Bible Study Leader s Guide Esther: God In The Details City Presbyterian Church

Transcription

1 Bible Study Leader s Guide Esther: God In The Details City Presbyterian Church citypresokc.com

2 This leader s guide is to help you as you do this study. We studied a lot for this and want to provide for you the product of that study. The questions from the study derive from this, and much of the information is already in the bible study itself. What you find included here will be more of the same, as well as perhaps some helpful illustrations or ideas as to where to go for application. Nothing can replace your own study of these passages, and your own personalized stories. May the Lord bless you and your time A Product of the ministry of City Presbyterian Church in Oklahoma City by Doug Serven and Bobby Griffith. Not much of this material is original or unique since we are striving to present historic Christianity to the 21 st Century world. Therefore, we are building on the shoulders of those who have gone before us. Please feel free to use this material in discussions with others and even in other Bible studies. Feel free to adapt and modify for your own purposes. The reader should assume that none of the ideas expressed are original to us. We especially appreciated commentaries by Samuel Wells & George Sumner, Sandra Berg, Karen H. Jobes and Ian M. Duguid. All Scriptures come from the English Standard Version, Crossway. Used by permission. Cover graphic designed by April Marciszewski. City Presbyterian Church is a missional community that seeks to worship Christ and serve Oklahoma City. Our goal is to Love God, Love People and Love the City. You can learn more about us at citypresokc.com.

3 Leading Small Groups 1 Small group values Spiritual transformation Jesus Christ, as Head of the church, intends for people to become like him. Small groups help people: Grow in grace (the saving work of Christ) Group (in connecting others with significant relationships) Gifts (serving the body of Christ with specific giftedness and passion) Good stewardship (honoring God with our resources). Small group community A small group provides a great environment for the life change Jesus Christ intends for every believer. People get connected to each other, to the church, and to God s plans for them in small group. We want to become a community where no one stands alone. Strategic leaders Small group leaders are strategic in the life of the church. They can understand, disciple, care for, pray for and help the people in their small groups in profound ways. Span of care Small groups must expand and multiply so that more and more believers can be connected to others. A small group does not exist for itself and Christians resist selfishness. Seek and Celebrate Effective ministry happens in an atmosphere of prayer and celebration. Create a climate for discussion People care about people caring Pray for the Holy Spirit to create a strong bong among group members Ask the Lord to give you love for every member of your group, especially those you don t naturally click with. Be the first to arrive at the meeting site and greet people as they enter. Be sure you or someone in your group calls or s people when they miss. Send handwritten notes (or facebook of course) to encourage participants. Laughter Use humor; it makes people loosen up. Poke fun at yourself, not at others. Be sure to be sensitive and not force things. Intercession Because God answers prayer, what can we pray for you? What has the Holy Spirit exposed during this study? How can we pray about those needs? Link prayer to the lesson you just completed. Try to make the connection in prayer. Model the level of personal disclosure you want group members to reach. Distribute the group members addresses and make prayer and prayer requests a regular part of your interaction throughout the week. Methodology People like to know what to expect. AND they like change now and then. Try to have a regular pattern, and mix it up every so often. Think about how you are doing the study and if your methods will facilitate open discussion. You may have to set the stage first if a passage is complicated. Think about how your location and room affects the group discussion. Think about what activities will help open people up to discussion. Feeling Welcome and Joining the Group Do we make people feel like they want to come back? How do we do this? Transparency and Leader Sharing What improves relationships? When leaders shares what they do in their off times. When they share personal experiences. When they share about their problems in daily living for God. Will my stories help the discussion? 1 From Now That s a Good Question, by Terry Powell; Standard Publishing and Leading Life Changing Small Groups, by Bill Donahoe, Zondervan

4 Will my self-revelation encourage others to share needs and prayer requests? Will my sharing meet my own need for emotional support and prayer? Will my illustration portray family members or friends in an unhealthy way? Have I received permission to tell this story by people who might be embarrassed by it? What personal application or carry-over ideas has the Lord shown you from this study? What personal need or issue has the Holy Spirit exposed to me from this study? Who can illustrate one of our lesson s truths from their own personal experience? What has God brought to your mind that you ve never thought of before? What people come to mind that show characteristics from this study? What unresolved questions on this subject matter still are with you? Environment The nature of your surrounding affects the learning climate. If you re doing your study over the dinner hour, can you trade off making dinner first? Will you put out snacks, drinks or cookies? People like food. It makes them feel at home. Is the room arranged for seeing everyone? Should you change locations now and then to make a point (ex: you could do a lesson in a graveyard when you talk about death)? Is the location clean? Is the temperature correct? Team Building Ask a question or two every meeting. It can be connected to the study or random. Use a book of questions. Come up with a project to do together. See each other outside of your study time. Go on a road trip together camping, a conference, etc. Come up with a name for your group. Questions Don t ask run-together questions. Be clear. Ask one question at a time. Don t ask long-winded questions. Don t ask questions that are really statements. Don t ask yes/no questions. Be willing to let there be silence for awhile. Ask someone a specific question, especially those more reluctant to talk. Be sensitive about this. Be wary of speculative and/or irrelevant questions. Bible study isn t Trivial Pursuit. Don t unrealistic questions. Can someone summarize the Old Testament? Who can tell everyone what we discussed four meetings ago? Who is willing to explain the hypostatic union? Be careful about too-obvious questions. You have to create a culture where people are willing to answer obvious questions. Leading the Discussion Exhibit enthusiasm Think about how you respond when someone makes a comment. Are you encouraging? Are you giving bad non-verbals? We want people to share, but not to hijack the group with too many tangents. Celebrate what people say. Make a hero out of anyone who contributes. Howard Hendricks Show sincerity. Excellent answer, Valerie. I like the way you referred to Jesus words to support you conclusions. That is a provocative question, Joseph. Thanks for bringing it up. Bryan, you did a great job of putting Paul s remark into context. Beth, that is good thinking. Can you repeat your answer so we can think about it more? It s evident you don t see eye to eye on this issue, but I appreciate how you expressed your viewpoints tactfully and listened to each other. I m impressed with the way you connected this verse to last week s lesson. Wait after you ask a question. Don t answer it yourself. Ever. Notice the non-verbals of the people in your group. 55% of communication comes from non-verbals. Eye contact, slumped shoulders, others talking and interrupting the speaker. Smiling at people, maintaining eye contact. Follow up their feedback. Why do you say that? Can you be more specific? What else did you notice? Do you mean? Could you rephrase your question? How does that apply to? How does your answer relate to what we said earlier? How did you come up with your answer? Don t worry about correcting every error every time. Be glad error is coming out and being discussed in the group. Make time to talk about that topic one on one. You don t have the be the Bible Answer Person. You can say, I don t know. I ll get back to you on that. For now, let s move on. What you re really wanting is people to talk to each other. That is different than everyone talking to you. Getting into God s Word Observation

5 We simply want to know what the text actually says. The answers are sometimes so obvious that you may feel like it s a trick question, but it s not. In observing the text, we want to ask, What does the text say? We look at the Context what is around the text? Where does this passage fit into the Scriptures near by and in the Bible as a whole? We Analyze the text. We look at the words and the sentences and how they fit together. Are there any key words or figures of speech? Are there contrasts or repetitions? Is there a cause and effect relationship? Are there any commands to follow? Where do we see grace and Jesus in this text? We see Problems. What stands out as odd or unusual? What do we need to look up (ex: how much is a talent?) We look for Themes. What does this text remind you of in the Bible? What Bible stories or figures does this connect to? (These are often call cross-references). Interpretation This admittedly is the toughest part of studying the Scriptures. Usually, we ll be comparing Scripture with Scripture. We are interested in how the Scripture speaks to us, not in what we may want it to mean. Here, we are asking, What does the text mean? Once we have observed the text, we want to interpret it. Try summarizing it into your own words, or seeing if you can make an illustration that captures the meaning. In the group ask, Who can illustrate this point from a situation in your own life? How has this played out for you? Would anyone be willing to share a time when you felt this way? In what ways should show in our lives? How can we do this without making it a cliché? Ask rhetorical questions if the question might be too exposing What temptation plagues you the most? Application This is where the rubber meets the road. Sometimes in observing the text and understanding its meaning, the application flows naturally. Sometimes, we will need to do some discussing to work it into our lives. Having understood and accurately interpreted the text, we now ask, So what? How does this affect my beliefs, my words, my actions, my community? What is your response to what you ve studied? What are you encouraged about or convicted about? What do you need to change? How did you see God and Jesus more clearly? What do you need to repent about, asking Christ to forgive you? How can your community help you change? Most of our studies do a lot of this work for you. You can follow along with the study. But you need to do the work on your own too, and you need to read your group as to how much they are willing to follow the study guide. When you lead the study in your group, don t just read through the study, answering every question along the way. Think about where your group is, and what parts of the study may be the most important for them to discuss. Spend some time on the other parts, but highlight the one or two questions you think are most needed. Allow the others to ask about things they didn t understand and to bring out things you didn t consider as the most needed, but try to keep on track and keep going unless you need to stop because something important is happening. May the Lord bless your Bible study and show himself to you in the group.

6 The Gospel At City Pres, the gospel is our greatest treasure it truly is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes, and that continues all throughout our Christian lives. However, in our day and culture, there is confusion as to just what the gospel is. The following article, adapted from an article written by Pastor Tim Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, clearly defines the gospel. The Third Way of the Gospel The Gospel means good news. It is the basic message that: God made (Christ), who had no sin, to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:21). The gospel says that we are so sinful, lost and helpless that only the life and death of the Son of God can save us. But it also says that those who trust in Christ s work instead of their own efforts are now holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation (Colossians 1:22-23). The gospel tells us that our root sin is not just failing in our obedience to God but relying on our obedience to save us. Therefore, the gospel is a third way, neither religion nor irreligion. The religious person may say, I am doing the right things that God commands 2 and the irreligious person may say, I decide what is right and wrong for myself. But both ways reject Jesus as Savior (though they may revere him as Example or Helper). Both ways are strategies of self-salvation both actually keep control of their own lives. So the gospel keeps us from legalism and moralism on the one hand and from hedonism and relativism on the other. The Gospel s Power for Change The gospel is not just the ABC but the A-Z of the Christian life. The gospel is not just the way to enter the kingdom but is the way to address every problem and is the way to grow at every step. If we believe we can find our own worth and meaning through performance, then we will become either proud or disdainful of others (if we reach our goals), or else discouraged and self-loathing (if we fail our goals). But the gospel creates an entirely new self-image. The Gospel tells us that we are more wicked and sinful than we ever dared believe but more loved and accepted in Christ than we ever dared to hope at the same time. In fact, if the gospel is true, the more you see you sin, the more certain you are that you were saved by sheer grace and the more precious and electrifying that grace is to you. So the gospel gives us enormous power to admit our flaws. Then secondly, the knowledge of our acceptance in Christ makes (for the first time) the law of God a beauty instead of a burden. We come to use it to delight the One who has enriched us so mightily, instead of using it to get his attention or win his favor. The first way makes the moral and sacrificial life a joy; the second way makes it a burden. Therefore the gospel changes everything. It brings down racial barriers by melting away facial pride or inferiority. It brings down psychological problems by melting away self-inflation or self-hatred. It brings down personal facades, for we are free to admit who we are. It effects the way we do everything how we motivate people, how we help them work through counseling problems, how we worship, how we take criticism. 2 Our core problem, say St. Augustine, is that the human heart, ignoring God, turns in on itself, tries to lift itself, wants to please itself, and ends up debasing itself. The person who reaches toward God and wants to please God gets, so to speak, stretched by this move, and ennobled by the transcendence of its object. But the person who curves in on himself, who wants God s gifts without God, who wants to satisfy the desires of a divided heart, ends up sagging and contracting like a little wad. He desires are provincial. There is something in humility which, strangely enough, exalts the heart, and something in pride, which debases it. - Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way It s Supposed to Be, p. 62, (at the end quoting Augustine, The City of God)

7 How to Do This Bible Study With those important preliminaries aside, we re excited that you have decided to join us in exploring some of the foundational truths of the Christian faith. Whether you are investigating Christianity or have been a believer for as long as you can remember, we hope that this study will be fruitful for you. You may come with lots of questions or even with some apprehensiveness. Whatever the case, we earnestly desire this to be a time where you can honestly ask questions and explore the foundations of Christianity. You may have been in a Bible study before, or you may be joining us for the first time. I want to make a note on our method of study. In each of the texts before us, we will use the simple O-I-A method of study: Observation Interpretation Application. Observation We simply want to know what the text actually says. The answers are sometimes so obvious that you may feel like it s a trick question, but its not. In observing the text, we want to ask, What does the text say? Interpretation This admittedly is the toughest part of studying the Scriptures. Usually, we ll be comparing Scripture with Scripture. We are interested in how the Scripture speaks to us, not in what we may want it to mean. Here, we are asking, What does the text mean? Application This is where the rubber meets the road. Sometimes in observing the text and understanding its meaning, the application flows naturally. Sometimes, we will need to do some discussing to work it into our lives. Having understood and accurately interpreted the text, we now ask, So what? How does this affect my beliefs, my words, my actions, my community? Attendance If you are working through this study in a group, please commit to coming each week. Not only will you benefit by this commitment, but the other people in your group will by your presence. It can be really discouraging for each week s study to be only optionally attended. While coming each week is by no means a badge of righteousness for you, it will mean something if you put this as a priority in your week s schedule and make every effort to be there.

8 Esther 1 God isn t saying anything! I can remember sitting in Café Plaid in Norman with my friend. He was a fellow campus minister and we were talking about how I had been wondering if it was time for me to start a church and leave RUF. He was (and is) a good friend, and it wasn t the first time we d had that conversation. I hadn t thought of it very often in my first eight years in Norman. Other people certainly had. There is a normal trajectory for an RUF campus minister into and toward starting new churches. Our denomination is doing a good job with church planting and our presbytery is one of the leaders. So it had been brought up many times. I d always shut that down. I was committed to staying as long as I could so I could be more rooted and established and see things through. I also didn t want to keep considering other things and get distracted from what I felt called to do. I loved campus ministry. I was at least decently good at it. God was blessing. But I d been doing it for a long time. As I got closer to forty, I couldn t see this continuing. Really I d been doing some form of campus ministry since I was 23 right out of college. Three years at OSU and one at Nebraska with The Navigators. I d pieced together various ministry and bible studies at Missouri Baptist College and Saint Louis University while in seminary. Then we moved to start the OU RUF chapter in That was 17 years. I loved every second. So I wondered if I should change. Really? As I look back now, I don t have any regrets for taking the call to start City Pres in Oklahoma City with Bobby. We started three years ago in It s been awesome. And it s been exhausting. We re tired! But it s been awesome! But we re tired. Repeat that a million times to get a sense. But what most people don t fully understand because I haven t talked about it that much because it feels funny to talk about is how worn out I was the two years before we started working on City Pres. Planning meetings with interested groups. Plans that didn t pan out. Trips to Springfield, Missouri, to go on dates with people hoping they would choose me based on what? Trying to sound confident and humble at the same time. Acting like I knew what I was talking about but resenting it when someone figured out that I didn t. I wanted the best for my family. I wanted the best for me. I wanted the best for RUF at OU and Christ the King in Norman. I wanted the best for what God wanted me to do. But I didn t know what that was. And the clock was ticking. There were natural timelines that came up that would pass that added to the pressure. Would I start another year? Would I ask people to give money to something I was about to quit? What if I quit and didn t have any job anywhere? What if I stayed too long? I talked to people and listened to advice. I didn t talk to people because I didn t want their advice. I worried about it. And I prayed about it. A lot. All the time. Sometimes less fervently than other times. And honestly here s the whole point to this long story God didn t answer very much. That may surprise you. Maybe it doesn t. In the end, I definitely think God did speak. I definitely think he did lead. I definitely think he did bring us to start this church in this time and in this place. But sitting there in Café Plaid that day it certainly didn t feel like it and it certainly had not happened yet and I wondered if God ever would speak. I wonder if you can relate to this? Surely you can. You have had periods where God didn t seem to be saying anything, right? You are asking him about where you should move, or what job you should take or when you should have a baby or when you should adopt or when or if you should make a big change or a little change or why your kids won t change or your parents. And you wonder if he s ever ever listening. Esther is for you. This is a book that will speak to you, or at least it should. We have a book that certainly seems off topic. It s not about Jerusalem or the temple. No one prays. No one has any visions. Nothing miraculous happens. The whole story takes place off stage, off the beaten path in a pagan land with questionable people who are not doing what they re supposed to do. There have been many who have questioned if Esther should even be in the Bible. Martin Luther didn t think so. He relegated it to an apocryphal book of Jewish history and that s what it is. So often we think that God is only the God of Exodus. He s only the God of big events and awesome miracles. Some churches and strains in the church promote this idea. They think that if God isn t doing miracles, then he s not doing anything. That he can only prove his power and work if something incredible happens that everyone can discern as a miracle. We think the Bible is filled with Exodus. Thunder and lightening. Tablets. The Red Sea. The cloud leading the people. Or we think the Christian life is like that of Daniel. Daniel and his friends were in a foreign land but they still wanted to do the right thing and follow God. So they committed themselves to that path, that way, and God gave them visions and blessings and miracles and it was dramatically amazing the way it all worked out. We want Daniel to be our story. But we so often feel like we re living in Esther. God isn t even mentioned in the book of Esther. People do things for suspicious reasons in a foreign land without godly motives and what in the world is going on that God saves even people like that? Esther is for you. Esther is for me. Esther is for me in Café Plaid that day, and what I experienced. God was leading. He was working. He was never not working. He was working when I got rejected and accepted by committees and presbyteries. It s not just miracles. There are miracles. We believe in miracles. But it s not all miracles. We have Esther. Let s look at what this book teaches us.

9 Extravagant Empire We need first to get our bearings. This book is filled with history so we need to know that history in order to understand it. A sermon isn t a history lesson, but redemption and grace always has a history in its story. This is really a book that has the Meanwhile back at the theme. Most of the Bible is focused on Jerusalem and the immediate surrounding areas. Not all, but certainly most. And there were a ton of things going on in Jerusalem as Esther was taking place. The temple had been ransacked. The people had been displaced. God had shown his displeasure on his people by casting them out of his city, just like he had said he would. The golden era of the kingdom was over. It would never be the same as it had been under David and Solomon. Things were different now. But some God s people had returned. They d been allowed to and some had taken that opportunity. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah tell the story of rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem and the walls of the city, and restoring the people to the law and the ways. But not all had returned. In fact many hadn t. Many stayed behind for one reason or another. It was tough to get back to Jerusalem to start over. Some couldn t make it. Some didn t want to. They liked where they were. They d perhaps been assimilated. And some of them were funding those who had gone back to rebuild. Esther is one of those books. It takes place in the city of Susa, in our modern-day Iran. It takes place over ten years starting in 483 B.C. The Persians are a great empire that are on the move. In fact the battle of King Leonidas of Sparta against the Persians and their king Xerxes that took place at Thermopylae wages just three years later in 480 B.C. Confucius died in 479 B.C. Pericles was shaping the political system in Athens. Sophocles was writing Oedipus Rex, Electra and Antigone. Herodotus recorded history, as did Thucydides. Socrates was born in 470. Pythagorus died around 495. What at time it was in the history of the world! There is so much Biblical and Classical history taking place right during this exact time period. 3 Meanwhile back in Susa. The book of Esther doesn t mention any of that. It doesn t speak of the temple or the rebuild or the law or anything happening with anything spiritual. It seems amazingly oblivious to the important happenings of the world, which are connected to this very story. Instead it is focused on what is happening in Susa in 483 with this small group of people without mention of God. King Ahasuerus is King Xerxes. As you know from history and as you can see he s doing awesome. This is a summer home to get away from the heat. The Persians were known for their extravagance and opulence. When Alexander the Great entered the palace in Susa more than a century later he found 1200 tons of gold and silver and 270 tons of minted gold coins. 4 The author of Esther (who by the way is unknown) gives us a glimpse by telling us in great detail about the party and the curtains the linens, couches and their fabrics and how every goblet had to be different for every person for every drink. That s a nice goblet hoard Xerxes has going there. You can imagine the Pinterest board for this party. People were impressed. Xerxes is so super awesome that he even has an edict that no one has to drink under compulsion. Every person can do as he or she desired. Or so it seemed. Queen Vashti had been having her own feast for the women of the palace but on the seventh day of this huge party, Xerxes called for her. Let s stop for a second and mention that this is the way empires work. Everything looks good. Everything looks fine. Everything looks powerful. But you have to realize the whole book of Esther is written with an ironic wink and a nod. The writer is writing after this event. Xerxes died in 486 B.C. He was murdered by the commander of the royal bodyguard and the most powerful official in the Persian court. But instead of starting the story with Xerxes demise, the author much more cleverly and adeptly starts the story with Xerxes at the height of his power and glory and excess. But we have the inside scoop. We know how this is going to turn out. Don t we? It sure doesn t feel like it. The world is filled with power. It s filled with stories like this. Xerxes seems like even a good guy. He s the Great Gatsby multiplied by a hundred million. He s in control. He s not forcing anyone to do anything. But all is not well. We re tempted to believe the hype. We secretly want a royal wedding and to live in our dream house with our dream job and our dream kids and be paid for what we love without bad bosses or bad neighbors or bad stop lights or bad credit. This is a really extreme example but I want to make the connection between Xerxes empire and that of Hitler s. We all cringe at Hitler, as we should. He was an evil man. But consider for a second that not everyone thought so. People followed him. People loved him. People believed him. He gathered around him power and influence and millions upon millions loved it. We re looking back at him, but if you had been there, would you have been able to see how corrupted he was, how evil it all was? The Monuments Men movie tells the story of how he was gathering all of the art in the world that he could steal so he could have it for his own in one place. And how close he was for getting it all. It would have been an awesome display of power, beauty and glory. Corrupt King What if Hitler had gotten his dream for that museum with all of that art? What if you d been standing there and seen the awesome display of masterpieces? The University of Oklahoma has this problem. They have a piece of art that someone is claiming is from that exact situation. 5 It s a long and complicated story but OU has a Pissaro painting that it has received through various collections. The 3 This thought especially comes from Karen Jobes commentary pp Jobes,

10 painting was owned by a Jewish man named Raone Meyer, but it was stolen by the Nazis. Meyer survived the war but he couldn t get his painting back. Now his daughter Leone is suing the university to get the painting returned. OU is disputing this claim. From what I understand of the story and I m not a lawyer it says that although it may be true that this has come from Meyer, that claim cannot be proven and it would set a bad precedent for the university to hand back the painting that is worth millions of dollars. What do you think? Did you know you can go and see a painting that was stolen by the Nazis and is now hanging in a gallery in Norman? I ve seen that painting. Now that I know this if it s true should I think differently about this beauty? Should I reconsider the story since I better understand how and why it s here? We see this situation with Xerxes. It s a great party, but all is not well. Something is off, though the party attenders may not know it. They don t know it because they love the party. They re insiders. They re in this culture, so they re participants in it. We can be too. Xerxes calls for Queen Vashti to make an appearance. It seems so lighthearted as the author writes, On the seventh day, when the heart of the king was merry with wine, he commanded [several attendants] to bring Queen Vashti before the king with her royal crown, in order to show the peoples and the princes her beauty, for she was lovely to look at. (1:10-11) Many commentators think what he s asking is for the beautiful queen to show up in her crown and just her crown. Is that wrong? She s a beautiful woman. She s the queen of an all-powerful king who can do whatever he wants and command whatever he wants. Nothing bad is going to happen. What s the big deal. I think it s important to remember that this happens all the time. Still. Today. Think of bachelor parties. I think this still happens to some degree or other in sororities. If not all the way to this, pretty close and at least the concept is the same. 6 Queen Vashti says no. We don t know why she says no. Maybe she s had enough. She s reached the breaking point. She stands up for herself and puts her foot down. She s not a sex object. She has dignity and respect and wants to be treated like a person. Way to go Queen Vashti! We stand with her in her refusal and agree that she should say no according to our values. But not according to those of the world or those of the empire or those of the system she s in. Xerxes isn t quite as accommodating as he had previously appeared. It s always a lot easier to seem easygoing and goodnatured when you re getting everything you want, isn t it? But the minute something stands in your way, especially if it s something dear to your hear or at your bottom line or core value then you start to have big big problems. The author writes, At this the king became enraged, and his anger burned within him. What then transpires is a huge program to make sure nothing like this can ever happen again. He appeals to the laws, but he is the law. Queen Vashti has not performed her duties to please the king. What is to be done to her? Under the guise of some sort of justice, the verdict comes down that this cannot ever ever be allowed and that it s the principle of the thing. Not only has Queen Vashti done wrong, but this could become just the tip of the iceberg. We might have a huge huge problem on our hands. We may not be able to continue this behavior in our own homes! What if women stood up for themselves! So the king makes a law that actually tells this story all over the world (and is continued to be told). If Xerxes had been embarrassed that he d been so disrespected in his own palace, now that story is being told all over the world and more and more people know that the queen stood up to the queen. In being made an example of, Queen Vashti proved to be a possible inspiration. And then you have to think would this work? We can shuttle the queen out of sight and punish her, but can we make a law that all women must give honor to their husbands, high and low alike. If they don t, will the husbands be able to get rid of their wives? Well we can do that. And we have done that. And it works to some degree. And we all know that it doesn t work. You may get some level of compliance, but you will not get honor. You ll get smirks and smiles and a whole system that looks like deference on the outside but it actually filled with even more disrespect and more dishonor until it all comes crashing down. The king sent a decree that every man must be the master in his own household and speak according to the language of his people. The master of the household we ve been talking about. The language part is getting at the idea of the political and sociological implications of controlling people. Language is a way of assimilating people and establishing control. That s still true today too. In his commentary on Esther, Ian Duguid calls this section The Empire Strikes Back. I love that title, and it s so true. The empire cannot handle any degree of disobedience or forms of debate or discussion. Its ways are absolute and its decrees are absolute. Its parties are fun until someone has to show up naked. Then we have some problems if someone doesn t just go along with it. By why wouldn t she? This had to be par for the course. It had to be normal in the palace, in the empire, at least at the top. Yet on this day Queen Vashti refused, and that set in motion a whole course of actions and events. Xerxes isn t a good guy. He s not a good king. He s corrupted. Remember that this is true. It s still true. We want our leaders to be kind and just, but they can t be. None can be. The whole reason God s people are in this situation is because the people and its leaders have themselves strayed from God. It s not just a problem with the Persians, though it is that. It s a problem with people. God had told his people not to stray from him and his commands. One example is Deuteronomy 28:15, 36, 64: However if you do not obey the Lord your God and do not carefully follow all his 6 Kappa at OU has a tradition where the seniors come to a party (just with other girls in the house) topless and with decorated breasts and body paint to celebrate another successful rush. This last year nine of them lined up to take a picture and send it to a friend who was still at her summer internship. One of the girls sent it to her boyfriend and he posted it to totalfratmove.com. It went viral and a couple of the girls' dads sued.

11 commands and decrees I am giving you today, all of these curses will come upon and overtake you The Lord will drive you and the king you set over you to a nation unknown to you or your fathers Then the Lord will scatter you among all nations, from one end to the earth to the other. God has judged his people. Xerxes has huge problems. His empire looks so good. It s so tempting to think he has it made. We look at the next step up and think that will do it for us. We long for the better house in the better neighborhood with the better school. We love more and more. As we ve gotten into our new church building, I started receiving magazines for every type of business and furniture and a million other needs. I didn t even know I wanted these. One of the is from ULine, and they sell everything industrial. Boxes, soap dispensers, garbage cans, mops, floor mats. I have looked that magazine so many times, and there is so much in there I want. I want to live in the empire. I want to serve a king who will take care of me. I want to have a different goblet for every drink and I didn t even know I wanted that! So my heart is corrupted too. We ll see that the goodness in Esther isn t from good people. It s from a good God taking care of a bad people, at the best an ignoring people. He s working his ways in his providence. It is so often unseen and it doesn t feel directly connected to anything the people are doing. But he s at work. He was at work back there in Café Plaid with me. I can see it now. He was at work as we unfold the story in Esther. The author shows us. He is at work in your life as you sit and wonder in class, at work, in the coffee shop, in the car, in line, in bed, in the shower, in the million other moments when you aren t thinking about God at all and are wondering about whatever it is you re wondering about. He s there. He s at work. Jesus is our kind king, a controlled king, a compassionate king. He loves his people and treats them with respect and dignity. He serves his bride. He doesn t humiliate her. He rules over and defends her and defeats all of her and his enemies. In fact, he died for his bride, his church. She submits to him out of love for him, not his edicts, though his rules are good ones. Jesus the king does spread out a banquet. It s not especially lavish as we think about it. You may be underwhelmed. For us today it is simply bread and wine. But that speaks to a much bigger and deeper reality. Those consecrated elements become his spiritual body and blood by faith, and we by faith commune with him. So it s a feast based on his love and sacrifice. It s profound in its simplicity. He doesn t consume his people. He feeds them himself. This is intimacy. The king shares himself and he extends his kingdom. It s not an empire really. It s a kingdom, or at least that s the way he describes it. It s all over the world, all throughout time, in all types of people in all walks of life. It ranges around. Men and women, old and young, all races, all tribes, all tongues, all IQs, all personalities, all jobs and vocations. It s all the same and all different. When we pray Your kingdom come, your will be done we are pledging allegiance to this king and his kingdom no matter what happens to our mayor, our governor or our President. Or our bank account or our grade point average or our career track or our family life. What I think is amazing in this book is that God is working with people like this, and that means with people like you and me. It s not all always Genesis and Exodus. Creation and floods and patriarchs. Thunder and lightening and the plagues and the parting of the Red Sea and manna and quail and the 10 Commandments. It s not all Daniel in the lion s den with visions and prayers and miraculous interventions. Sometimes it feels way more like Esther. Stuff is going on that just seems pretty normal. Your business starts. Your business fails. Your boss is demanding. Your kids need to get to practice. Your grandkids are a pain in the neck. You cannot get the chainsaw to work on the day you have set aside to work in the yard so you cuss and fume and feel defeated Of course there are times and places where things are way more dire than that. People are displaced and oppressed or enslaved and beat down by the system or with their own choices or by forces set against them. This book of Esther is very dear to people. They have held it close. If you know how the story turns out, can you see why, right? Jews in Germany and Nazi-occupied countries and in concentration camps would cling closely to the Torah, the books of the law. This formed their people and their concept of God. And they would hold close to Esther. You could find Esther written on the walls at the camps. People would gather to quote the book of Esther every day in a circle. Very often it doesn t feel like God is saying anything. Why isn t he?! Where is he?! Friends, there is hope. There is hope today. Esther reminds us of hope. He is saying something! It takes a longer view than today or this year or honestly even this life. There is a king and a kingdom and we don t have to be perfect to be blessed and enter into that goodness. Because of the Great Reversal, we can have hope that someone listens, and someone cares and someone is at work to make all things right. That person is Jesus Christ.

12 Esther 2 I met Tom in Lisbon, Portugal. He was a missionary and church planter in that city, and I was on a trip talking about campus ministry and how that might look if we worked together. Tom loved the city, he loved people, he loved the church and most of all he loved God. How did he get there? Do you ever wonder how missionaries end up being called to the work? If so you should ask them. Make it a practice to take an interest in people who do interesting things. Ask a missionary about his or her calling, about what that life looks like, about those struggles. How do you get to the place where you move your family and career so that everything is for God and his church? If you asked Tom, he d tell you. He d tell you to go to jail. When Tom was 17 he was arrested. Not good. He sat in a rustic, small town jail in North Carolina. He didn t have a tv, a newspaper, a magazine, a gym or a yard. Boredom eventually won out and he picked up the only thing he did have a Gideon Bible in the room. He wanted to see how the story ended, so he read the last two chapters of Revelation. God changed his heart that day. He was converted. That s how you become a missionary. Well, not exactly, right? We may not like that advice. But the Bible is filled with stories like this. How do you become one of the greatest leaders in all of history? Paul persecuted and murdered Christians. Is that how? How can you be one of the greatest rulers and influencers of God s people? Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers. Is that how? Is this what we re teaching our kids?! Maybe not. But look at where Tom ended up. God is at work. He was at work. Even in idiotic 17-year-olds. Even in idiotic 43-year-old pastors like me. We don t promote heading that way and that direction as the best life or godly life. But have to remember that in some way at least we all have this same story, this story of rescue even when we weren t looking for it. Esther is a strange book, but it s so much like our lives. We don t always see the way things are fitting together. We don t often see the way things are fitting together. Our lives are like that all the time. City Pres is like that. The story of how you met is like that. What if Julie hadn t been sitting at the cafeteria table that one night our sophomore year? What if she hadn t been standing there the next morning to walk to class. What if it hadn t been the same class? What if she hadn t batted her eyelashes that night to ask me to help her study for statistics? What if I hadn t fallen for it? This week I sat in coffee shops, lunches and meetings. I spent time at Devon Tower. I fed the meter. I worked out. I attended a party. I watched tv. I answered s. I what did I do all week exactly? Was God in any of that? I can go each day from one thing to the next and it doesn t appear in any way that these things are either connected or purposeful. Are they? Esther is a book just like that. It s a book that feels strangely similar to our own lives. Esther doesn t even mention God. No one prays. There aren t any visions. There s nothing about the temple. People don t seem to make many choices that even consider what God wants. These are a people in exile. They ve been assimilated. They are in hiding. So is God at work? Is God doing something? Is he here? It s important that Esther is in our Bibles. It has something really important to say. God isn t only the God of Exodus and Daniel. There are dramatic redemption miracle moments, but there are also the quiet profound important moments of providence where God saves his people through totally normal ways and means, through secondary causes and through the mechanics of history and even bad, bad choices. This is a story that takes place in the 480s B.C. It s not taking place in Israel. It s in Susa, which is a city in Persia that would be in modern-day Iran. It s written by an unknown author after the fact. That author is telling the story of God redeeming his people off the map. For no real reason. Not because they deserve it, but because he loves them and he has promised to be faithful even when they are not. Remembered Events After these things, when the anger of King Ahasuerus had abated, he remembered Vashti and what she had done and what had been decreed against her. (2:1) Thus opens chapter 2 in this story, the next movement. One of the themes of the whole book is remembering. Who remembers what and when. Let s remember: Queen Vashti hadn t wanted to be on parade for King Xerxes. She probably had many times before but on this day, she said no for whatever reason. It almost certainly was a sexual reason, but this wouldn t have been unusual. Vashti was a beautiful woman. She was the envy of everyone else. She took the room. She was stunning. And now she was an outcast. She d gone too far in just an instant and Xerxes banned her for life. She s not queen any longer she s Vashti. The advisors are often in charge in this story, and they scurry into action to take care of it. They had sent out a decree that tried to enforce male rule in every house, but which in reality made Xerxes and men look even weaker. Now they had to attend to Xerxes again. His appetite has to be satiated. He has to be around beautiful women every second. He has to be powerful. So they need to get to work. So when Xerxes remembers Vashti, he doesn t seem to care about her. He moves on to other women, to other things, to other decrees, to the next moment.

13 Look at the end of the chapter. We hear something else about remembering. Or we get the background for something that will be forgotten and then remembered again in the end. It s what seems like a tiny piece, but ends up to be really important. It s a detail that becomes a linchpin. Read 2: Mordecai is Esther s uncle, and he s an official in the king s court. We ll hear more about him, but for now we know that after Esther had become queen, Mordecai had learned of a plot to kill Xerxes. He d been faithful to the king, and had reason to since his niece was the queen. He reported the plot and the whole affair was thwarted and foiled. That dutiful deed was recorded in the book of chronicles in the presence of the king. But it was forgotten. What was supposed to happen was Xerxes would award him a medal of honor or an extra day off or something to acknowledge this important faithfulness. King Xerxes doesn t remember Mordecai s good deed. He forgets. You ve been forgotten. No one cares that you tried hard and worked hard. No one noticed that you ran that extra mile. No one even saw what you did. Does anyone care? You ve been remembered but for the wrong thing. You keep being remembered for that shameful moment. It s never forgotten. It s never dropped. It keeps on being brought up. Over and over and over. Friends, I want to remind you of something important. I want you to remember something. God is not like King Xerxes. Much of this whole story is to contrast what God is like in contrast to what the King of Persia is like. God does forget. But that s because he casts your sins as far as the east is from the west, as he describes in Psalm 103:12. Your guilt and shame are dealt with. They re done in Christ. But God also remembers. He remembers his covenant with his people. He doesn t only forget. He doesn t dismiss. He isn t too busy. His timing may not be your timing, but this whole book is about God remembering his people even when they aren t remembering him. God is a God of covenants, and that means he remembers and he keeps his promises to his people. You may have liked the XMen Days of Future past movie. I enjoyed it. But it played a common comic book trick. It went back and redid time. I personally don t find that very appealing, and I think it s a cheap way to go because if you think about it, it robs the people of the drama of the redemption. After they get rescued and saved, only one person knows what happened. History has been wiped away. That s not the way it s going to be. Your sins are not remembered because they have been paid for in Christ. But you are remembered. Your history is telling the story of salvation. It s a story of rescue. You once were lost but now you re found. You were blind but now you see. I think we ll always remember that story. It will get clearer and sharper, not duller and dumber. But you have to tell it. You can t hide it away. You can t just will yourself to forget those painful memories and think that will work. You have to talk about it and tell that story. That s what Esther is it s redemptive remembering that gives us hope in the future because we see God worked in the past. Hidden Beauty My friend Kara can tell you how to get a new phone. Here s how she did it. She and her husband Blake were fighting. She was pregnant and ten days past her due date, so she wasn t in the best mood or frame of mind. In one fight Blake gave her the silent treatment and she was so mad she picked up his phone and threw it on the ground, which of course shattered it to pieces. She felt justified, but she also felt mortified that it had come to that. So she took it to the apple store to make it right and get him a new phone. They took pity on her, and took her to the front of the three-hour line. They gave her the replacement phone, and when she went to the register they didn t charge her anything for it. The receipt said, For surprise and delight. So that s how you get a new phone, right? Go back and read Esther 2:5-18 again. This is our first introduction to both Esther and Mordecai in the story. Remember we re in Iran, way outside of Jerusalem. The author tells us about Mordecai and gives us his lineage and history, so we can remember he didn t just pop up out of nowhere. He s there because things have gone wrong in the history of God s people. They d been carried away from Jerusalem among the captives. He has a niece named Hadassah. That s her Jewish name, her real name. But everyone called her Esther, and that s what she s called the rest of the story. It wouldn t have been uncommon to have two names, but it is unusual for the Bible to keep referring to her with her pagan name when she has a perfectly good Jewish name. It s being highlighted. This book is painting the picture of a people who have given in and given up. They went into hiding and then they forgot who they were. It s not so much that they are living double lives. It s really that they should be very committed to the Lord and living in Persia, but they picked one and it s not a life that s being lived God s way. King Xerxes advisors start this beauty pageant. He s picking virgins. Before we get too upset about the gender inequality (which is there to be sure), do realize that he would have picked young boys to be castrated eunuchs to serve him. The boys aren t in view in this story, but the girls are. And they would have been girls, not women. 14-year-olds. It was a different world, and the king was king and he could do whatever he wanted so no one would have thought twice about this. It just was the decree and the expectation. The edict went out, and the girls were assembled and the preparations were begun. Hegai was in charge, and it was his job to fatten them up. Skinniness wasn t a virtue, and it wasn t until recently in our world s history. If you were thin it meant you were poor. So people wanted to get fat and plump. So these girls were stuffed. They had every makeover possible. Think about your make up drawer and then multiply that by a million. Think about how long it takes you to get ready in the morning and then think about doing only that for a year. It might sound nice for a day spa or a makeover for a special occasion, but what if that was the only thing you were judged on, and you were

14 in competition with everyone else? There wasn t a talent portion or a special question to answer. It was how you looked naked and how you were expected to perform in bed. It doesn t sound very good anymore. However, it was also the best life some of these girls could have ever expected. Remember that things like this still happen all the time. This isn t that far-fetched. And you might all still be able to get a sense of what this might be like. Can you feel this, ladies? Can you feel that love hate relationship with beauty? With being stared at? With the power and the weakness that comes from that? Esther was beautiful. That s why she was chosen. That s why she advanced. The author accentuates this by writing, The young woman had a beautiful figure and was lovely to look at. She doesn t seem to have much else going for her, but if a girl has her looks, she might as well use them. She was taken. The young women were gathered, and Esther was taken into the king s palace and put into custody of Hegei, the beauty makeover man. It doesn t sound like she went by force. Esther shouldn t have gone. Mordecai shouldn t have let her. Both could have run away or tried something, anything to get out of this. The very best case scenario is that Esther might be married to an uncircumcised pagan, and that contradicted everything in faithfulness to God s law. Mordecai in fact didn t keep her from this, but pointed her to it, and also he told her to keep quiet and hush up and not tell anyone about her faith and heritage. What advice is that?! Do the wrong thing, and don t tell anyone really who you are. They author is presenting a story where the people are caught up, swept away, taken by things beyond their control and they don t seem to care about it even. There isn t any internal wrestling with this. Esther completely cooperates with this whole plan to compromise and conceal her identity. Fidelity to God and his law are out the window. They re not even in view. There is a passivity here that is just startling. 7 Surely there are reasons. We all know that Christianity will cost you your life in certain Muslim countries. Many choose to keep quiet about it, and there is a debate as to whether that is best. I m sure many of us might struggle with this similar issue in our jobs. Should we say something if it might cost us our tenure? If it might cost our promotion? Can I say no to the soccer tournament on Sunday and let the team down and lost my spot? Can I afford to give any money away, much less 10%? Can I let other moms see that I discipline my child? What s going to happen? How have you answered that question and handled that situation? Esther and Mordecai chose to fully enter into the whole culture without reservation. The cosmetic industry generated $55 billion in revenue in 2012 in the United States. 8 I m not sure beauty pageants are wrong per se, and we in our church have a friend who just won Miss Oklahoma (woohoo!), but it s also what gives us Honey Booboo. This whole deal is like The Bachelor, a ton of willing women schmoozing for some kisses and real love from a man who thinks this is how you find a wife or get some good attention. We love it. We re in! This can work! Xerxes cares about their beauty and the bedroom. That s about it. This is what Esther s entering into. Women, can you remember your first day of high school or junior high? Girls, can you remember? All the things you wondered about. If you were popular or pretty or weird or would fit in? The pressure you felt? The trauma of it all. Think of a year of preparation for a night with King Xerxes, the king of the world. Yikes. Honestly I m not exactly sure what she should do. I m not really exactly blaming her. It s tough to figure out what living Biblically means all the time. Some of us like to think it s easy and we can do it. But you should read the books of those who poke fun at this concept by trying to live biblically. One guy tried to live out the Old Testament literally. He had a tough time with his wife with clothing and her cycle and food and touching. He had a tough time in trying to find someone to stone for adultery but he pulled it off one day when he asked a stranger if he d ever been divorced. When he received the affirmative answer, the lightly hit him with a tiny pebble, so he could scratch that off his list. Another woman tried to live out biblical womanhood, and she kept on finding that really difficult when you listed out all the thing you had to do, or at least were suggested. It s all funny and not funny. Where do we shop? Where do we put our kids in school? What should we watch? What should we wear? What should we say? How shall we then live? Surely we don t think we have this perfectly sorted out? Do we? Are we still interested in these topics? It seems like we should always be humbly discussing them. We need to be thinking about how we can best design and implement thriving cities, streets and schools. How our churches can be better flourishing in breadth and depth. How our budgets and schedules can reflect our priorities and goals. We get worn out. We call it all good. We back off. We talk about how judgmental people are as a way to get them off our backs. We blame the government and the credit card companies and the beauty culture and the fast food chains and we don t ever stop and look at ourselves and our own hearts. How should we live in this world when it doesn t always feel like God is talking, or perhaps it doesn t feel like we re listening. These are good questions, fair questions. They re important questions. I think we need to talk about them. Just this week I helped someone install a porn blocker on a computer. It would be awesome if that never had to happen. But it does need to happen, and because that s true it s awesome when someone says, I need help. I don t want to live that way anymore. I want to change. And then takes that step. I don t berate them for getting to that point. I accept the sadness, the shame and the guilt and am thrilled at the repentance, confession and steps to change for freedom. There are reasons things shouldn t be this way, but here we are. In Esther, some of God s people are in Susa. They re in hiding. They re fully participating in the Persian culture without much push back. Without any pushback. 7 Now when Mordecai heard the king s herald announcing that whoever had a daughter or sister should bring her to the king to have intercourse with her an uncircumcised heathen, why did he not risk his life to take her to some deserted place to hide until the danger would pass? He should have been killed rather than submit to such an act Why did Mordecai not keep righteous Esther from idol worship? Why was he not more careful? Where was his righteousness, his piety, and his valor?... She [Esther] too should by right have tried to commit suicide before allowing herself to have intercourse with him [Xerxes]. Quoted in Barry Walfish, but found in Jobes, p

15 Let s go back to Tom Hudson. I want to go back because I shortened the story to make it work. The reality is much different and more confusing. Tom was sitting in his jail cell and reading Revelation. To that point he d grown up Catholic, and he thought we was good. He was one of the good guys. Misunderstood for sure. A victim of the justice system. But as far as religious life goes, he was good. But when he read Revelation that day, he saw something different. He saw a lake of fire and a judgment and a holy God who hates sin. Tom s relationship to God wasn t personal. It was the priest and the sacraments. And now he saw that that wasn t enough. He was one of the liars the Bible talked about. Tom went to trial had his sentence reduced to 18 months and five years probation. After jail, Tom says he knew he was going to hell and he was a more chastened criminal. He didn t know what to do about it, and he didn t try to do much about it. It was 18 months later, that a surfer friend shared with him that God loved him and had sent his son Jesus to die for him and pay for his sins if he would trust in him and have faith in him. Tom had heard that before. It wasn t the first time. He d heard it from the priests and the nuns. But up to that point it had been very general. It has been the sins of the world. It had been a concept, an idea, a religion. That day, his friend told him that Jesus had done it for him. That he would have only done it for him. That it was personal for him. Tom had used drugs with this friend. But this friend had been changed, and Tom could see it and that s why he was listening. That s why he trusted Christ that day. That s why he crossed over from death to life. He had read about the bad news in the Bible and he heard about the good news from a person who told him that story of rescue. That s a crazy story. Adam and Eve plunged our world in sin. Noah wasn t a good person. Samson was a bad guy. Would you honestly promote the life of David as an example to follow? These are bad people we re talking about. They re not lives to emulate. And this is where we find ourselves. Don t do drugs! Don t. It s not best and it s not good. Don t sleep around. It will hurt you and every relationship you have. Don t look at porn. Don t abuse alcohol. Don t use people. Don t speed. Don t lie. Don t steal. Don t overeat. Don t obsess about body image. Don t gossip. Don t disobey your parents. Don t hide it under a bushel. Don t break the Sabbath. I could rattle these off all day long. The Bible is filled with them. There are so many, and they re all true. They are bad for us. They break relationship with God, people and the world. They destroy. The devour. The hang around and kill slowly like radiation. They re sneaky like cancer and they attach to good things to make them bad and evil and wrong and painful. The wages of sin is death. That s true. No matter what. Sin brings death. It brings death to two year olds. It brings death to fifty year olds. But the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus. Have faith in him. See yourself in him. Put your trust in him. He remembers. Let him remember and take care of it. He will pay the penalty. He will take the judgment. He will take the death. If you are in Christ, he has taken it. Remember those things, so you can find them in Christ and tell that story so you can forget yourself. If you try so hard to never remember, try so hard to forget you ll always remember and it won t go away. Tell the story and then you won t be owned by it. Christ will own it for you and you ll be free. Find your beauty in him. Join his parade. It s not the parade that corrupts beauty. It doesn t hide away the reality of faith. It brings it out and then trusts in his assessment. The world may find you ugly and awkward, but you have beauty and strength in Christ. You are his bride and he is crazy about you. He loves you. You can have confidence without shrinking away. It may not all go your way, but there is satisfaction in Christ. Don t hate beauty. Don t give in to beauty as the world sees it. Find beauty in Christ, the one who was made hideous so we could be whole and cleanses and purified. It s a really strange beauty contest that way then, isn t it? The beauty is found in the transformation in and through the death and suffering. God works with people like this. 9 With Esthers. With Mordecais. With those in exile. He works with Americans and Oklahomans. He works with those in public school. He works with judgmental Pharisees. He works with gay people. He works with the poor. He works with Communists. He works with obese and anorexic. He works with those in jail. He works with you. He sees you. He s not hiding. He is faithful to his covenant in Christ. Find yourself in him. Let him tell your story. Give over to his beauty, his way, his love, his affection, his attention. Believe in Christ today. God has providentially brought you to this place today. What is the story he is writing after all? 9 This book shows that against all odds the fate of a marginalized people within a hostile world is reversed. These marginalized people not only survive, they rise to power within that world. The story is not about conflict between any two hostile peoples, it is about the hostility of the world against God s people. Against all odds, in some inscrutable and mysterious way, the events of human history work to fulfill the promises of the covenant the Lord made with his people at Sinai. While God may be good to all his creatures in general, he is in special relationship of protection and preservation with is covenant people. Jobes, 103

16 Esther 3 He just couldn t take all the freedom and creativity. He wanted order. He wanted things in the right place at all times. He was the ultimate micromanager. You may know him as President Business, but the rest of the world knew him as Lord Business. This is the evil genius in the Lego Movie, and he s a bad guy. He sends out his Micromanagers and his eventual goal is to freeze everything in place with his secret weapon the Kragle. The movie was a smash hit. It s incredibly good. And it s about the Power of One. One special person, which in fact is and can be any and each of us. It s like a cat poster You are special. One of the messages from the Lego Movie is that we shouldn t just all go along with the pack all the time. Rules are good and important. They do and can help us. But they can also enslave us, especially if we give in to each and every rule without any thoughtfulness or introspection. Especially if the rules were made by tyrants like Lord Business and we don t know any better so we just go along forever. Especially if the rules are made by tyrants like me. Our freezer can only hold so much. I like Ben & Jerry s ice cream. Only so much can fit in the freezer, so I have claimed them all for myself. I don t ask for much. Just this one little thing. But rulebreakers! keep getting into my stash and leaving half-eaten cartons of my stuff. This chaos must stop! It ends here! Esther is a book that s really important for us. Here we are living our daily lives. We have messy apartments and houses and rooms. We go to work. We go to school. We re constantly disappointed. We re sometimes looking forward to something. We re worried about our health. We re wondering if anyone likes us. We re unsure if we ll get up and go to church or if that s something that is important or if anyone cares whether we go or not. People aren t friendly. They are friendly, but it s not enough. We re depressed. We re stuck. We re apathetic. We re just trying to make it. We can t stop sinning, or else we re unaware that that is true because we ve been trained as moralists. Are we special? Is God listening? Is Lord Business going to have his way? The events that we read about in the book of Esther took place in the 480s BC in the city of Susa, which is in our modern-day Iran. Some of God s people had been displaced and never moved back to Jerusalem and Israel. Some of them remained behind in Persia, probably for both good and bad reasons. One them was named Hadassah, but she went by the name Esther. She kept her Jewish lineage, traditions and faithfulness hidden completely from view. Somehow, in rather unlikely circumstances, she became Xerxes queen, the Queen of Persia. This isn t just her story. It s the story of God s people, and I m suggesting that it s your story. It s important to know that God is writing this story too. It s not all prayers and prophecies and miracles. In fact, there aren t any of those things in Esther. It looks remarkably like normal life, well as normal as queens and kings of Persia can be. Chapter three is a dark moment in the life of God s people, and we need to take some time to look at it specifically and see what it says for us. The Huge Problem of Sin Haman, Mordecai, the Jews and You Esther has been queen now for about five years. At the end of chapter two, we hear of a short but important episode where Mordecai (Esther s uncle) had uncovered a plot to kill the king. He reported it, and his duty was duly recorded, but he was not rewarded. We skip ahead that five years to the start of chapter three. Without any transition, we read that Xerxes picked a man named Haman for advancement up the chain to an important position. We re left to think that it should have been Mordecai that had that position. He d been forgotten. He d been passed up and passed over. Surely that s happened to you. We all think, It should have been me. And sometimes we re right. But we weren t picked for the date, for the job, for the internship, for the team, for the award. Is God still in charge? Is he still ordaining what is right? For you, for me, for Mordecai? We don t know much about Haman, but we start to learn about him. For whatever reason, Mordecai refuses to bow down to him. We re not told why this is, and it seems a little strange. Mordecai has been perfectly compliant all along the way thus far. He s followed the rules and kept his head down. So something is up. It may be that he s fed up and had enough, so he says no way. That s what Queen Vashti did too back in chapter one. She was booted out. Now Mordecai won t bow and pay homage, and the servants talk to him about it and still he says no. They go to Haman to tell him about the non-compliance, and we get a hint that there was something ethnic or religious about it. Verse four says, For he had told them he was a Jew. When Haman hears this he freaks out. It taps into something deep and evil in his heart. Haman was filled with fury. But he disdained to lay hands on Mordecai alone. So, as they had made known to him the people of Mordecai, Haman sought to destroy all the Jews, the people of Mordecai, throughout the whole kingdom of Ahasuersus. (3:5-6) The rest of the chapter is the mechanics of that plan. Haman throws dice called pur in the singular and purim in the plural which land on a certain day for the decree to go out and another one for the penalty to be exacted. Haman takes his plan to Xerxes and lays it out for him. It s maniacal. It s vague. He talks about the Jews different laws. That s never been a problem. In fact the Persians were known for their accommodation of other people and customs, which made it easier for them to assimilate people into their kingdom without as much resistance. Esther and Mordecai haven t been even trying to keep Jewish laws or customs, at least not that has been talked about in the book. This is an entirely different situation than Daniel and his friends, the ones that refused to bow down to worship the king or eat the food they were given. Esther s not balked at one single thing along the way. We don t know if the other Jews in Susa or Persia have followed her and Mordecai s approach or not. They ve been good citizens, but no matter.

17 This isn t about good citizenship. Haman says they ve gone too far. He tells Xerxes that if they are exterminated, their valuables could be collected and 10,000 talents of silver could flow into the treasury. Records show that a year s income would yield about 15,000 talents, so if the king could get 10,000 in one swoop with one easy decision, then he s for it. It s pragmatic, and who cares about these people anyway? The king gave Haman his signet ring. That meant Haman had all of the king s power, wealth and authority (I mention this in the weddings I perform). It s a profound moment. The king and Haman sit down for a casual but profound drink (3:15), and the king says to Haman, The money is given to you, the people also, to do with them as it seems good to you. The scribes wrote out the official edict and it went out all over the land, in all the languages to all the people. Not everyone was happy about it, but what can you do? There must have been reasons and they all knew what would happen if it wasn t obeyed. The decree held these instructions: To destroy, to kill and to annihilate the Jews, young and old, women and children, in one day, the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, which is the month of Adar, and to plunder their goods. (3:13) We ve promised to try at least to present the real and full story of Christianity, and to deal with all of life and not just the pretty parts. That s easier to talk about than to do. Esther 3 is going to force us to look right at pervasive and far-reaching evil at least for a few moments. As I ve read this chapter over and over this week I ve been depressed. This is a decree of full-out genocide, so I ve been reading about that topic all week. So you can imagine how I ve felt. These aren t ancient stories. They re recent stories. There are millions upon millions of people living in our world right now who have lived through these stories. There are survivors. And there are millions upon millions of victims. I understand some of this is somewhat debatable. I d encourage you to look into it yourself if you d like to substantiate the numbers and learn more about it. A simple wikipedia search will yield the results I m discussing here. The Bosnian Genocide took place during the Bosnian War from The ethnic cleansing campaign took the life of over 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys. That was in 1995, not 20 years ago. Only 8,000 died. The Rwandan Genocide was far, far worse, but happened at about the same time. In 100 days in 1994 (April 7 to mid July), 500,000-1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed. That represented 20% of the population of the nation and 70% of the Tutsis living in Rwanda. The Hutu population had been armed and preparing for months and were told to begin your work and spare no one including babies. The goal was to kill every living Tutsi. Hundreds of thousands of people complied with these orders and killed their fellow Rwandans of a different tribe. This 20 twenty years ago. If we go a little farther back to the 1970s, we learn about Pol Pot and Ta Mok organizing a mass killing of 1.7 million Cambodians of suspect ideology groups. Stalin and Hitler stand above the rest though. I won t spend too much time because it s just too terrible and I don t want to just skim by the horror. Estimates are rough. Stalin died in He is estimated to be responsible for million deaths. 6-8 million of those are from organized crop failures which led to large scale famines especially in Ukraine. The rest were terror campaigns million people were killed in terror campaigns. The Holocaust is more well known because it was more systematic and less hidden. Between approximately 11 million people were killed. 1 million were children. Jews. Gypsies. Slavs. Communists. Homosexuals. Mentally and physically disabled. Two-thirds of the nine million Jews living in Europe at the time were killed. 100, ,000 people were direct participants in the planning and murder of the Holocaust victims. According to sources, there are approximately 500,000 Holocaust survivors still alive today, most of whom would be in their nineties. 120,000 of those live in the United States. Most of the Nazis who committed the war crimes were never charged. Let me lastly mention this staggering one: It s estimated that indigenous populations decreased over 90% from when Christopher Columbus landed. That goes from around 50 million down to 1.8 million. 10 It s terrible stuff. Just this week (June 25, 2014), news broke that the FBI has released another 168 children from sex trafficking slavery. We have friends in our church that have been rocked by murders. Deaths in the family. Tragic diseases. We could talk about this all day long. There is no end to the sadness, the disease, the murder and the genocide. It s tough. These are massive problems. They re going to make your hurt seem pretty insignificant. They re going to put your whiney #firstworldproblems tweets in perspective. Maybe when your barista messes up your order or is rude you should read Esther 3 before you post. In one sense I m glad these chapters are in the Bible. They are real life, and they remind us that things weren t okay then, just like they re not okay now. There s a degree of honesty that I can appreciate. God s people don t just skate through life then or now. But on the other hand this is problematic. It s just this type of chapter that keeps people from Christianity and the church. What in the world is God doing? Why isn t he at work? Why isn t he protecting his people? Why isn t he doing something about sin? Why did he let Haman get in this position in the first place? To be honest, I can t answer all of those questions. Some have tried. Most give up. Some think they re impossible ever to answer and therefore the conclusion has to be that there is no God. I think that evil is really evil. It s far far worse than you think. Evil isn t just being late or over-working or gossip or being mean. It s not just trying too hard or caring too much. It s not just one unconnected thing plus another one. It s important to tell the awful stories too. It s important to acknowledge the pain and heartbreak and loss. It s important to honor those who stories go untold, and to uncover them and name them. It s important to see it and feel it and sit in it, even if 10

18 we can t explain it. It s so deep. You can see it, and you have it too. They aren t these stories, but they are there. And these stories are here. Mordecai s refusal affected tens of thousands and maybe hundreds of thousands of people. Haman s decree went out and it would affected the same number, plus more since all the land was to enact this genocide. Sin isn t just a small, contained thing. It grows and kills. It seeks to destroy and devour. We should weep at these. We should erect memorials. We should tell the stories. We should write papers and paint paintings and sculpt sculptures and make movies. We should cry and fight and cry and fight and weep and wonder and hate this so much. The Strange Solution of Grace Haman, Mordecai, the Jews, Jesus and You It s a strange sermon to preach and a strange chapter to finish with. That s it. Chapter three ends with the word confusion. The decree has been sent out and received. Haman and Xerxes have a satisfied drink. Haman seems like he has a smug smirk on his face. And the city of Susa is thrown into confusion. Kill the Jews? All of them? Not just the ones I don t like? Not just the soldiers? The women? The children? The babies? My neighbor s family? I can t exactly tell you what to do with this. I can t explain it away. I can t tell you why God allows all of this evil to persist. I can t tell you why except that I have to try to trust him and walk with him and then hope and believe that all will be made well someday and that forever eternity with Christ must be must be must be worth so much more than the blink of pain which feels like so much to me right now. If I m honest, it just seems trite to say that. I can t hardly do it. I think I can only do it because I have to believe it s true and not because I m unwilling to look at the actual pain. I m looking at it and telling you I think it still has to be true that All Must Be Well. When I try to write illustrations about this, they just feel wrong. So I ll skip them. I do want you to see a few more things in this chapter. We can sit in confusion and anguish, and I think we should sometimes. We make a space for it. Although all must be well, it doesn t have to be all well all the time or else get out. Bring your anguish and your pain. Bring your confusion and your cynicism. But let s not stay there. There is a war going on. Haman is said to be an Agagite. This is a people that have been against God for centuries. They ve been at war with God s people. An original hearer would have known this, and would have instantly been very suspicious. The decree that went out. It went out and was received on the night before Passover. Was that a random event? Was that coincidence of the way gravity and force landed on the purim? On the very night before the Passover the greatest feast of God s people where they celebrated God s deliverance they received the news that they were to be exterminated. Passover wasn t going to be enough. They needed another deliverance, a new deliverance. However faithful or unfaithful they had been, Passover wasn t going to cut it. God was going to have to come through again in a different way. It s a huge set up. This whole story is a set up. Things look so so grim. A man and a woman have been put in a situation. They ve been unaware of all that s going on around them. By one s choice, they have been cast out. They re to receive severe judgment and death, and many will pay for what they ve done. They have a great adversary. For reasons that are really bigger than them and bigger than they could ever know or realize, he wants to destroy them and everything about them and everyone around them. So why did Haman do that? And why did Mordecai do that? And why did God do that? Why did God let all of those Native Americans all over North and Central and South America die? Why did God let these kids get captured and bought and sold? Why? I don t know. I do know SIN. I do know that sin brings about death and destruction and that although God supercedes and superintends and allows sin, he s not the author of sin. That we can go back and pin this on Adam and Eve in that garden of Eden. And we can see that Satan is real and John 10:10 says that, The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I think the devil is real and sin is real and both are terrible. I think they re terrible in individual ways, in ways that you and I get each and every day, or maybe we re oblivious to. After all, Haman s choice was just a choice. He didn t kill anyone. He just pushed a button. He just commanded and it happened. He didn t actually do it. After all, it s just people. Just a few people. It was expedient and prudent for him and Xerxes. Or it wasn t. Who really cares? The world doesn t care. Evolutionary processes don t care. What s one life over another. They ll die anyway. It s the survival of the fittest. And that s wrong. That s evil. The Bible says that every life matters and people are created in the image of God. It also says that if anyone has the right to take a life at any time, it s God. He is the one who has been wronged. Haman wasn t really wronged. Not extensively that we can tell. But God was. Each and every day by Haman and Esther and all of the Jews. By Haman. By Xerxes. By you and me. We are breaking his law all the time. That doesn t explain away genocide or murder or illiteracy or poverty or masochism or any injustice. I m not suggesting it does. But it is his right to judge, and he is both just and good. For you and me and every person. We don t deserve better. We have broken God s law and that s on us. Most of us don t have enough power to wield that much destruction, but you have to at least wonder what you d do if you had unlimited power and money and time and resources and really what choices you d make. You read all the time in the news and you watch all the time in the movies that people don t do well when they have that. We do so much with the little we already have. We re good at hate, especially the goodlooking socially acceptable hate. But it s still hate. Many have said that the biggest factor in the Holocaust was the shocking indifference of the ordinary citizen. People turned a blind eye and wanted to believe it was okay, and that s why it worked. Indifference. Do you ever confess your indifference? Your hate? Your creating your own rules for each situation so you can be the king and queen, the dictator of what is right and wrong?

19 And yet. And yet. It s not the end of the story, is it? It can be infuriating that God allows this to be the part of the story. It doesn t seem fair that these things happen. Some of them are on us. We can take some of the blame, though we often don t want to. But some of it is on others. Their sin affects us. Sin doesn t just stay to one person, but it gets on others. It spreads out and kills more. It spreads like a virus. It gets passed down. It becomes an engrained system, a pattern, a whole way, a culture. We should stand against Satan and his ways. We need to think of and explore all of the ways he works against God, and not be satisfied with easy or moralistic answers. Let s weep and cry and expose and work. And let s try at least to trust God. Satan is real and he s seeking to steal and kill and destroy. You may feel right exactly in that place today. But listen to this know this trust this avail yourself to this: I came that they may have life and have it abundantly. God came into this broken world. He didn t write it off or blow it up. He sent his son, which means he came himself. Galatians 4 tells us that he came at just the right time. He entered into history. He was watching and waiting. I don t know why he didn t come before. I don t know why he didn t come in Genesis 3. I don t know why he didn t appear in Esther 3. I don t know why he didn t show up faster to stop Herod from killing Jewish babies. I don t know why he allowed the Trail of Tears to end up its ethnic cleansing and forced relocation here in Oklahoma. I don t know why he doesn t come in an zap everyone. Why Haman even gets a moment in time. But then I wonder why he doesn t zap me in my worst moments. When I have hated so much, so deeply, so profoundly. He is more patient than I can understand. I have to trust his patience comes from his wisdom and goodness. I believe his patience and entrance also comes from his own suffering. He is well-acquainted with suffering. He suffers! He screamed and cried. He was affected by sin. It got on him too. He died. Dr. Gregory Stanton is a professor at George Mason University. He has identified ten stages of genocide. They are: Classification, Symbolization, Discrimination, Dehumanization, Organization, Polarization, Preparation, Persecution, Extermination and Denial. 11 I m asking you to care about these, and to do the hard work of indentifying them in your own heart and in your own relationships with people who aren t like you. Think about Those People. Men. Women. Races. Classes. Neighborhoods. And I d like to ask you to consider suffering with them. Somehow. That redemption means an entering into the very story and that the story can change if you sit in it. It may not change as fast as you d like. It may not change as you d like. In a wonderful sermon called A Beautiful Orthodoxy delivered at the Presbyterian Church in America s 2014 General Assembly, Pastor Ray Cortese told an illustration about an AA meeting. An author had been going to AA meetings to try to write about them and see if they might be right or wrong according to a Christian perspective. He was a witness to incredible, crazy redemptive stories in the midst of incredible, crazy painful moments. One stood out to him. A woman came for the first time. She looked like she had been beautiful but was torn up and used up and messed up. She talked about her life and how shameful and awful it was and how she didn t want to live on the streets any more, but she didn t know what to do to change or stop or even if she could. When she was done, the woman next to her didn t say much. She reached over and grabbed her and pulled her close into her huge breasts, and said, It s okay. You re with us now. That didn t fix that woman that instant. It didn t make the pain evaporate. It didn t erase her story. But it was an embrace of a knowing, caring, seeing, powerful, weak love. The abundance of shared poverty. The looking into the eyes of pain and death, and then pulling it close to share that pain and death, but to find resurrection love. One person can plunge a whole people into a death. And one person can stand for them and take the penalty as a representative so they can have life. It s the Power of One. You re special because he is and was special. He s not micromanaging. He s setting us free to abundance and love. That may and will still involve death. He doesn t pluck us out and onto a beach resort. That can be confusing, but it doesn t mean you can t have an eternal future of life in the happiness and joy of God. If he takes it all. If his death is for you. If his life is for you. If he can be your all in all. Haman is having his day. The day of redemption has not come yet in Esther. For us it is already and not yet. Jesus has come the first time, but not yet his second time. He will. He has come to set the captives free and he has done that in reality but not in fullness. It will come. Today, find yourself in him. Give him your future. Give him your past and present. Trust in Christ for yourself and for the world. Galatians 2:20 says, I have been crucified in Christ. It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me. And the life I live in the flesh I live by faith in the son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. God s providence is at work. He is preserving and governing all his people and all their actions. Proverbs 16:33 says, The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord. I d love to see things cleared up a little faster. I d like to see No Bad Days. That day is coming. It s not here yet. I d like to trust God, but I don t understand it. I know that I m a part of the problem, so I grieve sin in me and I long for redemption in my heart and in this world. The Lego Movie is a story of rescue for legos. For creativity. For the son in the story. And even for Lord Business. We need to see, tell and remember stories of rescue. God s people will get rescued. Not in chapter three, but later on. As we suffer through chapter three and the chapter threes of our lives we long for more rescue, we hope for more rescue. It s made all the more powerful when we are forced to deal with the fact that not everyone gets rescued. Yet God does rescue some. May he rescue even more, even you. May the Lord do his work and may each of us trust in him in all his ways. 11

20 Let Us Love And Sing And Wonder John Newton, 1774 Let us love and sing and wonder Let us praise the Savior s name He has hushed the law s loud thunder He has quenched Mount Sinai s flame He has washed us with His blood He has brought us nigh to God Let us love the Lord Who bought us Pitied us when enemies Called us by His grace and taught us Gave us ears and gave us eyes He has washed us with His blood He presents our souls to God Let us sing though fierce temptation Threatens hard to bear us down For the Lord, our strong salvation, Holds in view the conqu ror s crown He, Who washed us with His blood, Soon will bring us home to God Let us wonder grace and justice Join and point to mercy s store When through grace in Christ our trust is Justice smiles and asks no more He Who washed us with His blood Has secured our way to God Let us praise and join the chorus Of the saints enthroned on high Here they trusted Him before us Now their praises fill the sky Thou hast washed us with Thy blood Thou art worthy Lamb of God

21 Esther 4 He wasn t supposed to be in this position at all. In fact, he was explicitly told not to. Things like this just couldn t be done. They weren t appropriate or suitable. He needed to stop altogether. But he couldn t. He couldn t stop. He wrestled with it. He tried to stop. He said things he didn t mean. He did things he didn t know he could do. He hurt people. He was hurt. This passion actually drove him away from his community and into the seedy underbelly of Mexican lucha libre wrestling. You know the story of Nacho Libre, the great luchador. He didn t exactly have a straight meteoric path to fame and fortune. It was a meandering, painful (hilarious) journey. But in the end of course! he saved the very people who told him not to do it. He saved the orphanage, and all those associated with it. He got his girl and his stretchy pants. There are other examples of everything coming together. I personally cannot stand The Count of Monte Cristo, but it s an excellent example of how thousands (upon thousands upon thousands) of details come together to make sense at the end in one final swoop. Or The Prayer For Owen Meany. Or the Harry Potter series. And in many of these, the hero isn t exactly the hero we might have picked along the way. The hero is in the heroic place, the heroic path because of less-than-heroic reasons and means. The way he or she got there are suspect and circumstantial, but the person finds herself there nonetheless and a choice has to be made, a sacrifice has to be given, a life has to be paid. And that unheroic person saves the day. And if I m honest, I m not sure what I think about that story. I m unsure I want to promote stories where bad people save the day and make things right. It s a common story, and it s where we find ourselves in Esther 4. We re glad to get out of Esther 3. We had to have Esther 3. It s essential to our story to have a reason the people need to get saved and a villain to root against. It s important to have an impending doom and a ticking clock. And it s important to have a way to resolve the story, which is what the rest of the book starts to show us. Here s a spoiler alert God s people are saved in Esther! Hooray! Harry Potter dies. Darth Vader is Luke s father. Woody and Buzz save the toys. The dude abides. We tell these stories of victory and rescue, and they can tend to roll off of us. We re reading Esther 2500 years after it took place. The story is done. The outcome is set. This happened in the 480s BC in the city of Susa in modern-day Iran. God s people weren t in their place, their land. They d been cast out in judgment, and some had gone back to rebuild the temple, the city and the walls. But some had remained behind, and in this case one had been chosen to be the Xerxes queen. You have to remember that the story wasn t set for them when they went through it. They were true characters, and they didn t know the spoiler. We can look back on God s providence and it sometimes make sense. Oh, that s why I lost that job. Oh, that s why he dumped me. Oh, that s why we had that awful, awful conversation. Oh, that s why I went through such heartache. Oh, that s why I go the worst fifth-grade teacher ever! We can look back and see some of those, but we also still have to go through them, and it doesn t make sense at the time. It s not all wrapped up in 90 minutes with an American story resolution. We can sit in Act Two for decades. We can keep getting pounded by the same life lesson that never ever seems to end. Will the whining stop? Will the disobedience stop? Will I ever get motivated to change? Will she ever hear me? Will I ever be good enough? These are important questions. They re the questions we re asking and observations we re making in Esther as we consider how and why this book might matter for us today in They re Nacho Libre questions. They re Walter White questions. They re Lego Movie questions. Let s look and see how those issues spin out in chapter four. Power What we re going to ultimately see is that the power for everything God s power. That s true in Esther and it s true for us today. But it sure doesn t feel like we re talking about God s power along the way. We have to interact with all the other power and misplaced power in the book and in this chapter. The book really highlights the dynamics of power at play. Think of how much Haman overreacts when he hears the news that Mordecai won t bow down to him (3:4-6). Given the constructs of the story, it would make sense that Haman seeks to punish Mordecai or teach him a lesson, but instead he instantly decides to destroy all the Jews. When you start talking to people, look for this overreaction. You ll start to see it. You can talk about something that is a level three, but you ll get a level ten response. It will be hard not to notice. You may be able to do it then, or you may have to wait until a different time, but that s something to come back to talk about. It s like when you touch a bruise and then you get a scream. Something is going on. Investigate. Don t just let it go if you care about the person. Ask more questions. There is something deeper at play. You can see it with Haman, and you can see it in life as you talk to people too. You might even notice it in yourself. Esther has an interesting interplay with power too. She s been the queen for over five years, but it doesn t sound like she s been doing much. She s the queen! She s come from nothing to this power. She s living the royal fantasy. She d never seen diamonds in the flesh. She wasn t proud of her address. She d only heard about the gold teeth, the Cristal, the Grey Goose, the jet planes, the tigers and the ball gowns. Now she was royal. She wasn t just dreaming about it she was the queen bee. 12 But it wasn t getting her much after all. Now that she d gotten it all, it was a lonely life. She hears about Mordecai making a scene out by the king s gate. He s torn his clothes and put on sackcloth and ashes, which are the actions and the position of mourning and lamenting. He s still following the Persian rules because he s gone up to the 12 With apologies to Lorde.

22 king s gate, but he hasn t gone in that way (clothed in sackcloth). He wasn t the only one fasting and weeping and lamenting. All the Jews in every province were acting this way, as they should. But Esther is clueless about it. She s missing it. She hasn t heard anything about it. Her attendants inform her about her uncle and she tries to fix him, but he won t be placated so easily. They send messengers back and forth. We find out that Mordecai is extremely well-informed. He knows all about not only the decree but the exact sums of money that have been promised. He has inside sources. And he has a copy of the decree, which he sends over to Esther so she can see it. Finally she does see it. She s powerful but isolated. But she s not powerful at all, is she? She s living in a world where her power is mostly from the beauty and the bedroom, or at least that s what she s been told. She s a queen, but she s a plaything in the harem of the most powerful man in the world who is time and time again shown to be a fool. Xerxes can command armies, but he can t control his wife. He s at the mercy of his sexual whims. He s manipulated by his wise men who make him look like more of a fool all the time. We all know people like this. Smart fools. Strong weaklings. Wealthy beggars. Yet I wonder if you can see it in yourself. Some of your greatest assets can so easily and readily be your greatest downfall. There are always givens in any story. They are characteristics or circumstances or events that just are. You are short. You are tall. You are a man. You are a woman. You grew up divorced parents or together parents. You grew up in the country or the city. You come from money or poverty. You have ADD or you have OCD. We all have something. You may think of it as your weakness, but it is your power. And this something has a power in our lives. It can dominate us or it can isolate us. We can rage against it or we can ignore it. We can overcome it or it can overcome us. In Jeremiah 9:23-24 we read, Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him how boasts, boast about this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord. You can see in Esther 4 and in Jeremiah 9:23-24 that power (and wisdom and riches) wasn t getting anyone anywhere. What about you? Can you see that in your life? Can you boast in the Lord, or are you still boasting in what you have or don t have? Status As we see the story unwrap in Esther 4, we also need to think about status. This book deals with status and how both high and low status interact with each other. Esther had gotten to this point in her career by obeying Mordecai and keeping her identity hidden. Perhaps we can relate to that. There are things about ourselves we don t want anyone to know. We re unsure of how people will respond when they hear about a certain detail or life event in our past. Or our current addiction. Or our secret life. Or our same sex attraction. Or that we re secretly a Pharisee at heart and we hate people who don t follow the rules. Or that we re not a Christian even though we ve been raised in church. Or we are a Christian even though no one around us is one. Well, we re pretty sure we know how people will respond, and we know it won t be good. Or sometimes we forget to tell someone. Or it just never seems like the right time to say, Oh by the way, I know we re eating yogurt and heading to a movie, but here s something totally unconnected but that I figured now might be the best time So we let it go. And then months and years pass and it never comes up. Or we re afraid. We want to be accepted. We don t want things to change with this new information. This is low status. Esther s in this place. She s following orders. In this case it s Mordecai s orders. In our case, it might be society s orders. Or are parents orders. Or the orders of our internal self that says this information cannot be leaked and it won t do anyone any good, and in fact it will wreck every single thing ever. Esther s been playing this part well. So has Mordecai. They are dutiful Persians following all the Persian laws and customs. Esther had concealed her true identity to get to be the queen, and now she s gone five years as the queen without raising any questions. We re not sure that many people would have cared anyway, but we for sure know that some would. Haman certainly did, and it s got to be true that there are more Hamans out there. Esther s hidden herself for good or bad reasons. We re not sure. But she has fallen out of favor with Xerxes. She says that he hasn t called on her for a month. That s not good. He was smitten, but now he s moved on. If that is the case, would it make sense for Esther to do something so risky? She had been a favorite, and that would have been a much better time to make a dramatic request. But now, she s unsure. She seems like she s out of it. She s much lower than she had been, and she s dependant on a fickle, all-powerful king who could strike her dead at any moment even before he hears the request in the first place. Beauty and charm don t seem like they re going to cut it because she s gotten this far by doing to opposite of what she s now being asked to do. This makes me think of a few conversations I ve had with young freshmen women. These women were strong Christians who wanted to do something good and important with their lives and they had the idea of becoming the president of their sorority so they could be an influence for good and change things from the inside and the top. It s certainly true that one of the ways for a society or culture to change is when the top decision-makers are in place to make those changes. These are culture-shapers. Culture enactors. Policy makers. They re sorority presidents but also mayors and newspaper editors and authors and school superintendents and sheriffs and company CEOs. We need strong Christian men and women in those places to make key decisions for our good and the benefit of all people. Here s the trick, and it s the trick for Esther and you and me and for my freshmen women. How do you get to be in those positions? Most of the time people don t want someone like what we just talked about to ever ever get in charge. If you let on that you want to change things, you will encounter opposition and you ll never get to the top. So you re faced with that dilemma. Do you be true to yourself and therefore you risk never achieving what you think is best? Or do you lay at least a little lower so that you can get there and then reveal who you truly are once you get there? I think most of the time people who take the latter track get

23 changed along the way. There never is a good time to risk your true self, and you find out that your true self has changed along the way. By the time you are a senior and you re that sorority president, your freshman self has been lost. You ll call yourself wiser and more circumspect. You ll say that life is complicated and that you are being more realistic and that change is slow. And you might be right. But to be sure you ve changed. And most often when you ve changed, things don t change. Esther is considering giving up everything in order to save a people who she has not previously associated herself with. She s about to take her status, whatever it is, and give it all up to possibly save her uncle and show solidarity to her heritage people, a people who she never sees and doesn t know about. Will she do it? Should she do it? Would you? So here s the question: Can God use even that person? You ve changed. You ve sold out. You didn t speak up. You haven t been true. Your status is low or it s high or it s higher or lower than it should be. You ve done things you shouldn t have done. You ve said things you shouldn t have said. You ve thought things you shouldn t have thought. Maybe you ve gotten what you ve wanted or you haven t. No matter. Will God use even you? Wherever you are? Will he use me? Are you frozen and trapped by your status? This was a real question in Esther and for Esther, and it s a real question for you and me today. Will God use us when we ve failed so much? What will our status be? Would you risk your status in your community to say that you have stopped unbelieving? Or that you aren t so sure? That you are taking the low place and very possibly could be thought of a great big dummy for actually following Jesus and believing his way is best and that he was born of a virgin and lived a life of ministry and miracles and said what he said and died on a cross for our sins and was raised again from the dead and will come back some day. And that that actually matters and that you want to live your life according to that truth in a meaningful way? Doesn t that sound pretty crazy? Action It is crazy. It honestly is crazy. It s especially crazy if it isn t true. So is it true? Are these true things to believe in and follow? That has to be answered, or at least that has to be wrestled with and considered. Pure expedient morality will surely fail when stacked against tremendous pressure to do something more expedient at the time. The other reason it s crazy is because there hasn t been any indication of a devoted life from these people. Will God use bad people? That s a real question and it s the question of Esther. Some want to make her out to be a hero, but I don t think so. God uses people even like you and me and even like Esther. Neither Esther or Mordecai pray. There is weeping and fasting. There is mourning and tearing of garments. These are actions, and they re appropriate ones. But they just don t seem to be fixated on or rooted in prayer. Fasting and mourning go with prayer. They re expressions of a confused and desperate dependence on God. Mordecai asks Esther to intervene. It s an important ask and a call to action, but it too is tinged with a strange ominous tone. There s a hint of faith in there, but it s faint. He says that if she doesn t act the role of the mediator to stand in for God s people, someone will. For if you keep silent at this time, relief will and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father s house will perish. There s a bit of a threat in there. She will not escape. He seems to be saying that if she doesn t act, then she will either die with the rest of the Jews since she is one herself or they will be saved but she will not be. What does that even mean? Mordecai puts it out there in a movie-moment call to action: And who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this? I d rather he didn t ask it as a question but make more of a prophetic declaration. You were made for this! It s game time! Let s do this! Clear eyes, full hearts, can t lose!! Go get em!!!! She was made for such a time as this, but she doesn t fully realize it yet. And there is risk involved, which is a part of every risky endeavor, isn t it? Yes, it is. Esther gives some action instructions. No prayer but maybe an implied prayer. More fasting. She s going to fast as well, which is perhpas not a good plan when the king likes his women plumped up and what she s had to offer to this point has been her looks to win his favor. But maybe she s going a different direction with this whole thing. Her statement might sound confident but it s not. She says, Then I will go to the king, though it is against the law, and if I perish, I perish. I think this is more of a resignation to her fate. She s expecting to die. There is some bravery in that, but she s also been backed into a corner, and she according to Mordecai at least doesn t have any options. She could just keep quiet, and deny all association and then hope for the best. It s what we might do. We ve been complicit to this point, so maybe no one will notice. But she s deciding to stand up and say something. And then she ll die. I ve been a little hard on Esther, haven t I? I d like for her to be a more well-rounded person than what we often think of. I m comfortable with heroes with flaws, or at least I want to be. I think those are the only types of heroes we have. I think that we should seek out high positions at the tops of cultural mountains, and we should try to get there if we can. I don t want us to give up everything to do it, but I also don t want us to be so scared of mistakes that we don t make the attempt at all. God uses people like that. He uses Esther. He uses you. He uses me. He uses weird, crazy broken mistake-filled marriages like Esther s. I think it was a mistake for her to be queen at all. It was a mistake for Mordecai to even suggest it. It was a mistake for her to marry this man. We don t know if she liked him or didn t like him or if she liked her marriage or not. He uses weird, crazy broken jobs. I don t know what the queen of Persia is supposed to do. It sounds like her job description was pretty simple or that there weren t many tasks on her to do list. And yet, it was also pretty impossible to always stay beautiful and available and witty and compliant every second. Some of you have tried. It s not a good job in the end to be a sex object. Or a play thing. Or a mantle piece. Or a baby factory.

24 He uses weird crazy, broken people. He uses inactive ones. Un-prayerful ones. Ones who aren t reading the news or up on current events. He uses ones that have broken homes. Ones that are far from home. Ones that don t read the Bible. Ones that don t talk about who they really are. Ones that follow certain rules and break other rules and get them all mixed up as to which is which. He uses Pharisees and he uses prostitutes and he uses Esthers and he uses Nacho Libre and he uses you and me. That s because it s actually all about him. It s not about us. I m not saying that we should give up a virtuous life. We should seek out to follow God s laws and his ways and what is steadfast love, justice and righteousness because that s what he cares about. We should live lives of integrity and honesty and industry because that s how he is. So if we want action, let s look to the God of Action, the God of Status and the God of Power. God recommends the action of fasting, weeping and mourning. Those are good things, biblical things. They re things we should do. We should fast. We should weep. We should mourn. But in Joel 2, we read, Return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping and with mourning, and rend your hearts and not your garments. Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and he relents over disaster. (Joel 2:12-13) The God of Action calls us to return to the Lord and wring our hearts out. We have work to do in this city. We need to pursue art, politics, education, sports, business and teaching. We need to be faithful in the little things, in the small jobs, the back places, the third grade classroom, the end of the line, the dry-waller, the lawn mower, the bed-maker. We don t all have to be called to greatness every second like there is this some obsession with it that we have to have in order to make our lives count. We can come to the Lord with our hearts today. Wherever we are. In our marriages. In our singleness. In our good and bad and no jobs. In our sadness and in our gladness. He is the God of Status and Power. He is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He is the one who made and rules heaven and earth. He has a plan and isn t swayed by whims. He sets decrees that are enacted to the letter. He holds justice and yet wields it with grace and peace. That God of Status and Power took the lowest position. He befriended sinners. He walked with the lost and broken and lonely. He took the towel of a slave to wash the feet of his bride. He didn t banish her. He served her. He was asked to come as the Suffering Mediator. This wasn t presented to him as a threat at all. He didn t have to do it, although it was always in the will of God for him to do so. He chose to come to put himself in that position. And it wasn t just the potential of a possible death. It was inevitable. It was the only way for him to release the people. It wasn t a gloomy resignation. He took the cup willingly, after wrestling with the full measure of God s wrath that was to be poured out on him. God didn t have an arbitrary golden scepter rule. He said that none with sin could ever enter his holy presence. Jesus had never known that rule to be needed for him, but he was about to get all of sin and everyone s sin all poured out on him to die. To mediate. To get rent. To get annihilated. To get destroyed. To get killed. We talked about the strange solution of grace. The only way for us to have that John 10:10 abundant life is for him to get the John 10:10 death that Satan hands out to steal and to kill and to destroy. What you see in Esther then is a picture for what you see in Christ, though sometimes it s in a sort of reverse image way. Esther doesn t do the right thing, but Christ does. Esther wonders if she might perish but doesn t. Jesus knows he will and dreads it and it happens. Esther is a bit clueless about the fate of her people. Jesus is fully in the know and that is why he s there. Esther s unsure of the outcome, but Jesus knows it will work. He has come for such a time as this. He is the Mediator and the Redeemer of God s elect. Esther does in this story see that she can embrace the givens in her story. They are significant challenges. She will see how God uses her femininity, her vulnerability, her community, her position, her own story and her own possible death. She does eventually accept those and they become gifts where she gives over her life to provide salvation for many, most of whom she does not know. 13 God uses each and every detail to weave together something we can see and a story of rescue that we can see, know and even embrace as our own. 14 There is a mysterious faith here. It s not all in the Torah or the sacrifices or the exodus and covenant. It s not all liturgy or Calvinism or church government or a wonderful new building. Some of faith is going to happen in your bedroom. It ll be during a fight with your roommate or spouse. It will be at work when you have to decide to cheat or not. And you decided wrongly. And now you re caught and what will happen next? Or you ve lost the game and lost your temper. There is no breathless escape or safe land or wise ruler. Will God love you even then? What will he think of you? Will you be enough for him? I say yes in Christ. I say no in yourself. You won t ever be in yourself. It s not the wise man or the mighty man or the rich man. Unless those are all Christ himself. If he giving his power to you, his status to you, his action to you. Then you can be safe. All those things all came down and rested on him so you could be saved in Christ today. So you could return to him, no matter what givens you ve been given and no matter what story is being written. It s a risk to be sure. I hope you ll find your risk in him today. 13 Commentator Wells does a fantastic job on this in his work. 14 Every discarded element in the story now has vital power. The king s love of banquets, his reluctance to tolerate anything disagreeable, his pliability under the influence of wine, his inclination toward a compliant spouse, his inattention to detail but somewhat contrary desire to always look good, the tendency of palace politics to have immediate imperial ramifications, the benefit of getting on the right side of the eunuchs, the wisdom of taking advice from those who know the king s proclivities, the importance of getting the timing right for the king s mood, the significance of hiding and revealing, the power of beauty and sexual expertise, the king s sensitivity and forgetfulness concerning his own well-being all these things Esther has been party to, and all these things cluster back into the story as ingredients with which she will cook up a recipe for redemption. Wells, 57

25 Esther 5 Jia Jiang wanted to desensitize himself from rejection and thus overcome his fears. Apparently, there is something called Rejection Therapy, which I had never heard of. The idea is that if you re so afraid to be rejected, you ll never ask. You ll never try. You ll shield yourself from life itself since it s filled with rejections all the time. Jia wanted to be an author, blogger and speaker. This was one of his steps along the way. He realized that in order to achieve his goals, he had to be rejected far more often than he had been willing to. So he set off to get rejected 100 times in 100 days with different crazy requests, many of them sent in by those who were following along on his quest. He asked for a burger refill. He asked to be a live model at an Abercrombie and Fitch store in the mall. He went up and asked strangers for compliments. He drove up to a house and asked to join a random stranger s Super Bowl party. He asked if he could take a nap for awhile in a mattress store. Rejection Therapy seems like it went pretty well. Sometimes he even failed his mission because he wasn t rejected. He learned that some people were willing to try to make what he wanted happen. You can hear about his projects at fearbuster.com. His last entry was to ask President Obama for an interview. Many people say and teach that the worst they can say is no. I had that approach when as a scrawny little freshman I asked senior cheerleader Leah to go with me to homecoming. She said no. She said she wasn t going to the dance. Which wasn t true! Jiang says the worst thing someone can say is, You didn t even ask. He writes, If I have a good reason, it is my duty to step out of my comfort zone to ask, no matter who difficult and impossible the request is. 15 Today we re talking about an impossible ask. I wonder if Esther had gone through Rejection Therapy as she prepared for her time with Xerxes the king. She doesn t make the ask in chapter five, but she s preparing for it. She s gearing up for it. She s decided to do it. Her reason for asking was much, much greater than a burger refill or dancing with your waitress. It s bigger than asking for money to help us buy our church building, or for asking for medical breakthroughs. And her possible no outcomes were much more severe. She could die. Her people could die. We re looking at an event in the Bible that took place in 480 BC, and that was a long time ago. It happened in modern day Iran, in a city called Susa with a people who have strayed from their God. Will Esther fail even before she asks? Will she anticipate the no answer, and shield herself from rejection? Jia Jiang says she should ask, and that in asking she is doing the right thing. She might hear a no like I did from Leah. But she might hear a yes. She might save her people. There is a real drama and tension here that I hope you can see and feel, but I also hope you can enter into. You aren t in this same situation but you do have things in your life that need asking. You have conversations in your future where things are on the line. You have petitions that you want granted. You have risky relationships where you will put everything on the line. Esther 5 is ancient, and it s relevant for us today as we encounter the opposition of the world and see it in our own hearts. The Death Tower Haman There are two main characters and two main sections in this chapter. The first focuses on Esther and the second on Haman. We re going to start with the second one first. We ll start with Haman. In the previous chapter chapter four we saw that Esther was mostly clueless about what was going on in the kingdom. She had become disconnected with what was going on with her uncle Mordecai and she hadn t seen the king in awhile. She didn t know about decree that Haman had Xerxes sent out and signed into law, the one that mandated that all the Jews be killed on a certain day in the future. Now we see a clueless Haman, but he certainly doesn t know it. You probably know the ending, so you know that Haman is in trouble. But he doesn t know he is. And if you stop the story without knowing the ending yet, there isn t a promised resolution at this point. You re supposed to hate and despise Haman in this story. He s the bad guy. He s Bane. He s the Joker. He s not some sympathetic character who you re supposed to relate to, like so many of our current antiheroes. He s not Walter White or Dexter. But I do want you to relate to him for just a bit. We need to know this story and think about it and perhaps even consider how we too have a Haman inside of us. Haman craved significance and being seen as significant. He has a fragile ego, and thus an easily bruised ego. His heart idolatry is huge, and we can see it because it s being shown to us as such in an evaluative way by a narrator. But if you were living this story, you very well may not have seen it in him. Or in yourself. Haman is basically the second in command of all of Persia. He s immensely powerful. But one man Mordecai gets completely under his skin. He becomes fixated on Mordecai. He cannot shake this man and the actually really tiny slight he s received in the grand scheme of things. It doesn t feel tiny to Haman. It feels huge. It has to be dealt with. And so he over-deals with it. He doesn t just want to punish Haman; he wants to kill all of the Jews. This is so out of proportion, but people don t seem surprised. Haman is thrilled to get invited to the dinner with Esther and Xerxes. We don t know if this is a big part of Esther s plan or not. We re unsure if she s thought this through. Haman doesn t suspect anything. He should be there. He s important. He s powerful. He s close to the king. He has status and access. 15

26 He leaves the feast. And Haman went out that day joyful and glad of heart. (5:9) He s pumped about this. Things continuing to keep working out for him. Everything is awesome! Ah, but then Mordecai keeps showing up, and he just can t shake him. There s Mordecai again. Mordecai doesn t rise and he doesn t tremble. So Haman is filled with wrath. Hatred comes quickly. Haman restrains himself. I m sure he views himself as a man of restraint. As a very reasonable person. As a picture of calm and serenity. He goes home. I m imagining him with wine and cigars sitting around the fire in the patio. He s telling the story of his dinner feast, and then goes into all the amazing things in his life, and his achievements. It s all so, so good. Except one thing Mordecai. This Mordecai! What should I do about him? It seems like a good friend should have said something like, Forget about it! Drop it. Leave him alone. He s nothing. Quit being so obsessed with Mordecai. So what? He is a jerk, but you re a bigger, better person so just chill out. That would have been good advice. Or maybe something like, Dude, you need counseling. Haman, this is obviously getting to you. There is something about this guy that you just can t shake. You need to talk about that or else this is going to grow into an even bigger problem. That s not what they say. The say, Feed the rage! Yes! You are totally right about Mordecai. In fact, you should wait for the decree to go through in order to get him. That won t be enough. Go after him. And don t just do that. Teach him a lesson. Build a gallows 75 feet high and have Mordecai hanged on it. Hanged probably meant impaled. This would be a gruesome death and a public spectacle so everyone will know that Haman cannot ever ever be trifled with. Then you ll be good and you can go on and enjoy the king and the queen and the feast and your life. So how can you relate to Haman? What in the world in your life is Hamanic? Surely you ve experienced a very successful moment that should have been filled with joy but it was ruined by something insignificant. These are on-the-way home fights in the car. You attend an incredible banquet, a fantastic party and a wonderful event. But you cannot stop talking about the two seconds where he was rude. There were 10,000 seconds, but you cannot shake two of them. It spins in your head. You go back over it and over it. You feel justified in your hatred. You want others on your side. You cannot believe he said that or did that or thought that. It wins over. It wins the day. You share that with others and they feed that thought so it grows instead of weakens. That s Haman. I recently attended our denominational General Assembly. We d just just just finished our three-year start to our new church. We d done so much and I was so satisfied and thankful for all that God had worked. I was so proud of our church, its outreach, its depth, its gospel-centeredness, its new building and its newly elected elders. But honestly I hate to tell you this: it wasn t enough. I wanted recognition. I wanted people to notice. There are people who said it would never work and we d never be able to pull this off. I wanted to go talk to those people not out of love but out of spite. There are people who ignored us I wanted to go and make sure I talked to them so I wouldn t be ignored and so I could ignore them. The funny thing (it s not funny at all) is that I did receive recognition. So many people noticed and commented. But it s never enough. My Hamanic heart always wants more. It craves more. Doing a good job isn t good enough I want credit for the good job. I can t let things go. My Haman ego is fragile and bruised. My heart idolatry can never be fed enough. I get preoccupied with what I don t have, the one person who isn t attending the church or hasn t given me what I wanted. It s a very tiring bondage. It s a slavery. You can t let it go. You obsess over your boss s comment. Or your lack of recognition. Or that thing someone said when you were 12. It s not just a story that you can tell because you ve dealt with it. It still defines you. That story, that comment, that thing is so close. It s right there. You re building that gallows so you can nail it in hatred and punishment for forever. You didn t make the team, so you hate that coach. You cannot forgive your ex-husband ever ever ever. There is someone you feel attracted to or threatened by. You have someone whose approval eludes you or whose happiness consumes you. You have people who you adore or despise or both at the same time. 16 These are real things. I m not suggesting that they re easy to deal with or they should just go away. We so often build that gallows by ignoring the whole thing altogether. We build and imaginary one so that no one knows it s there. We pretend we don t hate so we can keep the hate. Like I said not many of us have the capacity or power or authority to actually do what Haman does but it s there. You have death towers too. Can you see them? Will you remain unaware? Will you believe the people who in fact tell you to erect them? The Brave Request Esther Let s move to the other key figure of the chapter, and the person who is the central key character in the book. Esther assumes the star role. We ve been talking about her. We ve been pretty hard on Esther to this point. In some sense, it hasn t been her fault. It s not like she s done a ton of stuff wrong exactly. What can we really blame her for? She didn t ask to be born in Susa in the 470s. She didn t ask to have no parents and be raised by her uncle. She didn t ask to be beautiful. She didn t ask to be taken as one of the young girls to enter into this nation-wide beauty contest. She didn t ask to be picked by Xerxes to be his wife, to be the Queen of Persia. She didn t ask to be silent about her heritage, however much she even knew about it. And she didn t ask to be the mediator in order to save her people. At this point in the story she s most likely only 19 or 20, and she s been married to Xerxes for five years. How would you be doing? Perhaps not even this well. She hasn t been faithful to her God, but it s not like she s completely repudiated him. She hasn t been connected to her people, but she s been hidden away in the king s harem. She s been in 16 Great thoughts from Beth Moore.

27 a crazy situation and now is being asked to do something far beyond her years. She s being asked to break the law and risk it all for a people and a God she has barely known. How would you be doing? Would you be able to stand up to the king, your husband? Do you? Remember that Xerxes has banished his latest wife. He s given power and status to Haman. He s non-chalantly agreed to the mass murder of thousands of people. We know from other places in history that Xerxes commanded hundreds of thousands of soldiers and sent them to die without even thinking about it for even a second. This isn t really the biblical marriage we think of. We re not often put in situations like this one. I don t think we have many queens in our church. Ah, but we re still in situations like this. We have so many stories where we follow the rules and conventions. We do what we re taught to do. We follow the script we re told to follow. We end up getting married and having success. We have houses and banquets and power and robes. We work on beauty. We work out like crazy so we ll be thought of as desirous and beautiful and sensual and powerful. But we feel so weak. So powerless. So unwanted. You re not sure you want to risk it. It feels like too much risk. You re not even about to save all of God s people all throughout time as any sort of picture of the redeemer of God s elect. You just want to ask for something simple. But you re afraid. You re breaking a rule. It s not this rule we hear in Esther 5, but it s a rule. One rule might be don t bring stuff like this up! And you re about to risk some amount of wrath to break that rule. Is it worth it? Especially if you know you yourself haven t been faithful? If you aren t a good person. You re not Esther. Your husband isn t Xerxes. You re not Xerxes. Your wife isn t Esther. This is a broken marriage. Just like you have. The situation is totally different. It s just like happens every day still today. This is where God works. This is how God works. It s not always in miracles with fire and doves and lions. Sometimes it s in the bedroom between a Christian and a non-christian in a place that shouldn t be this way. Or two Christians that are stuck in something that shouldn t be this way. Esther arranges a feast. She s decided to take this on. She can t stay silent any longer. She has been raised up for such a time as this, but she doesn t know what that means and she doesn t know that outcome. She s prepared for death because the law is that you cannot come into the presence of the king unbidden. So she decides to risk. You can decide to risk without knowing what will happen. You can have conversations with unknown outcomes. They ll often feel just this same way. You ll feel like you re breaking rules and entering death. Esther does find a miracle here. It s one of those natural, sort of explainable miracles where a conversation goes another way. Xerxes reverses an irreversible law. Then he offers her up to half the kingdom whatever she wants. She can have it all. That s probably not literally true. It s a way of telling her that he loves her and wants her to be happy and a part of him being happy is to make her happy. She s about to ask him to reverse another law, but this one will be far more public. He s about to give up 10,000 talents from his treasury and go back on his word for a decree he d signed with his own signet ring. He banished Vashti for something far less brash than this. He d made a decree about husbands in the kingdom standing up for themselves and being treated with respect and now she s about to ask him to reverse a decree for her because of something she had never told him before that will come at a great great cost to himself. Esther had prepared for this moment. She had set her course. She had fasted and asked for her people to fast for her. She doesn t sound very confident, but she does get herself ready. She puts on her royal robes. She assumes her authority. She uses her femininity and her beauty. She uses her power, her access, her status and even her sexual power over Xerxes (think about this: And he [Xerxes] held out to Esther the golden scepter that was in his hand. Then Esther approached and touched the tip of his scepter. Uh. Yeah.) Esther is beautiful, meek and smart. She uses her awareness of his character or lack of it. She uses his ego against him. She uses delay, suspense and secrecy. She s one smart cookie. I used to tell our OURUF women to use their girl powers for good. Many though of course not all of these women were good, faithful, kind, smart compassionate women who were extremely frustrated that there weren t many if any at all Christian men who wanted to date them, much less befriend them. The men they often met said they were Christians but you couldn t tell and they d try to talk these women into leaving the real Christianity behind. I d tell the women to not forget that they were women. They didn t have to give in. They were and could be strong. So tell these men to show up to RUF and to church and to walk with God and then see which ones of them do, even if it was just for them for awhile. Use your girl powers for good. Get them to get around some different people by inviting them and telling them that if they wanted to see you, this is where you ll be. Sometimes it worked. Esther isn t denying her femininity. She s agreeing to it and using it for God s glory. She s embracing it, and the story God has put her in, however much she does or doesn t understand it. It really is true that God had put her there in the presence of the King of Persia to save his people because she was a woman, and the woman for the job, no matter what or how she had gotten there. That s empowering. She ended up playing Xerxes like a fiddle. 17 There is a courage here, even in the midst of desperation. She s not necessarily going to fix her husband (she doesn t). She may die (she doesn t). She may still see all of her people killed but she survives as a terrible punishment because she is spared but has to watch (that s not what happens). She doesn t know what s going to happen. The outcome isn t assured. She can t rest on her own goodness to save the day she doesn t have any. Yet she has courage to enter in. It s not a technique or an opportunism. Her hidden identity is what God uses to save his people. 17 Only her beauty exceeded her audacity. Found in Beth Moore s study, p 110.

28 I know I ve witnessed miraculous conversations that felt a lot like this one. I ve heard people say that they could never ever do something and then seen them do it. I ve had people that they know that they will get wrath and then they didn t. I have seen transformation where someone took disrespect to make things right or took payment to his or her shame. I ve seen miracles like Esther and Xerxes this week I ve seen them. I have to be honest and say that I don t always see them. Sometimes I hope for it and ask for it, and then it doesn t happen. But that doesn t mean it can t. Or that it won t. Or that it hasn t. Be like Esther. Don t be like Haman. Simple enough, right? It s a little tougher to be like Esther since she was quite literally the Queen of Persia. It s pretty easy to stay away from 50- cubit gallows construction. So it s both impossible and super easy. You need to think about those super touchy places in your life and what lies beneath them. Take an interest in yourself. Don t just let them go on and on impeded. Think about it and get people in your life to challenge you to forgive those people and things. I m not saying there can never be justice. There absolutely can be justice. There must be and there will be justice. But there needs to and must be forgiveness or else you will make Mordecai and everyone else pay. What is your anger all about anyway? What exactly is it you hate about that person or that situation? Don t be like Mordecai isn t going to cut it because you already are like him. We re a church filled with Hamans and it s worse than we could ever know. Let s acknowledge it and tear down the scaffolds so we don t keep killing people and telling that justified story over and over. Let s tell it to someone who says, Whoa! and calls it what it is hate. God says vengeance is his, and that hatred in our hearts is murder. We re going to need to work on some forgiveness, no matter how terrible the thing or person we re forgiving is. Or else we ll be going down with the ship. Be like Esther? Well, maybe. We do have Esthers. We do have women who have gotten themselves into bad situations because of bad advice or a bad culture and now they re stuck with unbelieving husbands. You may be one of them. Or you may be an unbelieving husband. You may have power, status and riches but you don t care about God for even a second. Or you may be a believing husband with an unbelieving wife. There are plenty of those too. You re sort of stuck. And you sort of aren t. God isn t done with you. He hasn t abandoned you. He is with you, and he cares about you. And he is for you. You may have an idiot, terrible, merciless husband. You may have a weak husband. You may have a jerk husband. You still need to enter in. There is still a place for you in God s kingdom and his love. It may not all get cleared up for you today or this year or even in this lifetime. But he still loves you and is working with you and in you and for you. Trust in him. There are difficult risky conversations in your future. He is with you. There is hope. This is another passage filled with a mysterious, cloudy vision of hope. Esther goes to visit the king on the third day. We re at another banquet, another feast. There is access given to the king. The king invites his bride into his presence to hear her request. Deliverance is about to be granted, but not quite yet. It s there but not fully realized. Can you hear the notes of the gospel of Jesus Christ in there at all? Is your heart attuned to hear God s grace? Remember, realize and hold onto the fact the Jesus has entered into the throne room. We call it the throne room of grace, but it s also the throne room of justice. It s where holiness is. Judgment. Justice. The law. Sin cannot enter in. So someone had to pay to price. The scepter fell on one. On Jesus. To die for the law. So that you could have access. So that you could enter in. So that you could live and not die. We are bidden to come and present our requests. In Philippians 4:6-7, we read, Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. So be like Esther in the sense that there is a really scary place that takes a ton of courage in order to live out a life that you aren t sure about to ask for something that you think could never happen on behalf of your sinful self and a people who you have essentially to this point perhaps unwittingly betrayed to follow a family that did not necessarily have your best interest at heart but hey, don t be anxious about that! It sounds pretty tough. And it sounds like what we re called to do. Because of God. Because Jesus has made peace with God and that surpasses even understanding. He s got you. He s got your back. He can be the way you think because he has it worked out and you don t even know what that is. He loves you. It s not about you. It s about him. Esther isn t about Esther. It s about Jesus and his work. It s about his courage for you. His petition for you. His beauty for you. His dying for you. His preparation for you. His work for you. Even you with your fickle heart can have access to the throne of grace. He can transform your life, and the Holy Spirit can work. You can see God, and experience God s presence and his rescue. You can even wait for Christ s return to make all things right. And you can wrestle in the meantime with the empire, with the thorns and thistles, and kings, and opposition, idolatry and towers. But we don t wrestle alone and we don t wrestle forever. There is hope even in situations like this for you and me today. It s the hope of the gospel, that you would find your rest in him. You don t have to be perfect. Find yourself in Christ. Come into his presence. Rest in confidence in him. He has forgiven you so, so much. So you can forgive others with that same love.

29 Esther 6 One of my favorite little books that never gets old is called Not Quite What I was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure. It s a collection of pithy, six word, quotes where people attempt to summarize their life. And the overarching theme is hey! Things didn t really turn out the way I thought they would! For instance, Richard Thomas summarizes his story like this: strived to become everything I didn t. George Girtin said: Developed labor-saving software: thousands unemployed. Harry McCoy opines: Bought American Dream. More like nightmare. Hannah Davies hits our heartstrings with: Cursed with cancer. Blessed with friends. And, finally, Phillip Steinberg gives us his surprised with: recent doctorate means overeducated and underemployed. And life is life that isn t it? We make plans. Maybe we scheme. Or we look back and see that things did not turn out the way we thought they would. Some of us are happy about that. Others may be sad or we don t know what to do with it. Some of us may wonder where is God in all of this? We might even wonder if God is active in our life. Esther is a book that speaks to that. As we have journeyed through this story over the past several weeks, we have seen that a book that does not mention the word God or have miracles or visions shows us how God works unexpected circumstances. We see God use the great King of Persia, a corrupt politician in Haman, a man hiding his Jewish identity in Mordecai and a teen age orphan who is essentially forced to marry the king and become the queen of Persia. This morning we reach the beginning of the climax of this story as the king has a sleepless night and the unexpected begins to unfold for Haman and Mordecai because of Esther s wisdom and the reality that God is working. He is working through history and through flawed people to accomplish salvation. Sometimes that happens slowly, which is the story of the Bible as a whole. And Esther provides a picture of that in a story that spans a few years in an out of the way town as God s people are exiled. As we look at chapter six, we will focus on three things: the king s heart, Mordecai s honor and Haman s humiliation. As we go through these points, I think we will all see ourselves throughout the story. So three points: the king s heart, Mordecai s honor and Haman s humiliation. The King s Heart This chapter begins with a sleepless night. Esther had requested that the king, Xerxes, throw a banquet to honor one guest, Haman. Haman, we are told, hates Esther s uncle Mordecai. And Haman wants to destroy him because Mordecai refused to honor him. And so he convinced Xerxes to allow an edict to exterminate all the Jews. And Haman, that very night, had ordered gallows to be constructed from which Mordecai would be hung, impaled for all to see. But those things don t necessarily concern the King. He has a large empire. He s the most powerful person in the world. He doesn t know Esther or Mordecai are Jews. He doesn t even remember Mordecai, who saved him from an assassination plot. All he knows is that Haman is going to bring money to the treasury, he has a beautiful queen who is the leader of his harem and life is good. Yet he still has sleepless nights. Melatonin was not used as a sleep aid until Apparently, on this night, neither wine nor the company of one of women of his harem would be his choice to calm the nerves and go back to bed. Instead, he asks for his annals to be read to him. This is extraordinary. It s not the typical behavior of someone in his position. He has everything he could possibly want. And this night the night gallows have been ordered to kill Mordecai. A night in which plans to begin genocide on the Jews was spreading through the kingdom this night is a sleepless night and he asks to listen to chronicles. I don t know about you, but this is a strange choice to make. And the writer of Esther gives us a holy coincidence to show that rings true that old saying of King Solomon the king s heart is in the hand of the Lord. As Xerxes listens to the celebratory tales of his exploits and the minutes from meetings of his throne room, he is reminded of something. The attendant reads to him of a plot to kill him and the fact that Mordecai uncovered that plot and exposed the evildoers. Xerxes realizes something. He forgot the one who saved his life. Just as he realizes that he withheld honor from Mordecai, but also the fact that brought shame upon himself as the arbiter of justice not to throw a party or parade for Mordecai, at that very moment in walks Haman to tell Xerxes about the gallows on which he would hang Mordecai. We aren t told in the text that God spoke to Xerxes. We aren t told in the text that Xerxes has a divine encounter the scales fell off his eyes and suddenly he saw the light and realized that he needed to amend his ways. But there s a sleepless night. The writer is showing us something important. We don t need to expect some power encounter to see God work. The writer shows us that God is working. This story gives us events that seem very coincidental and impossible. And in the divine drama of the Scriptures as a whole, the original readers would have seen that God is working in the sleepless nights of a pagan king to bring salvation to those who are under the sentence of death while they are in exile. In our own lives, we often become disheartened because some great event doesn t occur where it is absolutely evident that God is present. Or we become distraught about governors and law makers, presidents and judges. We think something dramatic needs to happen before God can work. Or we think that God can t use that person. But the sleepless night shows us that he is there. He is active. And most of the time, the active seems coincidental and very ordinary. But in the ordinary, God is working to accomplish salvation and rescue for his people. There may not be thunder, lightening and the deep booming voice, but God is there. God is the better king who does not forget those who honor him. God is the better king who is for the oppressed and the

30 afflicted and God is a better king who remembers his people and is faithful to them even in those times they are not faithful to him. Esther six shows us that God keeps his covenant to his people even through divine coincidence. And Esther six shows us that he works the ordinary and through kings who don t even honor him because the king s heart is in the hand of the Lord. And the king has a heart change because of a sleepless night and that leads us to our second point, Mordecai s honor. Mordecai s Honor We have another bizarre coincidence. Haman comes to the king to tell him of the impending execution of Mordecai only to play the chief role in honoring him. The king asks Haman for advice: how should the king treat the one he chooses to honor. Of course, Haman thinks it s him. We maybe not be too harsh on him since he s the king s number one, but he asks for a royal parade with all the trimmings wearing the king s crown and robes and someone going in front proclaiming that the king honors him. Yet this does not happen to Haman. Xerxes has him honor Mordecai. Mordecai, the one who saved the king yet was forgotten, receives honor. Imagine the scene Mordecai receives the royal robes, the crown, the parade. This is like a coronation. It is lavish. It really goes beyond what he deserved for saving he king s life. And, while this happens, unbeknownst to him, he has a death sentence to be carried out tomorrow. But there s no way it s going to happen now. He received the approval of the king. He received a royal welcome. And this was not in the plan. Mordecai knew he had been forgotten. Mordecai was probably surprised. This was how the night was supposed to go but he finds himself receiving honor when he had been ignored. This past March, President Obama awarded twenty-four veterans the Congressional Medal of Honor. What s remarkable is that only three were still alive, but these vets fought in World War II, Korea or the Vietnam War. And their heroic deeds were known at the time, but they were not awarded medals because they were Jewish or Hispanic, according to Pentagon committee tasked with reviewing records of minorities and recommending the award be granted. After the ceremony concluded, the three living veterans received a parade and their families participated. These soldiers were heroes who had been forgotten. Imagine performing something heroic and life changing for others for your country and then being honored nearly fifty years later? This was the case for the three who were still alive. Decade after decade went by and then it happened! Mordecai had saved the king five or six years before the king finally honored him for saving his life and, really, preserving the kingdom. And he was given an incredible parade, fit for a king and his mortal enemy, who was going to have him killed, led the parade proclaiming: thus shall it be done to the man whom the king delights to honor. His enemy proclaimed favor upon him. In our own lives, sometimes we are forgotten. Sometimes we do great things and don t even receive a thank you. Sometimes it looks like evil will succeed. But there s a slow and steady truth God is in control. He doesn t forget us. He is working in the details even when life isn t going how we planned. God is for us. Our king doesn t forget us. One of my favorite parts of the Westminster Shorter Catechism is question twenty-six, how does Christ execute the office of King? The answer, Christ executes the office of a king, in subduing us to himself, in ruling and defending us, and in restraining and conquering all his and our enemies. Christianity tells us that we are all longing for a true king. The book of Esther shows us that as we see the rule of Xerxes. We want honor. We are made to serve someone. And in the failures we see in the world around us and in our own lives. When we are forgotten. When we forget others. When we don t receive our due or someone else does, it reminds us that we are all seeking something or someone better. And Jesus is that better king. Jesus is that one who doesn t forget us. Jesus is that one bestows honor on all those who belong to him. God delights in those who wear the royal robe of Christ s righteousness and goodness. Mordecai is outside the gate and is brought inside. And we can receive honor from the King of the universe because of Christ. Mordecai received an honor he wasn t expecting and that same night we also see Haman s humiliation. Haman s Humiliation If Xerxes night didn t go as he had planned, imagine Haman! He goes to the king, thinks the king is asking how do I honor you, buddy? So he tells him this grand parade that is basically designed to tell everyone I am like the king. He is probably giddy telling the king about this parade for himself. And the parade is a kingly parade which tells us that Haman thought of himself as a king, if not the one who should be king. And the night ends with him honoring his mortal enemy and going home in sheer humiliation knowing the end is nigh, especially when his own advisors tell him he s not going to defeat the Jews. Haman is a schemer. He got a law passed that legalized the extermination of the Jews. By the way he describes the parade he thought he would receive, he apparently had his eyes set on the throne. And things don t end the way he planned. And instead of honor, he is humiliated and shamed. Evil has a way of catching up. And it s one thing to point to the Hamans in the world around us. It s easy to look at that type of darkness. We can point to evil in the world around us. We think of this plane that was shot down over Ukraine just a few days ago. We see the evils of war with ISIS persecuting Christians in Iraq, even burning down a Christian cathedral. We even see darkness here drugs, human trafficking, sex crimes, murder, abuse, corruption, pornography and greed. And it s easy to point fingers and think that the problem, or the evil, is them.

31 But stories like Haman s show us that any well-intentioned person can become entrapped and become someone they never intended. One of the six-word memoirs in my little book is: In prison. Can t publish poetry. That person never intended to be there. Evil has a seductive look. Power is attractive. Getting ahead seems worth it. Using people like they re disposable in order to get what you want is easy. And Haman shows us where it ultimately heads. I doubt Haman grew up thinking one day, I will get a law passed to commit genocide. I will, one day, have my mortal enemy impaled to show them who s boss. That s generally not how we operate. But sin is seductive. Sometimes death tastes good because it gets us what we want. Growing up, we watched a lot of old movies, the classics. And one movie that received frequent viewing in the Griffith house was The Bridge On the River Kwai with Alec Guinness and William Holden. It s about Allied POWs in World War II living in a Japanese prison camp. Alec Guinness s character, Lieutenant Colonel Nicholson, ends up aiding the Japanese Army to build a bridge with POW labor. In fact, he basically becomes the commander of British and American POWs who were building a bridge to help the Japanese army gain foothold against the Allied Forces. And if this bridge is built, the Japanese will be able to get troops and supplies through the terrain more easily. How did a British officer get to this point? Through the movie, you see Nicholson embracing the pride of his position. He also believes that if the Japanese see how well he leads the POW laborers, then they will see the superiority of British engineering and craftsmanship for ages. He even rats out his own people who were trying to slow the Japanese efforts!! At the end of the movie, of course, he comes to his senses as he is dying in the middle of an attack on the bridge and he was still trying to save it. He surveys the scene. Fighting. Bloodshed. He has a realization and says, what have I done? What have I done? and falls on the detonator and blows up the bridge. As Haman realizes his humiliation and heads toward the dinner with Esther and the king, he s dreading every moment. What have I done? What have I done? We, too, can reach those moments in our own lives. But the good news is that there is hope. There is hope that the world around us is not all lost and out of control. And there s hope for our lives when they seem like they are out of control. Esther six shows us that things happen that in ways we haven t planned, but that God is in control. God is for his people. God is bringing salvation. God rescues. You can I can experience and rest in salvation and rescue because of Christ. We may not experience life the way we planned, but we can go through our lives knowing that God is for us, God is with us and God is working. May God grant that we cling to him and trust his promises that he is for us. Amen.

32 Esther 7 In my doctoral work at OU, I ve been privileged to study under one of the foremost scholars of the civil rights movement. This has put me in a position to read a lot about civil rights and the African American freedom movement. It also means that I ve read and watched a bit of Martin Luther King speeches. As, I am sure nearly all of us know, Dr. King is one of the most revered people of the Twentieth Century because he led the cause for African Americans to be treated as equal citizens. He met with Presidents. He led the March on Washington in He shared the stage with Billy Graham. He was jailed. He led a mass movement. He won a Nobel Peace Prize. But he also met the assassin s bullet. He was someone who willing to sacrifice himself for the cause of freedom, or salvation, and justice. Every Spring when I teach history of Christianity at a local college, our class watches Dr. King s final speech, the Mountain Top speech. When you watch it, you get the sense that he knows he is laying down his life so that others will be free. He also understands that what he s doing is not just bringing about freedom, but also justice. In fact, he closes with these words: Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! And so I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!! We get a sense of this in Esther 7 this morning. In our text, Queen Esther risks her life to bring salvation and justice for her people, the Jews. She is willing to sacrifice herself to do this. And I wonder, are we willing to sacrifice for others? Are we willing to lay down our own lives as we seek to love God and love our neighbor? Because when we seek to love God and our neighbor we are agents of salvation and even justice. As we look at this passage this morning, we will focus on two ideas from this passage: salvation and justice, salvation and justice. Salvation The first thing we see in this passage is that Esther takes a bold risk. King Xerxes asks her to make a wish for up to half of his kingdom. Queen Esther could take a lot. She could have money, land or just seek to exempt herself, but she asks for salvation for the Jews. And this moment would not have happened had she not approached the king as she did two chapters prior to this event. If you look at chapter five, she risks her life to approach the king in his throne room to request this very banquet. She did not have the right to approach him, but she did. It seems the king is crazy about the queen. But Esther did not get to this point without risking. Salvation costs something. Recently, I read an article on the New York Times online that talked about family stories. It said that one major theme in many families is the theme of sacrifice. Nearly every family has a story of how a mom, dad, grandpa or grandma made a sacrifice to, they did not use this term, bring salvation to their family either economic, educationally and so forth. And it reminded me of a salvation story my own family has. While the Dust Bowl and Great Depression ravaged Oklahoma during the 1930s, my great-grandpa abandoned his family, leaving his wife and five kids behind to suffer in poverty. My grandpa was the oldest and still a kid. He gave up the end of his childhood to save his family. He quit school, left home and wandered through Oklahoma working odd jobs to send money back to his mom. When the US entered the Second World War, my grandpa enlisted in the Navy at age fourteen and still sent money to his mom. He took great risks to save his family in the face of impending economic destruction. Had my grandpa not given up his childhood, his teen years and, even, his dignity, to a degree, his family would not have made it. But he went to great cost to bring a type of salvation to his family. There are people all around us, in our city, who need God to show up in their lives and we re it. Sometimes, we are afraid to reveal ourselves. It s easier not to be the person you know you truly are because the reveal could bring something messy. We, who are Christians, are also called to be agents of salvation. And, to be honest, it s easier to kick back and say, God will show up somehow when that somehow might be you. It might be me. We need to ask the question, what is preventing me from bringing salvation to others? It might be risky to have that conversation with your friend or family member. It might reveal another side of you to others that could lead them to reject you. Esther risked rejection and even death to save the Jews, but there is something bigger in this story. Esther pictures Jesus. Esther risks her life for the sake of her people so they can find salvation. There was no way the Israelites could save themselves from the king s edict of death. They needed rescue. They needed salvation. And Esther was willing to give her life so that God s people could be saved. Jesus gave up everything so that you and I could have life. Christianity teaches that we are exiled from God because of sin and we are unable to rescue ourselves. We are unable to save ourselves. But the good news of Christianity is that Jesus not only risked his life, but he gave up his life so that we could find life, so that we could have salvation and not be exiled from God, but be counted as his children. God did this out of sheer love. I think we instinctively know that we need salvation. That s why we fill our time with self-improvement and consumerism and beauty and stuff. We re trying to find redemption. But Christianity says that we need a royal redeemer. Esther pictures that in this passage. She shows us a glimpse of Jesus. But Jesus did die so that people could find redemption through his sacrifice, through

33 his risk. And if you know you need salvation, then look to Christ. Look to his sacrifice on your behalf on my behalf. Cling to his goodness. Cling to his grace. We all need salvation. We also see that Esther s act on behalf of the Israelites not only brought salvation, but justice. Justice If you ve been tracking with us through the book of Esther, then you know that Haman is a pretty bad guy. He has schemed to have the Jews exterminated. His hatred for Mordecai not only led him to embrace genocide but to have gallows built to have Mordecai killed, impaled, for all to see. The writer of Esther gives us something the readers want. Let s be honest. We don t want the bad guy to win. We may be a culture that embraces anti-heroes but no one wants to see the Joker defeat Batman. No one wants Rocky to lose to Ivan Drago. And Star Wars would have flopped if the Galactic Empire had defeated the Rebel Alliance. We see that King Xerxes is furious that Haman would have his queen put to death. He s drunk, but comes to his senses in a way. Haman pleads with Esther for mercy, but the king sees that as an attack upon his queen and has him put to death. When Haman dies, the king s wrath is satisfied and justice is done. The bad guy lost. The one who was the enemy of God s people is undone and defeated. Justice would not have been served without Esther s risk. Esther could have kept her identity hidden. Maybe she could have had Mordecai exempted and let the others perish. Maybe she could have let them all perish. Instead, she risked her life to right what was wrong. She loved her people so much that she would not let evil stand in their way. Love him or hate him, one of my favorite quotes is by Cornel West, who channels Aristotle, when he says, justice is what love looks like in public. Justice is what love looks like in public. He s right. It s one thing to say that s bad. It s another thing to do something about what s bad. Justice is loving your neighbor as yourself. Esther does that. She speaks out on behalf of the voiceless to bring about justice. She acts in order to set things right. She doesn t wait for a miracle to happen or for God to miraculously intervene, she acts. One of the meanings of the name Esther is hidden. Esther spends the majority of this story hiding her identity only she and her uncle, Mordecai, know she is a Jew. She is hidden, but when the time is right, she reveals herself, at great risk, to bring salvation and also justice. I ve been reading Lauren Winner s, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, and in this memoir she talks about going to synagogue for a Purim reading, which will be the book of Esther. And she recounts something the rabbi says about Esther s big reveal and God s hiddenness in this book. He says, if God is hiding, then you must act on God s behalf. If you look around the world and wonder where God has gone, why God isn t intervening on behalf of just and righteous causes, your very wondering may be a nudge to work in God s stead. One of the things we can take away from this passage is that those who claim to be God s people have an obligation to justice. This isn t a Left or Right issue. This isn t a Democrat or Republican issue. It s an issue that speaks to the reality that every person is created in the image of God and is worthy of dignity and respect. If you claim to follow Christ, then you are called..it s in the Bible to speak for those who have no voice. Esther uses her position to speak on behalf of the voiceless who are facing certain death. How are we doing in that regard? In Oklahoma City, so much is happening that is great. At the same time, there is so much happening that is not so great. We have a foster care crisis, a mental health crisis and there are places where some of us can use our position for others. Wherever we are in our life, our career, or our social status, there are ways to help. Maybe you can foster a child. Maybe you can call a powerful friend to influence them to use their position to help the voiceless. Maybe you yourself can do that. At this church, we want to be a place where everyone is welcome and everyone is valued. And we believe that is counter-cultural because every culture has the other who is not valued. But the Gospel calls us to welcome everyone because anyone can find salvation in Jesus. And, personally, I find it tragic that self-proclaimed Christians can speak so much antagonism toward children who have crossed our nation s borders to seek refuge from violence and death. I don t know the right answer, but I do know that, while our government decides what to do with the Central American refugee children, those who claim to be Christian should be offering a welcoming embrace because Jesus offers us his welcoming embrace even though we were once strangers. Ultimately, the story of Haman s demise points us to something we all instinctively know we want, at NT Wright says, to have the world put to rights. We know things around us are wrong. We often feel the world spinning out of control. Maybe we feel our own lives spinning out of control. And we want the bad guy to lose. We want evil to be defeated. That s why we have governments and courts and law enforcement. We know that evil exists and, instinctively, we want a world without it. And that s the beauty of the cross. Jesus died and rose again in order to set things to rights. Jesus died not only to bring salvation, but also to bring justice. He endured evil and death to defeat sin and to begin the process of setting all things right. Jesus is the great King who does not mead out a sentence because of anger or inebriation, but he rules out of righteousness and truth. Jesus gave his life to save people and also to bring about the restoration of goodness and beauty. Through him, the world will be set to rights. We all have a longing for salvation. We all have a longing to live in a world without evil. In our older bulletins, we used to have lyrics from the Avett Brothers, Salvation Song. It s the perfect fit for today and what we want as a church. It says, We came for salvation We came for family We came for all that's good that's how we'll walk away We came to break the bad

34 We came to cheer the sad We came to leave behind the world a better way Esther seven gives us a picture of Jesus. Jesus is the willing sacrifice who gave his life for his people. Jesus gave up his life to make all things new. We see this pictured in Esther s willingness to sacrifice to bring salvation for her people and fight against even. And, today, you and I are called to embrace Christ but also to walk in that embrace as we give our lives so that others may find his grace and we work in our communities to give people a taste of goodness as we work to push back evil. May God grant that we walk in his salvation and righteousness to bring this to others. Amen.

35 Esther 8 You have been sentenced to 80 years, the judge said. The old man shaking his head in disbelief was Rios Montt, President of Guatemala for a short stint during the early 1980s. Montt, a former General, came to power in a military coup. His administration was one of order. He sought to remake Guatemala into a social utopia through severe moral and ethnic reforms. With the mantra no robo, no miento, no abuso, Montt s administration severely punished criminals, and also put to death those who disagreed with them and indigenous people groups. Montt believed that he could remake his country into a city on a hill. But it only took a little over a year for this to spin out of control. Montt was defeated in 1983, in a near bloodless coup, by one of his closest officials. He was undone. And Montt s reign of terror saw over a million peasants uprooted from their homes. Tens of thousands were exterminated. Yet, after the coup, Montt walked away a free man. He was investigated by Amnesty International and the United Nations, but it wasn t until 2013 when he was tried for his crimes. And this trial saw him undone. He was exposed for the person he was. He received justice. The evil he used to remake his world was undone. In Esther 8, we see evil undone. We see the kingdom Haman sought for himself undone by Esther, Mordecai and the King Xerxes. We see the death of the Jews undone by a new decree that allows them to defend themselves. And we also see the separation of Jews and others in the Persian empire as people join the people of God. And this passage is timely for us today in Oklahoma City, in We might look at the world around us and wonder if evil will succeed. We wonder if God is there? Esther is a book that doesn t mention God, but we see him working, though he is hidden, through people who aren t knights in shining armor. God is faithful. God is using people to undo evil. God is faithful to bring redemption. Each of us here has a longing to see evil undone. We crave this. And as we look at this passage we will see how the undone kingdom, the undone death and the undone separation show how Jesus is undoing the evil around us. The three points again, the undone kingdom, the undone death and the undone separation. Undone Kingdom The first thing we will look at is the undone kingdom. What do I mean by that? Basically, it s this everything Haman did throughout the book of Esther was to build his own kingdom. Yet, because of his evil, we see his kingdom undone. Haman used the king to have a law passed to rid the Persian kingdom of the Jews. Haman tried to have his mortal enemy, Mordecai, put to death. Haman wanted a parade that looked like a kingly coronation. Every step we see Haman take was one of building his own kingdom from evil deeds. Yet, his kingdom is undone. Instead of the royal parade, he is humiliated and honors his enemy, Mordecai. Instead of executing Mordecai, he is executed. And now we see his plot undone. We see the kingdom he tries to build, unraveled. Mordecai takes his place. Mordecai is given the rule over Haman s realm. Mordecai becomes the king s number one. Everything Haman worked for was undone. He saw himself as a king. He took glory in his position. He sought to build power and was undone by his own evil. His allegiance was for himself and it ruined him. I have this mild obsession with Richard Nixon. I ve read quite a few books about him. Two of my favorites are Nixon s Shadow and Staying Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. One of the things I ve learned about Nixon is that he was careful to cultivate an image and manipulate situations around him. For example, this picture seems simple. Nixon bowling. It s a poster in The Big Lebowski. It s my cover photo on my iphone. But the thing about this picture is that Nixon didn t bowl. He saw read a story about bowling s popularity. This led him to rent a bowling lane for a day, hire professional bowlers and spend four or five hours learning about bowling just to get this one photo. Nixon manipulated the world around him to get what he wanted. But we know what happened. It all came undone with Watergate, right? He and his Vice-President resigned in disgrace and everything he did throughout his career became overshadowed by the undoing of Watergate. Nixon spent decades using people, situations and power to build a kingdom and it came undone. What about us? What kingdoms do we build for ourselves? How do we manipulate and use others to get what we want. Haman followed a path of building his own kingdom. Others were disposable in his path to get what he wanted. But it was his undoing. And that should scare us, but it should also comfort us. When we see evil in this world. We can take solace in the fact that God will undo the evil kingdoms we see in this world. I love the hymn A Mighty Fortress is Our God and, especially, the line his kingdom is forever. The kingdoms of this world are temporary. No one talks about the Persian empire in normal conversation and, most likely, one day people will not talk about the United States as a world superpower. But the Bible shows us a kingdom of peace and love and justice that is ruled by the God of the universe who is a faithful and good king. Jesus came to bring this kingdom to this world it is not a kingdom of pettiness and violence, but one of grace, sacrifice, righteousness and love. And we can be tempted to build our own kingdoms, seeking first what we want. But the Bible calls us to seek the kingdom of God it is the kingdom of life. It is built on the goodness and holiness of Him. And Esther 8 reminds us of our longing for evil