Family of Christ Presbyterian, September 27, 2009
Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22
Isaiah 56:1-8
Before
I start, I feel like I should give a short summary of the plot of the book of
Esther, for those of you who might need it.
Esther
takes place during the time of the Jewish exile to Babylon.
The
main characters of the story are the Persian king, Ahasuerus, who is sometimes also identified as Xerxes;
Vashti, the queen of Persia; Esther the beautiful young, orphaned Jewish woman;
Mordecai, Esther’s cousin who has been caring for her and who works in the
palace; and finally, the bad guy,
Haman, the prime minister.
The
book opens with the end of a 120 day long feast. The king, very drunk, orders his queen Vashti to come down
and show all of his drunk friends how beautiful his wife is.
Vashti,
being a sensible woman, refused.
Unfortunately for her this meant that she had to be banished from the
kingdom.
The
king then begins a search for a new queen, and after a twelve month process, he
chooses Esther.
Somewhere
during that time, Mordecai uncovers a plot against the king, which makes him
very popular with the king.
Every
thing seems to be turning out just fine until Haman enters the picture. Haman is a very proud man and very much
enjoys the power that comes with his office as prime minister.
Haman
even gives orders that when he goes riding through the town on his horse, everyone
he passes has to bow down before him.
Well,
Mordecai won’t bow to him, Mordecai won’t bow to anyone but God. This annoys Haman so much that he
decides not only to kill Mordecai, but to order the death of all the Jews in
Persia.
Mordecai
goes to Esther and asks her to speak to the king on behalf of the Jews, because
she may be their only hope to save they’re lives.
Esther
tells Mordecai that she can’t possibly do that, because no one could speak to
the king without his permission, and to try to do so meant death.
But Mordecai reminds her that she’s going to be killed, too,
and that maybe the whole reason she had become queen was to speak out at this
time.
I suppose that I have to admit
from the beginning that part of this sermon is recycled. I’m not recycling out
of laziness, but because this sermon has been very important to me, but has
never been quite right.
This all starts with a sermon on
Isaiah for my Preacher and the Poet class in seminary.
It was an ok sermon, but it wasn’t
quite what I wanted it to be. Our
professor Dr. Anna Carter –Florence called it “one of those great sermons you
read in books” which may sound like a good thing, but coming from Anna, really,
really wasn’t.
For Anna, preaching is always a
very personal experience. In fact, shortly after I graduated, her book Preaching
as Testimony was published.
For Anna, there wasn’t enough of
me in the sermon, it was too sterile. I wasn’t testifying.
For me too, there was something
missing, but I didn’t know what.
But since that time, I have kept wanting to go back to it and add
something to it that would make it work better, make it more complete.
The Bible is an amazing
thing. Every time you go to it,
every time you look in a different place, you find new ideas, new thoughts, new
challenges to what you thought you knew.
And sometimes, it gives you answers to questions you didn’t even know
how to ask.
I came into this week not
intending to recycle something that I had used before, but rather wanting to write
something new
So I diligently dug into the lectionary
texts for this week, and had to eliminate one immediately, as it turned out
that Dick preached on the gospel text about three weeks ago.
That left me with the Esther
passage you just heard, Psalm 124, and the end of James, and I’ve never been
very good with the Pastoral Epistisles.
From there I focused in on the Old
Testament passages, trying to see where they would lead me.
What I found in the Esther passage was a story of great importance to the nation of Israel; at the end of the passage you hear the origins of the annual Jewish Celebration of Purim.
