Something old, Somthing new

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.

And Purim is definitely a celebration, huge feasts, parties, and behavior in the synagogue that would be unheard of, and maybe even blasphemous, any other time of the year.  The cantors will sing the prayers to the tunes of popular songs and during the reading of the book of Esther itself, each time the reader comes to the name of the villain in the piece, Haman, the people boo and hiss and spin noisemakers so that his name will be blotted out and unheard.  Since Haman’s name comes up 54 times in the 10 chapters of Esther, it can be quite a loud and raucous reading.

Esther itself is a story of great importance of to the Jewish people, and it is a story of the importance of loyalty to your group and of the importance of being part of a group.

Which brought me back to my sermon on Isaiah 56:1-8, and I want you to listen not just to what it says, but to what Esther can tell us about its message:

 

 ^NRS Isaiah 56:1 Thus says the LORD: Maintain justice, and do what is right, for soon my salvation will come, and my deliverance be revealed. ² Happy is the mortal who does this, the one who holds it fast, who keeps the sabbath, not profaning it, and refrains from doing any evil. ³ Do not let the foreigner joined to the LORD say, "The LORD will surely separate me from his people"; and do not let the eunuch say, "I am just a dry tree." ⁴ For thus says the LORD: To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, ⁵ I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off. ⁶ And the foreigners who join themselves to the LORD, to minister to him, to love the name of the LORD, and to be his servants, all who keep the sabbath, and do not profane it, and hold fast my covenant -- ⁷ these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. ⁸ Thus says the Lord GOD, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, I will gather others to them besides those already gathered.¹

It’s a huge question in our lives:  Who’s in and who’s out?

Who are we and who is the stranger?  Who is the other? In the immortal words of the Firesign Theater, “Who am us, anyway?”

It seems like it is very important for us to draw lines, put up boundaries.

We love to feel like we are on the inside and we want to know who is on the outside.

Who was in and who was out was very important for the nation of Israel, and for a very good reason:  God said so.  If any group ever knew who was in and who was out it was the nation of Israel.  God said over and over, again and again, “stay away from the foreigners.”  In Exodus, in Leviticus, in Deuteronomy, in Joshua, in Judges, one thing was certain; they were supposed to stay away from foreigners.

The rules were just as clear about eunuchs, Deuteronomy 23:1 puts it as directly as possible: “No one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the LORD.”  There’s no doubt there what the rules are.

Yes, the people of Israel, especially their leaders, knew exactly who was supposed to be in and who was out.  And they knew if they clung to those rules, everything would be ok.

But, here in the post-exilic Jerusalem of third Isaiah, everything wasn’t ok and the priests knew why, it was because of the way foreign elements had gotten mixed in with the people during the exile to Babylon.  They knew that was where the trouble was and they knew how to fix it.

This text has a word for them.

That group has survived through all of history.  Today there seem to be just as many people who know who should be in the church and who shouldn’t.   They know who should do the work of the church and who shouldn’t.  They are always ready to show you this verse and that passage to prove to you why someone shouldn’t be a part of the church.  And they will explain to you how all the problems of the church come back to the church having allowed that person to join or to lead.

This text has a word for them.

And there is another group of people, a group that was also around in the time of Isaiah and that has also been with us in every age since.  They have had different names and different faces, but they have always been there.  They have heard God’s call, they have wanted to serve and they have been denied.  In the time of Isaiah they were the foreigners and the eunuchs.  In Paul’s time they were uncircumcised gentiles.  A hundred years ago, 75 years ago, 50 years ago they were women.  Today they are LGBT.

Whoever they are, this text has a word for them.

 In short, there have always been gatekeepers and there have always been people outside the gates; this text speaks to both of them.

The prophet starts out by establishing the authority behind what he is about to say.  He wants it to be absolutely clear that these are not his words.  This is not a lone voice crying in the wilderness, this is not a vision, this is not allegory.  No.  This is the word of God.  From the beginning we know, “thus says the Lord.”

What does the Lord say?  The text begins with a moral code and an eschatological vision.

The moral code is simple “maintain justice, do what is right.”  That’s it.  It almost sounds easy, doesn’t it?  “Maintain justice, do what is right.”

Why do that?  Because soon God’s salvation will come and God’s deliverance will be revealed. 

And when that happens, whoever has done that, whoever has held fast to justice and right, whoever has kept faithful to God’s covenant, whoever has done this will be happy.  Whoever.  Period.  End of sentence.

At this point both the gatekeepers and the outsiders should be sitting up and taking notice.  It doesn’t say, “happy is the child of Israel who does this.”  It doesn’t say, “happy is the perfect specimen of manhood who does this.”  It says any mortal, it says any of us.

But then the gatekeepers jump up and say, “Wait just one minute there, that’s not what it means.  Sure it might sound like that’s what it means, but it also says it is for anybody who keeps God’s covenant and we’re really the only ones who can keep God’s covenant.  They don’t, they can’t, it’s for us. That’s what it really means.”

And what’s worse is the outsiders sit back and say, “you know, they’re probably right, it probably doesn’t mean us, the Bible does say in other places that we don’t belong.  It was a nice thought, though.  I thought I had a call, but I guess I was wrong.”

So God tries again.  And it is this next part that makes this passage unique, this is the only time, the only time in the entire Hebrew scripture where one word of God directly contradicts another word of God.

In verse 3, we hear the complaints and the resignation of the outsiders.  The foreigners are sure that they are going to be cut off from the people of God and the eunuchs know that, like a dry tree, they have no future.

But God takes those complaints and brushes them aside; God forbids them to give their complaints voice.  In the NRSV translation that I read it says, “Do not let the foreigner say…” but it can also be translated, “the foreigner must not say…”

God takes what they know and says, “No, that is not the way it has to be.”  For the eunuch the issue is the future.  Without children, who will remember them, who will raise monuments to them?   If they are not going to have children to keep their names and their works alive, why do anything now?  What’s the point? 

God tells them, “If you will have faith in me, then in my house I will do for you what the children you will never have would have done, and more.  In my house you will have a monument better than anything children could have done for you and the name that I will give you will last forever, it will never be forgotten.”

And to the foreigners who have always been told again and again that they have no place with the people of God, that no matter what they do, they will never really belong, their worship will never be right, and God will never accept their offerings.  To them, God says, “trust in me, believe in me, and I will accept your offerings and I will bring you to my holy mountain and you will be made joyful in my house.”

Why?  “Because,” God says, “my house shall be called a house of prayer for all people.” 

God takes everything that the gatekeepers and the outsiders have known to be true and turns it over.  God says that being in the church is not about what you have made it about.  It is not about being exactly the right people; it is not about making exactly the right sacrifices.  First, It is about justice, it is about mercy and it is about faith.  Everything else comes after.  Worship comes after justice, offerings come after mercy, and being the right person comes long after doing the right thing.

God says to the outsiders, you are welcome.  You are welcome as you are, you do not have to stop being who you are to be welcome in my house.  God calms their fears and answers their complaints, but that is not all that God does.  God also takes away all their excuses for not doing the work of the church.  No longer can the outsiders say, “There’s no point in my doing anything.  I’m still going to be an outsider, so why bother?”

God then turns back to the gatekeepers and reminds them that the only reason they are in is that God gathered them in.  When they were outcasts, when they were slaves, when they were in exile, God gathered them in.  God did not say to them,  “Once you get that outcast thing cleared up, call me.”  Or “when you stop being slaves, then we can talk.”  No God gathered them first.

In this text God says, “See, I gathered you in, now I am gathering the foreigners and the eunuchs, then I will gather more.”

So why is it so hard for them, for us, to understand that?  The God that gathered us in when we didn’t deserve it, will gather others in.  Others who, as far as we can tell, don’t belong; God will gather them in.

God is never done and wherever we point and say, “They don’t belong,” even if we are pointing at ourselves, God says, “I will gather them in.” 

When the church has problems, it is not because we are allowing too many or the wrong people to enter and to lead the church.

Love justice, do what is right and God will gather you in.

What I think Esther and Psalm 124, which we’ll sing in the following hymn, can bring to this is an answer to the question of “what’s so important about being in?”

It’s a question that I didn’t even think to ask when I wrote this sermon back in 2006, it’s just something that we assume, something that we know deep in our souls, that it’s better to be in than out.

I wrote this sermon at the end of my senior year of seminary, I had just come out and as a result was facing turmoil in my ordination process, and I was scared of leaving the safety and community of seminary.

I wanted to be reassured that even as I left that haven, God was going to welcome me in wherever I went.

What we can take from Esther’s story is what I’m looking for now.  And that is the reassurance that for those who are in, God will provide a way make it through, to survive, no matter how unlikely it may seem.  Esther, a most unlikely hero, saves her people from certain death. God will provide a way, but it almost certainly won’t be the way we expect. It is important to note that this isn’t triumphalism, Esther’s story doesn’t end with “and they all lived happily ever after.”  The Jews are still slaves and they are still in exile.  How God’s people make it through is on God’s terms and in God’s way, not in the way that the people would pick, but they will make it, and that’s what I need to hear today.

Psalm 124 reads,

If it had not been the Lord who was on our side—let Israel now say—

²if it had not been the Lord who was on our side, when our enemies attacked us,

³then they would have swallowed us up alive, when their anger was kindled against us;

⁴then the flood would have swept us away, the torrent would have gone over us;

⁵then over us would have gone the raging waters.

⁶Blessed be the Lord, who has not given us as prey to their teeth.

⁷We have escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken, and we have escaped.

⁸Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

 

Now that’s a seriously bad day.  Floods, enemies, kindled anger, raging waters, snares, but Israel made it through, because God was on their side

 

Esther and the Psalm tell us of the importance of being part of God’s in-group.  Isaiah tells us that all of us can be part of that group.

 

Together that’s some pretty tremendous good news.

 

Let all Israel now say:

 

Hallelujah and amen

 

 

 

Comments

[Whitney]

wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. you're awesome, meghan, and such a gifted preacher (and person in general).