Esther of the Bible-when powerful men believed a woman and justice prevailed

The next two weeks, the Lectionary takes us to Biblical myths that invite us to think a little deeper about the nature of God. Those who take part in the Highlands Book Club experienced that journey with Bishop Shelby Spong’s most recent book “Unbelievable.”

“God,” Spong argues, “is not a being” but rather is “being itself.” God, he said, becomes visible in the transformation of the world, what he called “the outbreak of human wholeness.” Spong locates his views of the nature of God in scripture, citing among others Isaiah 35: 5-6.

⁵Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped;⁶then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert

Isaiah saw God as the experience of the reversal of fortunes, a moment when injustice is righted, the oppressed freed, the hungry fed, the lions laying down with the lambs and the lambs no longer nervous. God is not separate from these human experiences but is those very experiences.

Who or what do you think God is? Let’s dig down on that question.

How fortuitous it is that after the last week the Lectionary asks us this morning to tell the story of Esther and how the suffering of others was avoided because a man in power chose to believe a woman, a story that speaks to the nature of God without ever mentioning God by name. Her book is the only book in the Bible that doesn’t mention God Yet, it teaches us more about the nature of God than we can imagine.

Once upon a time, King Ahasueras, who reigned over much of the known world from India to Ethiopia, gave a banquet for all of his princes and servants, nobles and governors. It lasted 6 months

When it ended he gave a second banquet for the people of the capital city of Susa. It lasted another 7 days. When the king was drunk with wine, he ordered his 7 eunuchs to retrieve the queen t come before him and the partiers, for he wanted to show her off to the others.

Queen Vashti Tweeted the King, “Sorry, that’s not happening, I will not dance in front of the king and his drunken buddies. ##MeToo.” Queen Vashti knew that it took powerful women to put an end to the games men were playing.

Unaccustomed as the men of the day were to women asserting control over their own bodies, the King was flummoxed. He consulted his advisers. These were all powerful men, wise enough to know the queen’s refusal to do as told was not just a problem for the king but them as well. If one woman was allowed to say no, it could prove contagious. Once their wives learned a wife could refuse a husband’s command, the entire empire would be in turmoil.

They advised the king to get rid the kingdom of this queen and find a new one. So, it was that the king sent letters to all the royal provinces, to every province and to every people in its own language, declaring that every man should be master in his own house.

The king held auditions for a new queen. Women from throughout the kingdom were brought before the king that he might replace Vashti.

There was a Jew named Mordecai who had adopted the orphan Esther whose parents King Nebuchadnezzar carried away to Babylon. She was a young woman as smart as she was beautiful. Esther was one of the young women brought before the king though she had to hide the fact that she was a Jew. When the king saw her, she immediately won him over and Esther was chosen to be the new queen.

Mordecai, meanwhile, went to the king’s gate each day to try to get a glimpse of Esther. One day he overheard men plotting to kill the king. He told Esther who told the king and the plotters were executed and Esther gained the king’s confidence.

It came to pass that a man named Haman was selected by the king to be his chief of staff. Everyone feared Haman and bowed down before him, everyone, that is, except Mordecai. Haman was furious and decided to take revenge by slaughtering all of Mordecai’s people, the Jews. But, first he had to get the permission of the king.

“There are certain people among the peoples of your kingdom,” Haman told the king. “They are, shall we say, different. They speak a different language. Their culture is different. Their religious beliefs are different. The color of their skin is different. Remember how the Pharaoh worried that those who were different would take over his kingdom? Well, that is what is happening to our country,” said Haman. “There are just too many people among us who are DIFFERENT. That cannot be tolerated.”

“I know what to do about these people,” said Haman. If it pleases the king, let a decree be issued for their destruction. I will pay ten thousand talents of silver so that it may put it into the king’s treasuries.” 

So, the king pocketed the dark money, signed a decree giving Haman the right to kill all the people in his kingdom whom Haman thought to be DIFFERENT, and he and Haman sat down to share a drink.

Mordecai learned of the plot. Went to Esther. Would she speak to her husband to stop the slaughter? Esther was afraid. Women couldn’t do that. Even queens couldn’t approach kings without an invitation. The penalty was death.

Mordecai replied, “If you keep silence at such a time as this, others will suffer because you would not speak. Who knows? Perhaps you have found yourself in a place where you can make a difference for just such a time as this.” 

Esther went to the king who received her happily. “What is it dear Esther?” he said, “I will give you even half my kingdom if you ask.” Esther asked the king to invite Haman to a banquet she was preparing.

Meanwhile, Haman was feeling good about life. All was good. Even the queen wanted to honor him. He confided in his wife that as good as things were going there was still that troublesome Mordecai, living and breathing and refusing to bow to him. His wife told him he should go ahead and build gallows in anticipation of hanging that loathsome Jew.

Unbeknownst to Haman, the king, one sleepless night, read through the records of the kingdom and found the entry reporting it was Mordecai who uncovered the plot to assassinate the king. “Has Mordecai ever been honored for this?” he asked. “No,” no honor had been bestowed on the man who had saved his life. Without naming the man he wished to honor, the king asked his chief of staff, “What shall be done for the man whom the king wishes to honor?”

Haman said to himself, “Whom would the king wish to honor more than me?” Haman said to the king, “For the man whom the king wishes to honor, let royal robes be brought, which the king has worn, and a prize horse that the king has ridden, with a royal crown on its head. 

Let the robes and the horse be handed over to the king’s most noble official; let him robe the man whom the king wishes to honor, and let him lead the man on horseback through the open square of the city.” 

The king said to Haman, “Thus shall it be done for the man whom the king wishes to honor.” Haman and the king hurried off to the banquet Esther planned, Haman under the impression that he was about to be honored by the king. After they had wined and dined a couple of days, the king asked Esther, “What exactly would you like from me? Whatever it is, I will grant to you.”

Esther told the king someone was plotting to annihilate her people. “Who?” the king demanded. “It is he.” The queen pointed at Haman. The king left to contemplate whether or not he should believe a woman who was accusing one of the most powerful men in his inner circle. While the king was gone, a now very frightened Haman went to Esther to beg mercy. In his exuberance, he fell onto the couch where Ester lay just as the king returned. It didn’t look good. Things just got worse.

One of the king’s eunuchs whispered to the king, “Did you know Haman prepared gallows to hang Mordecai, the man you are preparing to honor. They are ready.” The king said, “Very nice. Then use them to hang Haman.” And so, it was done.

Then the king issued a new decree revoking the authority to kill the Jews and permitting them to defend themselves if attacked. Haman had plotted against the Jews and cast his lot to crush and destroy them; but because of Esther the king gave orders that his wicked plot should come upon Haman’s own head, and that he should be hanged on the very gallows Haman had built.

It was a stunning reversal of fortunes, the sort of reversal of fortunes in which the nature of God can be defined.

And as we read the story of Esther, we ask how it is that an entire book of the Bible can tell a story like this without once mentioning the name of God, a story of a man in power choosing to believe a woman led inexorably to justice. There we witness is the hand of God in this story.

This is the nature of the God we worship; not a bearded old man on a heavenly throne who sides with humans because of their gender, race, religion or other human construct. God is never mentioned by name. Esther is never judged by creeds or church doctrine. Not once is Esther asked whether she has been saved or born again. Her church attendance or whether she tithes is not measured.

As Bishop John Spong says in his book, “While God may be present in the experience, the experience can never be identified with God.” The common theme in many Bible lessons, Spong argues, is that “God is not a being separate from the beings who are human.”

For those Esther saved, God is experienced and need not be mentioned. God’s hopes for the world in that one moment of history are accomplished by the hands of a human being. Esther acts out of love, Vashiti out of self-respect. Therefore, God exists through the choices of humans like the two Queens, both of whom God created for such a time as this. AMEN

Sunday's sermon @ Highlands

Let not your heart be troubled: believe in God, believe also in me.

In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. Jesus in the 14^th chapter Gospel of John

Odd that Jesus, after spending time on earth lifting up the poor, would promise us mansions in the sky. What did Jesus mean when he said that in his Father’s house there were many mansions, that he was going there to prepare a place for us?  

Do you wonder about what comes next? Books written by people who claim to have had afterlife experiences sell millions. People do seem curious about what awaits. Google “books about life after death,” and the screen fills to overflowing with books written by people claiming to have died, visited heaven and returned to write about the trip.

Raymond Moody is the bestselling author of eleven books which have sold over 20 million copies. “Life After Life,” first written in 1975, sold over 13 million copies worldwide. A 2015 “Special Edition” is right now in the top 10 sellers of spiritual books on Amazon.

One woman wrote an amazon.com review. “This book helped me heal after my mother’s death. I was a wreck with grief for 2 1/2 months. I had that 1% doubt in my mind that maybe, just maybe, there wasn't a Heaven after all. I started drinking every day. I was a mess! I read this in two days, and was "healed." 

Remember Edgar Cayce. Born in 1877; he died for the final time in 1945 after convincing millions that he’d been there and back many times. Cayce was a Christian who had regular NDEs or near-death-experiences and brought back medical cures and information on future events, predicting the 1932 stock market crash, the rise of Adolph Hitler, the creation of the UN and dozens of other events that actually happened. Of course, he also predicted the discovery of Atlantis, that China would become the cradle of Christianity, and the second coming of Christ would happen in 1998.

Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004) is well known for her work on death and dying, although she eventually claimed that death does not exist. Death, she thought, is one of several possible transitions through permeable boundaries, whatever that means. 

The idea that there are several possible transitions through permeable boundaries can be boiled down to this. We are all guessing. None of us knows. The skeptic in me believes those who claim to have experienced life after death had an experience far more emotional and spiritual rather than real.

Some years ago, I joined a group of local clergy in a discussion of the question, “What happens to us after we die.” We agreed to maintain one another’s responses in confidence but I can tell you that the people in their pews would be surprised by the collective responses. These are people who have spend a great deal of time pondering the ultimacy of the question and few of them towed the company line. 

Who knows? No one knows, which is why I prefer the work of David Eagleman. DAVID EAGLEMAN is a neuroscientist, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a New York Times bestselling author. He wrote and presented the PBS series The Brain.  At night, his bio says, he writes fiction.

Eagleman’s book entitled “Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlife,” could be considered satire, or could also be considered a brief collection of rational and thoughtful postulates.

One of Eagleman’s 40 guesses has it that after you die, you get to choose what it is you’d like to be in the next life. You could, for example, choose to live a simpler life as a horse, grazing in the warm sun, loping across the pasture with no responsibility.

You announce your decision and begin to change. Muscles bulge, a matt of hair grows, fingers and feet become hooves, your brain changes, synapses unplug here and re-plug into equestrian patterns.

But suddenly, just before the metamorphosis is complete, while you still have the ability to reason as a human, you realize that you are quickly losing the ability to comprehend what it was like to have been human. Your ability to think like a human quickly departs; the more you become what you’ve asked to become, you lose the ability to wonder what it would be like to be either a human or a horse.

This, Eagleman says, is punishment for your sins; left at the destination you chose without the ability to remember where you started.

Another possibility in a world ruled by technology is that we never really die. We just lose the password to our computer and the rest of the world believes we have, therefore, passed away.

In another scenario, Eagleman explores the motivational qualities of death. Upon arriving, you are offered an opportunity to change anything about your life; you can be taller or thinner; or you can change the world. With the sadness of your own funeral fresh in your mind, you proudly announce you want to end all death.

Your afterlife adviser warns you this has been tried before and has never ended well. But, with your human ego yet intact, you persist. You return to earth and go to work. Eventually your anti-death crusade succeeds. The last to die is an incurably ill elderly woman. You’ve done it. All death comes to an end. People can now live their lives knowing they no longer have to think about dying.

But, that creates unintended consequences. The thought of death, it turns out had been motivational. People actually worried about whether how they lived would have an impact on their after-death experiences. That motivation is gone. Accomplishments decline as does empathy and caring and giving. Churches are empty. Charities go broke.

It turns out that both the uncertainty of the date of death as well as what happens afterward were motivational. People had been motivated by both to live better lives. People actually spend a lot of time thinking about those things and it changed the way they lived.

Which brings us to one last scenario. You arrive at the Pearly Gates to discover that God’s favorite book is Mary Shelly’s “Frankenstein.” God is distressed that so few humans gave any real thought to what God intended by Creation and God is relived to find one who did; Mary Shelly.

For the first time, you begin to see the purpose behind the trajectory of Creation. God created the earth, the sky, the waters. Then God QUOTE sewed together the astounding platypus, the compact beetle, the weighty woolly mammoth, and the glistening pod of dolphins.”

And then he created humans, feeling this was his most prized possession; creatures, like God, with the capacity to care, empathize, love. God marveled as they wrote holy books, invented musical instruments, built marvelous cities, learned how to feed themselves and cared enough to feed others who could not feed themselves.  

Then they started to fight, to capture and kill. God tried to talk sense into them but discovered that even as their creator he had little control. The beauty of the earth was marred by blood and God could do nothing but weep. That, you realize, is the punishment for human sin; humans will be separated from God for eternity because God has locked himself in a room with a copy of Mary Shelly’s novel, pondering the way in which Creators are powerless over that which they created and must eventually flee from the things they have wrought.

Eagleman, Cayce, Kubler-Ross…guessers all in my humble opinion. Add me to that list of guessers. We don’t know what awaits us. God finds the guessing to be useful, motivational maybe. God could have made it simpler. God could have taken the guess work out of death. Dentists could teach God how to do that.

Every six months my dentist sends a notice, tells me when I’ll be sitting in his chair to have my teeth cleaned. I call it my “it’s time to get serious about flossing notice.” God could do that. God could send an “it’s time to get real about life” notice. Dear Rodger, “your day is whatever date God chooses. Just thought you’d like to start getting ready.” //GOD//

But, that’s not how God arranged the world, living and dying. It is ambiguous guesswork for a reason. It’s about being born again every day. Searching for the answer to the question, “Why am I still here” every morning as your eyes open and you roll out of bed.

What I do believe, what is enough for me is what Jesus said to Paul, “My grace is sufficient for thee.” Whatever awaits, one thing is sure. We can plan to arrive on the other side singing the words of the hymn, “I come with joy, forgiven, loved, and saved.” AMEN