The Whole Megillah: A Sermon on the Book of Esther

Hamentaschen are triangular-shaped pastries that are traditionally eaten during the Jewish holiday of Purim."Hamantaschen" is a Yiddish word meaning "Haman’s pockets." 

For our Jewish friends, the scroll of Esther is inseparable from the celebration of Purim, a carnival-like festival. Esther is a melodrama—a drama that is told with exaggerated characters. There is a hero (or in this case a heroine, Esther) and a villain (the evil Haman.) As with all melodramas, the plot appeals to our emotions and the audience gets involved by booing and hissing and shaking noisemakers whenever "he-who-must-not-be-named's" name is spoken. Very often melodramas also have some PG-13 parts and this one is no exception: if you were seeing it performed at the Hanover Theater you’d find it pretty tame, but hearing it read in Church, from the Bible, might surprise some people and even make a few blush. Unfortunately, most Christians are not nearly as familiar with this story as Jews. In fact, the reading we heard today is the only opportunity we get every three years to remember it in our common worship and the words we heard come at the end of the play. So if we don’t remember all that preceded it, it makes little sense. Let me begin, then, by sharing a brief summary of what led to this point.

In scene one, the narrator tells us that “all this happened in the days of Ahasuerus, the same Ahasuerus who ruled over one hundred twenty-seven provinces from India to Ethiopia. It’s the third year of his reign.”  What is important to note here is that we aren’t in Israel anymore, Toto; but at the heart of the Persian Empire (modern-day Iran.) The story is about how hard it is for God’s faithful people to live in the midst of a foreign imperial power.  As it begins, the king is seated on his royal throne surrounded by political advisors, including the evil Haman. (Boo, hiss, noismakers!)

What follows is a wild, unrestrained, party. On the seventh day of this bash, the narrator tells us that the king was “merry with wine.” (This is Biblical code language for “wasted”) He commands his beautiful wife, Vashti, to come in and do a little dance for his guests wearing her royal crown. It’s pretty clear that what he is asking is that she dance wearing nothing but the crown. She refuses, and now the drunken king is furious. His advisors suggest that this cannot be tolerated because empires rely on compliance: not only is the authority of the emperor supposed to be absolute, but if people learn that the queen doesn’t obey the king, then ordinary women will stop obeying their husbands. And so they convince the king to issue an edict to all the royal provinces that “every man is master of his own house.” They also convince him to get rid of Queen Vashti and hold a beauty pageant to find a new queen.

“Meanwhile in a nearby village ...there is this Jew named Mordecai, son of Jair son of Shimei son of Kish, a Benjamite.” (2:5) He has a beautiful cousin whose name is Esther. Mordecai suggests that Esther enter the beauty contest, which she agrees to do. Now part of the plot here is that while a guy named Mordecai will probably not be mistaken for an Irish Catholic, Esther can “pass” as Persian and neither she nor Mordecai see any reason to let anybody know of her religious preference. (So she doesn’t check that box on the pageant application.) Only she, Mordecai, and the audience know that she is a Jew.

We have now met all of the key players in those first two scenes, and the story is underway. Let me speed up the plot a bit here: Esther wins the contest and becomes queen. She becomes an “insider”—but only by keeping her identity a secret. Remember that. In the meantime the evil Haman (boo, hiss, noisemakers!) is promoted and becomes the chief advisor to the king. Haman loves power and hates the Jews. Whenever he walks out in public, he expects people to bow to him. Mordecai refuses to do that, however, and Haman decides to show Mordecai who is boss by introducing a bill that will basically enact a holocaust and kill all Jews in the empire.

Esther, however, is now in a position to expose the evil Haman and his plot to kill her people, and she does just that. Her actions save her people, and change the course of history. We heard the end of the story today: as in every good melodrama, good triumphs over evil and Haman gets what is coming to him. Listen, then, once more to the words we heard earlier:

The king and Haman went in to feast with Queen Esther. On the second day, as they were drinking wine, the king again said to Esther, "What is your petition, Queen Esther? It shall be granted you. And what is your request? Even to the half of my kingdom, it shall be fulfilled." Then Queen Esther answered, "If I have won your favor, O king, and if it pleases the king, let my life be given me—that is my petition—and the lives of my people—that is my request. For we have been sold, I and my people, to be destroyed, to be killed, and to be annihilated. If we had been sold merely as slaves, men and women, I would have held my peace; but no enemy can compensate for this damage to the king." Then King Ahasuerus said to Queen Esther, "Who is he, and where is he, who has presumed to do this?" Esther said, "A foe and enemy, this wicked Haman!" Then Haman was terrified before the king and the queen. Then Harbona, one of the eunuchs in attendance on the king, said, "Look, the very gallows that Haman has prepared for Mordecai, whose word saved the king, stands at Haman's house, fifty cubits high." And the king said, "Hang him on that." So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai.

And that’s what Purim is all about, Charlie Brown! That is the whole megillah. That’s why it’s a time for feasting and for sending gifts of food to one another and presents to the poor. This year Purim will begin at sunset on Saturday, February 23. If you have an opportunity to attend a Purim celebration, I encourage you to do so.

Well, what do we do with this story that is over 2500 years old and set in a culture very different from our own? Why did we say “the word of the Lord/ thanks be to God” when we heard this reading? Out of habit? Is there in fact a word of the Lord here for us or not? And if so, what might it be?

Because this is the Bible, we claim that this scroll tells us something about God, although interestingly enough the name of God doesn’t appear; not even once. Except for Mordecai, none of the characters are particularly religious, including Esther. Yet in another sense, God permeates the story. “Perhaps you are in this position for a reason,” Mordecai tells his cousin, Esther, at a key point in the play. Esther speaks up not because of some big mystical experience, but simply because she’s in a place where she can make a difference. In a very dangerous world she does the right thing by acting bravely and compassionately, at great risk to herself. There’s another vignette that I didn’t share today in my rush to outline the plot: early on in the story the king has one of those sleepless nights where he is tossing and turning until he can’t take it anymore. He finally gets up to read a book, which turns out to be some old police reports: “The Book of Memorable Deeds.” (Sounds like something out of The Princess Bride, doesn’t it?) In it he discovers that Mordecai had reported two eunuchs who were plotting to assassinate the king. No proclamations were made and no royal medals were awarded, but Mordecai can’t easily be “disappeared” because he’s now on the king’s radar. The rabbis suggest that God is the one behind that sleepless night; that this is precisely the kind of subtle way that God influences this world.

The narrator may be suggesting that God is at work in our lives—behind the scenes—even when we don’t know it. And that we are put into certain situations for a reason. And that there are no coincidences. As Christians we might ascribe all of these things to the work of the Holy Spirit, who has a knack of getting us where we need to be and sometimes even causes us sleepless nights that stir us to action. I wonder if some of us might even say that the God we encounter in Esther is closer to our own experience: discerned through hints and guesses more often than speaking in a clear voice at a burning bush or blinding us on the road to Damascus or Worcester.

Because this is the Bible, this story also suggests something about the human condition. The Book of Esther knows that it’s a dangerous world out there, especially for those without power: women, religious minorities, the poor. So this Purim play is about the challenges of trying to be faithful in the midst of imperial power; about obedience to God rather than the rulers of this age. It’s about the cosmic struggle against the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. It’s easy to put all of the evil on a villain like Haman (or Satan or Hitler or Osama bin Laden) but only very rarely does real life unfold like a melodrama. The most insidious evil usually involves at least fifty shades of gray.

Some of you have perhaps read Three Cups of Tea or The Kite Runner. If so, you know that melodrama or not, the world of King Ahasuerus is very real. The whole idea that Vashti is put away because she had the audacity to disobey her husband’s obscene request is pretty repulsive, but unfortunately not so farfetched even today in Iran. And maybe not so farfetched for anyone living in an alcoholic, abusive relationship either. As for the rest of us, it may be true that we have come a long way, baby. Even so, we still deal with sexism that dehumanizes both women and men. Perhaps you’ve seen the stir caused recently by the latest geisha girl lingerie from Victoria’s Secret. And a friend of mine posted recently on Facebook a response from our Secretary of State to a question from a reporter who asked her “who her favorite fashion designer was.” Hillary turned it back on the reporter and asked if that was a question that was regularly asked of men in government. Of course it is not.

This past week we began our interfaith Bible study on Genesis and one of my Jewish friends who teaches Sunday School teaches the children from a very young age to do as the rabbis have done for centuries: she invites one student to comment on a Biblical text, and then the next student comments on both the text and the comment, and then the next student comments on the text and the two comments; all the way around the room. This is, of course, standard operating procedure for rabbinical interpretation down through the centuries. Walter Brueggemann has noted that we Christians like to give closure to our readings and interpretations, but “it is recurringly Jewish to recognize that our readings are always provisional, because there is always another text, always another commentary, always another rabbinic midrash…” inviting us to live more fully into the questions. 

So I think it really is ok to finish reading Esther and ask a really big question like “is this the kind of world we want our daughters and granddaughters to grow up in?” (And "is this the kind of world we want our sons and grandsons to grow up in?)

I found myself reading a lot of feminist criticism on this text this week, both Jewish and Christian. There is some debate about whether Vashti should be considered the true heroine here; that maybe it is better to stand up against “the man” even if it gets you killed. Maybe. For her own part, Esther compromises—maybe even in some way she has to compromise some of her own integrity in a world that is far from ideal—to act for the greater good. Aren’t these often the kind of ambiguous moral choices you and I face as well, both as women and men? 

I don’t have much more to say about that, except to share these comments along with the story itself and then pass it all along, hoping that it might generate further conversation and maybe even argument, that may yet lead us to new possibilities and new insights. But I do think this is the pathway that may potentially lead us to say and mean that this is a "Word of the Lord" - thanks be to God!