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—
if it had not been the Lord who was on
our side, when our enemies attacked us,
then they would have swallowed us up alive, when their anger
was kindled against us;
then the flood would have swept us away, the torrent would
have gone over us;
then over us would have gone the raging waters.
Blessed be the Lord, who has not given
us as prey to their teeth.
We have escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowlers;
the snare is broken, and we have escaped.
Our 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

wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. you're awesome, meghan, and such a gifted preacher (and person in general).
Posted by: Whitney | October 24, 2009 at 04:57 PM