Sermon

Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22

Risks We Can Take

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Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22

Risks We Can Take

The Rev. Charles Hoffacker

The theme of God’s people
struggling to survive
in a sophisticated, alien culture
appears throughout the Bible,
especially in the Old Testament.
This theme is central to the Book of Esther,
which supplies today’s first reading.

Today is the only Sunday
in our three-year cycle of readings
when we hear from this brief book.
Thus I will draw your attention
to a key verse in Esther,
even though it does not appear
in what we heard read this morning.

The verse I have in mind
comes from the middle of the book.
Mordecai, a Jew living in the Persian capital of Susa,
is addressing his kinswoman Esther,
who has become the queen.
He sends word to her,
“Who knows?
Perhaps you have come to royal dignity
for just such a time as this.”

“Who knows?
Perhaps you have come to royal dignity
for just such a time as this.”
I offer this verse for your consideration,
not simply because it is a key
to the story of Esther,
but because it is a key
to the story of each of us,
and to the story of every one
of the people of God.

 

The Book of Esther is brief, only ten chapters,  2
and is lively, engaging literature.
Read it for yourself,
and you will delight in its twists and turns.
Very briefly
the plot is this.

Mordecai, a Jew at the court of King Ahasuerus,
reveals a plot to kill the king,
but is left unrewarded.
The king has to choose a new queen,
and Mordecai arranges
to have her kinswoman Esther selected.
She becomes the king’s favorite.
Esther learns of a plot
to destroy all the Jews in the empire.
It is the work of Haman,
the prime minister,
who bears a grudge against Mordecai.

One night the king remembers
that he has done nothing
to honor Mordecai for saving his life.
He asks Haman
what should be done
for the man the king wishes to honor.
Haman thinks he is that man,
so he proposes lavish compensation,
but is humiliated when Mordecai
receives the honors.

Moreover, Esther reveals to the king
that Haman has already issued a decree
for the slaughter of the Jews.
Haman pleads his case dramatically
before Queen Esther,
but the king assumes he is attacking her,
and so orders him hanged on the huge scaffold
that Haman had built for Mordecai.

Esther then obtains a royal decree
allowing the Jews to defend themselves.
They do so,
and Mordecai and Esther proclaim that day
as a great festival for the Jews.   3
This story serves as the basis
for the Jewish feast of Purim
where the story is often presented as a play
and a carnival atmosphere prevails.

So where does that key verse fit in,
when Mordecai tells Esther,
“Who knows?
Perhaps you have come to royal dignity
for just such a time as this”?

Esther finds out about
Haman’s decree for the destruction of the Jews
and the need for her to entreat the king
on behalf of her people.
The tension in the story rises sharply
when we learn that Esther,
even though she is the queen,
is still subject to a law
that prohibits anyone
from approaching the king
without being summoned.
Anyone who comes into the royal presence
without permission
is to be put to death.
And, as Esther herself notes,
she has not been called
into the royal presence
for thirty days.

Mordecai’s response to Esther
amounts to a challenge.
He sends her this message:
“Do not think that in the king’s palace
you will escape
any more than all the other Jews.
For if you keep silence at such a time as this,
relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews
from another quarter,
but you and your father’s family will perish.
Who knows?
Perhaps you have come to royal dignity
for just such a time as this.”  4

 

What we have here
is an old story,
but it is more than just an old story.
It is somehow the Word of the Lord
to God’s people today.

For the truth is,
each one of us has come to royal dignity.
Esther came to hers
by marriage to King Ahasuerus of Persia.
Each one of us came to our royal dignity
through our Holy Baptism,
by which we became God’s child
and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.

So each of us arrives at a moment,
perhaps many moments,
when we face some threatening decision
that requires holy courage on our part,
a decision that will make a world of difference
not only to us, but to people around us.

Let me tell you of three people
who arrived at such moments
and acted with holy courage.
Each of them appears
on the Episcopal Church’s
calendar of the saints.  5

• Born in Denmark in 1849,
Jacob Riis arrived in New York City
as a young man
among the multitudes of immigrants
flooding the city in search of work.
For seven years he lived on the brink of poverty,
and on several occasions
spent the night in jail
when he was without money.

In 1874 he took a job as a reporter,
eventually bought a debt-ridden newspaper,
and transformed it in short order
into a crusading reform journal
that was making a profit.
After selling that paper,
he continued as a journalist,
exposing the wretched circumstances of the slums
and campaigning for reform.
He became a firm opponent
of greedy landlords, corrupt politicians,
and inertia in state government.

In 1890, his investigative work
was published in
How the Other Half Lives:
Studies Among the Tenements of New York.
Illustrated with line drawings based on Riis’s photos
the book graphically described to affluent Americans
the wretchedness of slum life,
and provoked the first attempts
at remedial legislation.  6

Supporting the cause of those in dire need,
exposing poverty and injustice,
and awakening the conscience of a nation–
it was for countless moments of decision
throughout his life
that Jacob Riis had come to royal dignity
as a child of God.

• Toyohiko Kagawa, born in 1888,
was a Japanese Christian
who underwent a dramatic conversion experience
at the age of fifteen.
He became an evangelist, a pacifist,
and an advocate of social change,
thus gaining a whole host of opponents.

Following theological study
in Japan and the United States,
he sought to apply Christ’s teachings to the poor,
and so lived for much of his early adulthood
in a six foot square windowless shed in the slums.
A skilled organizer,
he helped found trade unions and cooperatives.
Trade unions were forbidden at the time,
and Kagawa was twice imprisoned.
In 1940 he was arrested
for publicly apologizing to the people of China
for Japan’s invasion of their country.

Although Kagawa was under police surveillance
much of his life,
the Japanese government called on him
to organize the rebuilding of Tokyo
after a 1923 earthquake,
and again at the end of World War II
to serve as head of the country’s
social welfare program.

Widely known as a pacifist and social reformer,
Kagawa saw himself first of all as an evangelist.
“Christ alone can make all things new,”
he said.
“The spirit of Christ must be the soul
of all real social reconstruction.” 7

It was for his persistent witness to Christ
at great personal cost
and in the face of widespread opposition from his society
that Toyohiko Kagawa had come to royal dignity
as a child of God.

• In 1909, Lillian Trasher
broke off her engagement
to a man she loved
to answer a call to serve as a missionary.
She opened her Bible
and came upon a verse mentioning Egypt.  8
On that basis she went to Egypt,
settling in a village near the Nile River.

Shortly after her arrival,
she was called to the bedside of a dying mother
who asked her to care for her malnourished baby.
Lillian took the child home,
but as a result of
the baby’s incessant crying
throughout twelve days and nights
her supervisor told her to take the child elsewhere.

There was no other place.
So Lillian left with the baby.
She managed to get just enough to live on
by begging for food and clothes.

Over time,
the scorn and ridicule of the local people
turned into admiration
for her persistence and stamina.
Gradually support came
from a variety of directions.
Children kept arriving too.
By 1915, there were fifty children.
By the time of her death in 1961,
she counted herself blessed
to look into the faces of twelve hundred children.
The Lillian Trasher Orphanage continues on.
To date it has cared for
twenty thousand children.

It was to help that first baby
and all the thousands of subsequent orphans
to whom she devoted her life
that Lillian Trasher had come to royal dignity
as a child of God.

 

Each of us has our opportunities.
They appear at home, at work, at church,
in community service and public citizenship,
and through every field of endeavor.
No one is left without an opportunity.
These moments are as diverse
as those that appeared to
Queen Esther, Jacob Riis,
Toyohiko Kagawa, and Lillian Trasher.
Each moment of opportunity
is lodged somehow
in the thick fabric
of a distinct life and a unique set of circumstances. 9

There are risks we can take.
By the grace of God, we take them.
These risks threaten us with death
in one form or another.
They promise the world
an unexpected resurrection.

NOTES:

1.  Esther 4:14.

2.  The Additions to Esther in the Apocrypha provide further material.

3.  This summary is based on one that appears in The Collegeville Bible Commentary (Liturgical Press, 1989), 823.

4.  Esther 4:13-14.

5.  Jacob Riis on July 2, Toyohiko Kagawa on April 23, and Lillian Trasher on December 19.

6.  Alden Whitman, ed., American Reformers (H. W. Wilson Company, 1985), 689-91.

7.  Holy Women, Holy Men: Celebrating the Saints (Church Publishing, 2010), 340.

8.  Acts 7:34

9.  G. Scott Cady and Christopher L. Webber, A Year with American Saints (Church Publishing, 2006), 115-16.

Copyright 2015, Charles Hoffacker. Used by permission.