Speaker 1: Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2: Hello. Hello. And welcome to church. We are so glad that you are here making a little space for Sunday rest or, you know, whatever day you happen to listen to this. Rabbi and theologian Abraham Heschel wrote, It must be remembered that the Sabbath is not an occasion for diversion or frivolity, not a day, and I love the specifics here, to shoot fireworks or to turn somersaults, but an opportunity to mend our tattered lives.
I mean, I just threw you right into the deep end there. How's that for an invitation to Sabbath rhythms? If we have not met, I'm Bobbie, and I am no longer spending a lot of time writing and editing our prayer book from a season like no other. So it's fun for me to shift gears and write sermons, a true love in my life. PS, by the way, thank you for embracing that little prayer book.
It's been so lovely to hear that you are reading prayers with your partner and taking them on bike rides to read by the river and even sending them to people that you love. If you haven't picked up the prayer book, you can do so from the church any time, any day of the week for about a month or so. And there is a big stack of those little books in the black mailbox by the entrance. Now, we are making our way through the Old Testament book of Esther. Not long ago, I heard the biblical scholar Amy Jill Levine say that to call the Hebrew scriptures old is wonderfully acceptable because old means fabulous.
Old is bedrock. Old is communal wisdom. Old is an antique that you use. So in honor of old being fabulous, I'm really digging the term Old Testament these days. I mean, we could use old wisdom.
Right? Well, last week in Esther chapter one, we found ourselves in an at an opulent banquet. In the setting was the ancient Persian Empire, modern day Iran. And the host, a king who rules to the base beat of party, party, party. And at the height of one such party, an inebriated king Xerxes calls for queen Vashti.
He summons her to don her royal crown and to parade before his guests, but she is not having it. Queen Vashti says no. And the plot roars to life when the king's advisors say that Vashti, she should vanish. This is the setup for a story that is described as fable and novel, carnival, comedy, and my personal favorite, burlesque. One of the debates about Esther is how a book with zero talk of God or ritual observance made it into the canon.
But the deeper I dive into Esther, the more I love its place in the ancient text. Esther is for you if you don't feel like God's presence is in obvious places in your life. And Esther is for you if you feel out of place in the world that runs counter to your values for justice and inclusion. And Esther is for you if you search for a way to celebrate after a season that honestly, like, nearly broke you. And the old is fabulous.
And through Esther, you are in the company of characters who don't always fit either. Today, are in Esther chapter two where we finally meet the names of the book and her cousin turned guardian, Mordecai. And this is a story where a couple of diaspora Jews rise to positions of power in the Persian palace thanks to beauty pageants and conspiracies and one woman's ability to win over every single person she meets. So if you take notes or you just really like good structure, your outline goes like this. Part one, girl interrupted.
Part two, beauty contest. Part three, hidden selves. And part four, no turning back. But before we dive in, as usual, let us pray. Please join me.
And we begin with a prayer of the Persian poet Rumi who said, Whatever you seek, you are that. Speaking of the scripture, we are copies. Speaking of divine beauty, we are the mirror. Loving God. As we take a moment to be still, we consider this question.
What do I seek today? Is it truth? Maybe some poetry? Is it wisdom? Solace?
An expanding compassion? A sense that, you know, I'm not alone? Our seeking is a holy endeavor and you Christ, you are with us on our searching path. So spirit, may we always reach for what is good and what is true and what is beautiful. And will you steady our steps and calm our hearts when we are tired and afraid.
Amen. In chapter two, some time has passed and new attendants surround the king. And they propose a search for a beautiful virgin to be made the new queen. And the plan is to put these women in the care of the king's eunuch, Hege, for beauty treatments. Then the king can, you know, he can just take his pick.
And the king is totally down with this pageant plan. And then the scene switches abruptly from the Persian palace to a Jewish home in the capital. So we begin in verse five. Now there was in the citadel of Susa a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin named Mordecai, son of Jair, the son of Shemi, the son of Kish, who had been carried into exile from Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon. Among those taken captive with Jehoiakim king of Judah, Mordecai had a cousin named Hadassah whom he had brought up because she had neither father nor mother.
This young woman, who was also known as Esther, had a lovely figure and was beautiful. Mordecai had taken her as his own daughter when her father and mother died. So let's talk about Mordecai, and then let's talk about Hadassah, aka Esther. Then let's talk about character formation in the face of life's limitations. So after Mordecai's name, we get this string of other names.
It's likely that the list is not factual but figurative. After all, if you take the list literally, Mordecai would be something like 115 years old. And the point of his genealogy is to indicate to the reader that Mordecai's Jewish family line is traced to, wait for it, King Saul himself. And Saul was the son of Kish. And when we meet the character Haman in chapter three, we'll face the fact that these men, Mordecai and Haman, are destined enemies.
Boo, Haman, as they'd shout at festival Purim. Now Mordecai doesn't enter the scene alone. Hey oh, there is a beautiful woman by his side. Esther is Mordecai's cousin, and he takes her under his guardianship because her parents are dead. So she's like a daughter to him.
But just to muddy the waters a bit here, some rabbis remark that daughter could actually be read as wife. And their point is to eliminate the improper presence of an unmarried woman in Mordecai's home. And here's the reality of the writing. It does have sexual vibe, which makes sense. This way of storytelling follows a genre known as harem intrigues or stories of high drama that take place in harems.
So let's picture what goes down. Esther's at home. You know, maybe she's just making an afternoon snack. I love an afternoon snack. Or she's doing some squats to keep up her figure or she's chatting with a neighbor over the fence and in walks Mordecai who says, Esther, honey, I need you to pack your bags.
I need you to use the beauty you were born with to get close to the king. It's what we need to do for our people. Her life is interrupted. But the little we know of Esther's background tells us that this is a person who knows something of interruption.
Speaker 1: Her parents, dead. Her names of two conflicting cultures, one Hebrew, one Persian. Her
Speaker 2: homeland, long forgotten. And do you know what? I think if you dig just a little bit, you'll find some Esther like interruption in your story too. Like, there's a whole swath of your life you never pictured for yourself. And you know the pull of others wishes for you against your own or abrupt change knocked you over and you knew it as loss and you felt it as grief.
So maybe the you're on isn't the one that you choose. Maybe people relate to you in a way that reduces you. Maybe your voice is ignored when you speak up about what matters to you. The trouble with interruptions is that they feel so rude, like a rip, a tear, a disturbance that keeps you up at night. Nobody likes to feel like they're out of choices.
But Esther, she doesn't fight. And I'm not saying that's good or bad, just that she adds this interruption to the many interruptions she's already lived through. Maybe now she knows what it takes to survive. Maybe she trusts that her beauty is a power she can use. So she steps out into that sharp daylight to follow the only man she's ever known as a father.
She also senses herself grow taller as she feels the energetic flicker of something new, a challenge, something she was born to do. So Esther joins the throng of women who stream into the capital and the harem is assembled. This beauty contest is underway and Hege is in charge. Esther is in the mix. Verse nine.
Esther pleased Hagay and won his favor. Immediately, he provided her with beauty treatments and special food. He assigned her seven female attendants selected from the king's palace and moved her and her attendants into the best place in the harem. Okay. This verse.
Honestly, it's maybe where I took an exit ramp from the story in the past. What is going on with Esther? Something I do not relate to. I mean, I have a pretty enough smile, but no one is throwing female attendance my way. But before you think Esther is in a beauty contest like how we would picture a beauty contest, be mindful.
Be mindful that Esther's beauty contest is something she did not sign up for. And some scholars go as far as to say that this whole scene is more akin to sex trafficking than pageantry. Taken and the women were gathered. The verbs are passive. And commentator Carol Bechtel says these are women caught up in Xerxes' dragnet.
And at the end of each day, they don't get to go home. Now for the Jewish audience living in diaspora reading this story, Esther is just so relatable. Just as they were torn away from their home and taken into exile, so was Esther. And just as they faced a violent displacement with no end in sight, so did Esther. And just as they were forced to make something out of their lives in a place they never asked to live, so did Esther.
But what makes her relatable to you and to me? Like, how do we connect? It's the freedom Esther doesn't have that makes her so relatable. Limitation isn't a sign of God's disfavor. It's a sign that you are human and every part of your story is connected to the limitations of others ancient, present, and future.
You're connected to residential schools if you live on this land. And you're connected to climate change because you you breathe this air. And you're connected to racism and white supremacy because you look out at the world through the lenses of class and privilege privilege and bias. Well, you do that if your skin is the color of mine. You do.
You just do. But that doesn't mean you should crawl into a cave and quit. It's not Esther's beauty and charm that make her relatable to me. It's what she does with her limitations. First, under the tutelage of her cousin, but then amazingly, all on her own.
Now before we talk about the hidden parts of Esther, I wanna say one thing about the Bible. If slash when you struggle to find the biblical text relatable, try. Looking less for God and its pages and more for the revelatory human story. Look for people who mess up. Look for brutal edges and rough patches.
Patches. Look for contradictions and long waits and deceptions and betrayals and meanness and lies. The divine is perfectly content to get real close to our rough edges, our brutality, our limitations, and with us somehow make something beautiful generation after generation after generation. I don't know how on earth Spirit does it, why she doesn't just burn the whole thing down. Maybe that's what love looks like.
Our worst met with God's best. But it takes time to emerge from our messy human story. Sometimes we keep ourselves hidden and that is part of the story too. Verses ten and eleven. Esther had not revealed her nationality and family background because Mordecai had forbidden her to do so.
Every day, he walked back and forth near the courtyard of the harem to find out how Esther was and what was happening to her. The chapter goes on to explain how the women were sorted and selected. Before each woman took her turn to go to King Xerxes, she had to complete twelve months of beauty treatments. There were fancy oils, perfumes, and cosmetics, so, you know, just like your everyday mall Sephora. And after an extensive makeover, a chosen woman was taken from the harem to the king's palace.
And when it was dark, she went to the palace, and when it was morning, she returned to the harem, all under the watch of the king's eunuch who was in charge of all the concubines. And that's where she'd stay unless the king summoned her back by name. I don't know about you, but this, like, moderately low maintenance, independence loving woman shudders when I think about having to live in this story. Now let me say, this parade of women is not how queens were chosen in Persia. Queens in Persia were chosen from noble families.
Add to that, a queen would never be chosen from the population's ethnic minority. Minority. So why this story? Well, remember who is telling it. This is a story of the Jewish people in exile as they struggle to hold onto their identity facing the facts that they may never never go home.
It breaks your heart. Right? Now some call Esther the book of hiding, and I really like that subtitle. I mean, Esther is hiding a big part of her identity as she rises through the harem ranks. After all, Esther isn't her real name.
It's not her Hebrew name anyway. It's her Persian name. And while earlier we read her Hebrew name on the page, Hadassah, that name is swept right out of the story after verse seven, and it never surfaces again. And this tension of holding on to who you are in a world where power keeps changing hands or your circumstances seem so out of your control or your trust in some divine force to help pull you through is waning, those tensions can make you feel like you have to shape shift to survive or just like get out of an awkward situation. Try this one.
Years ago I baffled this man who was trying to flirt with me in an airport. Now the truth is that I have always been clueless about flirting. I remember situations when I was single and like weeks after I'd have some kind of conversation, it would dawn on me like, Oh, that person was flirting with me. It's hilarious now, but it was really hard at the time. But this guy at the airport who actually seemed so genuine and so cool was asking me about my life.
I was traveling home to Canada from California where I was working at a church in the East San Francisco Bay Area. And when this guy actually dug out of me that I was a Christian and I worked at a church, he was dumbfounded. He was like, Bobby, you seem strong and bright. How can you find yourself in a religion that's not affirming to women? I've read the bible, he said.
It's horrible to women. And I don't really remember, it's been years, like, how that conversation ended. I probably just got, you know, even more awkward. But still, that chat, it really stayed with me. And what I concluded, I think much more articulately to myself than to him, was that where he saw limitation, I actually knew expansion.
Like I knew the truth of my hidden self. The quiet place inside of me where my relationship with God lives and where the religious tradition I come from lives. I knew the Christianity in my life to be one that calls me to do big, bold, brave things, not to limit myself because others try to limit me. Maybe you remember a moment when someone said to you, that thing, that thing in your life, it will always limit you. But you also know when you replied, maybe years later, no.
This thing this thing in my life, it expands me. And you know expansion, a deep sense that you are who you are for a reason, that you can step into an unfamiliar space and you can be so brave, that God never makes you feel small or insignificant or like your story can't be used in its fullness to speak of grace, the kind of grace that's always for you and for all. And maybe like Esther, walking into the heart of the empire, rocking what the good Lord gave her. Maybe like Esther, you can trust that your relationship with your hidden self and your relationship with the divine can withstand the whole of who you are and the choices that you make to survive. And from there, God help you.
There is no turning back. So we end the chapter here. When the turn came for Esther, the young woman Mordecai had adopted, the daughter of his uncle Abihail, to go to the king, she asked for nothing other than what Hagay, the king's eunuch, who was in charge of the harem suggested. And Esther won the favor of everyone who saw her. She was taken to King Xerxes and the royal residence in the tenth month, the month of Tibeth, in the seventh year of his reign.
And the story goes on to say how much the king loved Esther. He sets a crown on her head and makes her the new queen. Vashti is erased. Esther is in her place. And the king throws a great banquet because this guy still loves to party, and he gives gifts and proclaims a new holiday, so be it.
Now before you relax into party euphoria, know this. The last scene in chapter two is not a happy ending. And while we won't read the final section, the party cuts to a shadowy interaction where two of the king's officers are overheard by Mordecai is plotting to kill the king. And Mordecai tells Esther. Esther then tells the king, and there's an investigation, and the two officers are impaled on poles.
So gross. The bloody event not only establishes Esther as this reliable informant, but it reminds the reader that all is not well. Esther and her people live in a place where threat lurks around every corner. So at the end of chapter two, Esther is in the center of the empire, but she didn't ask for any of it. I imagine she'd like very much just to go home, to take care of her family, and to flirt with that nice guy down the road.
All of us have aspects in our life we wish were different. Places we feel stuck, situations we can't get out of. Yeah. You feel stuck just before you pull your boot out of the mud and keep going. And, yeah, you were trapped just before you reach into your pocket and pull out the key that was there all along.
And, yeah, you don't have a vision for what to do next until well, until you do. I get it though. It feels pretty impossible to sense that while you are grieving or waiting or changing or fighting to hold on to that last thread of hope, that strength wisdom is actually forming in you. Maybe you can't see how you're gonna make it through yet, but you will. You will.
Let us pray. Creator, we sit in the story of Esther today and wonder what what can it teach us. We can trace limitation hers and ours. Race, religion, difference, injury, threat, fear, longing. We can also trace expansion, hers and ours, power, influence, representation, opportunity, growth, making the best of it, refusing to live according to our fear.
Christ, invite us to heal by becoming fully human and there finding something so divine. So spirit of the living God, present with us now. Enter the places of pain and fear and heal us of all that harms us. Amen. Next week, my queen three is all about a couple of dudes who hate each other.
It's gonna be a great time. Until then, we'll end as we always do. Love God. Love people. Tell the story and take good care out there.
Peace to you.