perfect people to use to bless the world, no superhero’s who do everything just right. What God has is people like David, who when he was given the power of kingship misused it. What God has are people like you and me. We don’t always get it right and sometimes our own brokenness gets in the way of being a blessing in the world. However, if anything good is to happen it will be because people like us do it. 

The world is full of pain and hurt and we need to be God’s agents of healing light.  We need to be a place where the love of God meets the pain of the world to bring hope and healing. God is able to do miraculous things through the most unlikely of people. This is the story the bible tells us as it tells us the story of God at work through people like David. .  

God sees the reality of who are we. God sees those times we consciously sin against our brother or sister. God sees the brokenness we are blind to, but more important than that, God sees the beauty in each one of us, the ways we bless the world around us just by being alive in it, and the potential we have to be even more of a blessing. 

God thinks we are wonderful. Worth sending Jesus into the world to redeem. Worth sending the Holy Spirit to be our companion as we journey through life. Believe in this God who believes in you, open your hearts more fully to God’s spirit and let God help you become more fully the Hero of our Faith that God believes you can be. Amen.