Ask

Esther 7: 1-10, page 357
So the king and Haman went to dine with Queen Esther, and as they were drinking wine on that second day, the king again asked, “Queen Esther, what is your petition? It will be given you. What is your request? Even up to half the kingdom, it will be granted.”
The Queen Esther answered, “If I have found favor with you, O king, and if it pleases your majesty, grant me my life – this is my petition. And spare my people – this is my request. For I and my people have been sold for destruction and slaughter and annihilation. If we had merely been sold as male and female slaves, I would have kept quiet, because no such distress would justify disturbing the king.
King Xerxes asked Queen Esther, “Who is he? Where is the man who has dared to do such a thing?”
Esther said, “The adversary and enemy is this vile Haman.”
Then Haman was terrified before the king and queen. The king got up in a rage, left his wine and went out into the palace garden. But Haman, realizing that the king had already decided his fate, stayed behind to beg Queen Esther for his life.
Just as the king returned from the palace garden to the banquet hall, Haman was falling on the couch where Esther was reclining.
The king exclaimed, “Will he even molest the queen while she is with me in the house?”
As soon as the word left the kings mouth, they covered Haman’s face. Then Harbona, one of the eunuchs attending the king, said, “A gallows seventy-five feet high stands by Haman’s house. He had it made for Mordecai, who spoke up to help the king.”
The king said, “Hang him on it!” so they hanged Haman on the gallows he had prepared for Mordecai. Then the king’s fury subsided.
Esther 9: 20-22
Mordecai recorded these events, and he sent letters to all the Jews throughout the provinces of King Xerxes, near and far, to have them celebrate annually the fourteenth and fifteenth days of the month of Adar as the time when the Jews got relief from their enemies, and as the month when their sorrow was turned into joy and their mourning into a day of celebration. He wrote them to observe the days as days of feasting and joy and giving presents of food to one another and gifts to the poor.
Sermon
Correctly, my daughter Lily thinks that I am absolutely the coolest, most interesting and talented person alive. She is amazed, completely amazed by my dexterity, and will stare in awe as I open and close my hand like this.
I think she must think that I am a genius, and I imagine that she would enjoy nothing better than to sit in my lap as I teach her everything she needs to know.
But I know, because a lot of people have let me know, that I should enjoy these days while they last because one day, before I know it, my little girl will not be so little anymore, and her interest in the wisdom that I have to offer her will reach its end.
My little girl’s face – what today is a sweet, fat little face with kissable little cheeks often colored with sweet potatoes – will some unfortunate day be a face with cheeks that I’m not allowed to kiss because they’re colored by blush or something.
And to become the person she wants to become, to impress the people who she wants to impress, she’ll need a different kind of wisdom than what I posses.
That day came for Mordecai, the closest thing to a father Esther ever had. When she first left his house for the palace he never strayed far from the king’s gates even though he had already said everything she wanted to hear. The eunuchs took over, gave her lessons and beauty treatments to prepare her to meet the king, 6 months with oil and myrrh and six with perfumes and cosmetics.
She had to learn new lessons – rules on how to look, how to walk, how to approach the king because she wasn’t one of a million poor little girls living life in the vast Persian Empire stretching from India to Egypt and she caught the break of a lifetime and became Queen in the most powerful man in the world’s court.
The wisdom she needed there was a wisdom that Mordecai could not have taught her, because Mordecai didn’t understand. He didn’t understand a world of feasts and excess as his was a world of famine and poverty. He didn’t understand a world of makeup and perfume as his was a world of dust and stench. He didn’t understand the world of a god-king whose will decided the fate of millions because Mordecai’s world was governed by the God of the Exodus, a God who would deliver the people from oppression in a foreign land, if not now than soon.
So when Mordecai ran into Haman, he didn’t know he was supposed to bow down, but his ignorance did not forgive his indiscretion – in fact, it sealed his fate and that of his people.
Based on his faith in his God, though, Mordecai believed that Esther must have been placed as Queen in this Persian Empire to deliver her people from the evil Haman’s plot.
But Esther is not so sure. She knows that there are rules to be followed and that it’s no simple thing to ask for a favor. At best his response will be a simple “no” –as just the act of asking will surely cost her life.
Maybe it’s guilt, maybe it’s love, but whatever it is Esther agrees to go to ask Xerxes to spare her people saying, “When this is done, I will go to the king, even though it is against the law. And if I perish, I perish.”
She goes to him and she asks, even though, according to the rules of the empire, she knows the answer already.
She approaches Xerxes, knowing full well that this man cannot set the precedent of granting requests to anyone who asks, knowing full well that what she is doing breaks the law and ensures that she will forever lose her favored place in the court, she goes and asks knowing that the answer will be no and that she will surely die because of it, and she says to the King even though he won’t listen, “If I have found favor with you, O king, and if it pleases your majesty, grant me my life – this is my petition. And spare my people – this is my request. For I and my people have been sold for destruction and slaughter and annihilation. If we had merely been sold as male and female slaves, I would have kept quiet, because no such distress would justify disturbing the king.”
I wonder what thoughts passed through her head during the silence that followed. Did she watch his face, or look at the ground; maybe she stared out a window knowing that her father would be hanged but she would not have to live to see it happen.
I wonder if she remembered days of sitting on his lap, his fingers wiping away sweet potatoes, and hearing stories of a God whose will shaped the history of the world, whose will had liberated the people from slavery and Egypt, and the promise that this God would save the people again.
The lessons Mordecai taught her about this God must have seemed like fairy tales - if only the world really worked that way. If only Mordecai’s stories were true, if only the powers of life and death didn’t rest in the hands of a fickle king.
I’ll just imagine it’s true, until my fate is sealed with the word “no.” But that word never came.
King Xerxes demanded, “Who is he? Where is the vile Haman who has dared to exterminate your father and the Jews?”
Imagine the joy Mordecai felt then as he recorded these events, as he sent letters to all the Jews throughout the provinces of King Xerxes, near and far, to have them celebrate…to celebrate the time when their sorrow was turned into joy and their mourning into a day of celebration, because his daughter knew the answer to the question, but she asked it anyway.
If only we could be so bold – but what we have learned about the world and how it works almost always prevents us from asking such questions.
We’ve learned that we live in a world disinterested with religion.
We’ve learned that people would rather sleep in on Sunday morning.
We’ve learned that it’s better to get ahead ourselves, that when we catch a lucky break we should take it, and that we can’t worry about everybody else because we need to be worried about ourselves.
So we put away those Bible stories to make our way in the world as Esther made her way in the Persian court. We don’t talk about what we believe, we don’t invite people to church, and we don’t dare hope for a world where there is enough for everyone. If we did we’d stick out, people would stare – think of all we’d stand to lose.
This afternoon in the Town Hall meeting following the 11:00 service you will be presented with some numbers that may incite worry, anger, maybe even panic. I think that the lessons we’ve been taught by the world, like the lessons Esther learned at court lead us to react one way, but our faith, like the faith Mordecai taught Esther will lead us to another.
Our church faces a great trial, but we’ve got to remember that there is a power beyond what meets the eye at work in our world – a power that the world never takes into account.
So let us remember Esther – whose common sense told her one thing, but who nonetheless asked for the impossible, only to find that the God who liberated the people from Egypt was still at work – putting heroes in place, shaping the mind of a king, to save the people again.
Her common sense told her that she should think rationally.
Her common sense told her that all was lost.
And her common sense told her that coincidence, luck, and the will of the king governed the world.
But Mordecai told her that she had been placed here for a reason – for just such a time as this. And today I am bold enough to believe the same thing – that we are all here today for a reason, that we are here today because this is a day when the future of this church needs you the most.
May we be bold – trusting that the God who turns sorrow to joy and mourning into a day of celebration is still at work in the world calling the ways of the world into question – proving once again that the final word does not come from the king, from the bank, from the economy, but from the God who liberated the people from Egypt, set the people free from the vile Haman, and who will work through you to make what seems impossible possible.