Red Bison Faith: Akbaakuxshé: Wisdom Sermon Series 3, Esther, "Esther and Mordecai: A Template for Advocacy"

Wednesday, September 22, 2021

Wisdom Sermon Series 3, Esther, "Esther and Mordecai: A Template for Advocacy"

B Wisdom 3 Pilg 2021

Esther 3:8-9, 13; 4:9-16

September 19, 2021

In late winter of every year, our Jewish sisters and brothers, siblings and cousins celebrate the Feast of Purim. Purim is a celebration that remembers how tenuous life can be for Jews negotiating their identity, spiritual practices, and their loyalty to God as the only O/one who deserves their loyalty while foreign kings and their court demand their allegiance. When the Jews know that only the Living God is to be worshipped, what to do when another nation’s sovereign demands that worship and praise?

King Ahasuerus, known popularly in ancient history as King Xerxes, had been urged by one of his advisors, to purge the kingdom of an insolent people who are different. These people, in the practice of their faith, were regular law-breakers. Therefore, the king’s advisor reasoned, all the Jews deserve to die. King Ahasuerus consents. Gallows are built in preparation for the pogrom, the holocaust, which will take the life of every Jewish man, woman, and child. Unbeknownst to Ahasuerus, his own queen, the teenage Queen Esther is herself a Jew. Esther’s cousin, Mordecai, knowing how it has often gone for Jews in history, had advised her not to reveal her ethnicity. But now . . . but now the time calls for a teenage girl to risk her own life in service of her people.

Queen Esther, showing herself to be wise, has been watching Ahasuerus closely, and it is time for her to witness.

Let’s go back. The Book of Esther begins with King Ahasuerus throwing an opulent party, a huge party, lasting seven days, and he becomes drunk, two sheets to the wind. Queen Vashti also throws a party for the women in the palace. Near the end of the festivities, in his drunken stupor, King Ahasuerus wants to show off the beauty of his fair queen, Queen Vashti. He calls for her. She refuses to come. The insolence! What man is not lord of his own household? Ahasuerus sends out a decree to the whole land, “Let it be known that every man is to be the lord of his own household!” Patriarchy, firmly re-established, King Ahasuerus banishes Queen Vashti from the palace. He then calls for a beauty pageant throughout the kingdom looking for young virgins, ones who follow orders and keep their mouths shut. Long live the king! Who shall be the next queen?

Out of this imperial beauty pageant, Queen Esther is chosen. As she moves into the palace, her cousin, Mordecai, advises her not to share that she is a Jew. As always in Jewish storytelling, there are echoes of other stories in this tale. Abraham had passed off Sarah as his sister so that kings might curry his favor rather than off him to take Sarah as his own. And throughout so much of Jewish history, Jewish people like Daniel, Susannah, and Jeremiah are all trying to maintain Jewish identity while also using guile and cunning to remain alive when they are not the people in power. Even Jesus, in the Gospel of Mark, is regularly telling people not to reveal his identity and walking away from crowds, presumably so that the Romans do not see him as a threat to be executed.

As part of the story, Mordecai the Jew informs on two people who have a plot to kill off the king. But this act is largely forgotten until a pivotal time in the story. As a result, when Mordecai the Jew will not bow, confess, or kneel to the court advisor, Haman, as a way of recognizing that there is only one lord and sovereign, the Living God, Haman turns on the Jews. The last time Mordecai checked, Haman is not god, qualifying only as a false idol. When Haman hatches his plan to ask the king for the life of all the Jews, Mordecai now must turn to his teenage cousin in the palace and ask her to stay the execution of their people.

Mordecai sounds the alarm with ardent spiritual practice. He mourns in sackcloth and ashes, weeping, lamenting, and fasting. He calls his community to solidarity in this spiritual practice so that the plight of the Jews cannot be ignored.

Queen Esther takes notice and sends a servant out to her cousin to learn why all the commotion. Nobody in sackcloth and ashes was allowed to enter the king’s gate. So Esther sends dress up clothes to Mordecai so that he may be presentable and come to meet her in the gates of power. Mordecai will not leave his place among his people in weeping, lamenting, fasting, and morning. He refuses to give up solidarity for a power trip.[1] Queen Esther therefore comes to him by sending out her servant to greet him where he is, in the public square.

Mordecai sends word back to Queen Esther that the life of all her people is at risk and asks that she might intercede with the king.

Let me make clear what Esther is asked to do here. If she walks in on the king when he has not already asked for her, the king, has every right to execute her. Her execution would be the most likely outcome of her insolence. The only exception would be if King Ahasuerus extends to her the royal scepter almost as an extension of grace for an insolent, unforgiveable crime. And Queen Vashti has made it unlikely that the king would extend such grace. It is almost certain she will be executed.

Mordecai is asking her to risk losing her life. Mordecai reminds her that the salvation of the Jews may come from a different quarter, but, as the result of her unwillingness to come forward in courage, it will not go well for her and her family. Mordecai’s message to Esther ends with the powerful words, “Perhaps you have come to your place in the palace, for such a time as this.”

Upon hearing these words, Queen Esther asks her cousin to call all the Jewish people to a formal fast and she calls all of her servants in the palace to fast. The fasting seals all of them together in solidarity and heightens everyone’s awareness of what is at stake. The teenage girl, in courage, will risk her life for her people.

The courage of Esther is only surpassed by her wisdom. She does not throw caution to the wind and foolishly enter without reading the room. Although the king says when she first enters that he will give her up to half of the kingdom, Queen Esther knows that her request requires more than his word. Her request requires his commitment. Her first request is not to save the Jews. She enters the room with a request to throw a party for King Ahasuerus. Of course he consents. The story shares the detail that while King Ahasuerus was drinking wine, in the midst of the party, when he bestows again his pledge that Esther can have anything, even to half of his kingdom. Once endeared to the king, Queen Esther uses her relational ties. Does her life matter to the king? Of course it does. She has taken pains to throw a party for him. Then she asks for the lives of her people. She references all of this as not an affront to her but as something that could damage to the king and cause him dishonor. Knowing how much the king’s own honor matters to him, Queen Esther has read the room correctly.

When the king, now enraged, asks who has put the queen in danger, her people in danger, and shown their insolence in insulting and damaging the king’s honor, Esther tells the king that the perpetrator is his trusted counselor Haman. In her observation, wisdom, and planning, Esther has moved the most powerful person in the Persian Empire to get him to do her bidding.

Always under threat in a foreign land, the Jewish people escape a pogrom, a holocaust—this time.

As I thought about the advocacy I was a part of this week, I realized that the behavior of Mordecai and Esther is a blueprint for how we seek to find solidarity with and advocate for the most vulnerable. We are at a time in our nation’s history with issues like climate change, immigration, racism, and the way to organize around them. Let me make it clear. Both Mordecai and Esther risk their lives in ways that may seem foolish to outsiders. That is often what courage looks like to people who stand outside a struggle.

Here is what I also see in their advocacy. Mordecai remains in solidarity with his people and calls all of his people to solidarity and spiritual practice to recognize how dire their reality is. He will not dress it up. He will not be proper. Rather, he calls his relational power to come to him, to observe his reality, outside the halls of power. He then challenges that relational power to remember, even with her own life in danger, that this is an opportunity, now is the time, to bring salvation to all the Jewish people. Esther observes her reality and discerns how to move in a way that will gain her an audience with power. She discerns what is the currency of current power, and discerns the time and place to make her ask and how to make that ask in a way that is relational and implicates power in the ask she makes.

These were not intellectual exercises for the Jewish people. In a world where the Jews were often the conquered people in the ancient Near East, these stories were told as a way for people to remember their courageous ancestors, retain their faith integrity, and chart a path that might not only help their people survive but thrive when they were not the ones in power. At a time when we might feel like we have little access to hearings that go on in Lansing and feel defeated when hearings are shut down at the last minute or we feel little connection with the bartering and bargaining with billionaires in Washington, the story of Esther is one that reminds us that to be faithful we must find ways to be in solidarity with the suffering, challenge the powerful, and use our full observation, wisdom, and discernment of how we engage the powerful to midwife survival and even thriving in a world where life and death hang in the balance for so many people. Just this past week an immigration alert went out that over 10,000 Haitian refugees are sleeping in makeshift camps in Del Rio, Texas, having recently crossed the U.S. southern border. Over 10,000.

The U.S. deported some 86 Haitian asylum seekers Wednesday, including families and children under the age of 3.

In a statement, Guerline Jozef, the co-founder of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, said, “We are in utter disbelief … Hours after the 7.2 magnitude earthquake, President Joe Biden released a statement saying that the United States was a 'friend' of Haiti. A 'friend' does not continuously inflict pain on another friend.”[2]

I know this is not what many of you came to hear on a Sunday. It is too hard. It is too much. It is one of the reasons I debate with Tracy whether I can stay in the church. I know folks feel overwhelmed. I am ever more aware that I am being asked to be more of a comforter and an entertainer while life and death hang in the balance. But if faith is not about the grist of life, life and death issues, issues found in the ancient story of Esther, where is wisdom to be found? Where is wisdom to be found? Amen.