+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen

If you’re a priest at a bible study, there are a handful of books in the bible you hope don’t come up in the conversation.  Not because they’re not inspired scripture, not because they aren’t vital to a biblical theology, but because, if you’re asked to read from them, you don’t know where they are in the bible.  You either have to use the “flip” maneuver or throw yourself on the mercy of the group and turn to the Table of Contents.  Esther is one of those books.  Over the entire three-year course of the lectionary, there’s only one Sunday when we read from the Book of Esther.  Esther has long been part of Jewish worship because it records the institution of the Feast of Purim[1], but it doesn’t factor as often into Christian worship.  And that’s a shame.  You’ve heard me quote Tim Keller week after week for four years, but there are probably three sets of sermons I’ve heard him give that have changed my life more than any others.  The first is about the Parable of the Prodigal Son, three sermons[2] he developed into a book called The Prodigal God[3], which our house group is studying on Thursday nights right now.  The second set is from the book of Jeremiah, and it’s about living out the gospel in the heart of the city.[4]  It’s why we’re moving to Boston rather than home to Mississippi next month.  The third life-changing series was on the Book of Esther.[5]  So, although I won’t ask you to turn to it, or try to do so myself, let me tell you a story.

Esther was an exiled Jew in the fifth century bc during the reign of the Persian King Ahasuerus, a king you may know by his Greek name: Xerxes.[6]  In the opening act, King Ahasuerus hosts a fantastic banquet in his capital for all his officials and ministers.  Persia was the largest empire in the world at the time, so thousands of men came to this banquet, all summoned to the capital for one reason: So the king could parade all his wealth before them.  Think of those May Day parades in Moscow where communist leaders would march troops and tanks and missles through Red Square, but Ahasuerus’ parade took six months.  (Esther 1.4)  At the climax of the banquet, when the king had been drinking quite a bit, he called for Queen Vashti to show her off, too.  For obvious reasons, she declined, and that breach of protocol created a political crisis.  The king called a cabinet meeting, and it was decided that Vashti had to be stripped of her crown, and Ahasueurus must take a new queen. 

A decree went out to every province in the kingdom that all the beautiful young virgins were to come to the capital and undergo cosmetic treatments for an entire year.  Each girl, when her beauty treatments were complete, was to go in to the king for a night, and whoever pleased the king the most would be the new queen.  It happened that a Jew named Mordecai lived in the capital, and his cousin, whom he had adopted as his own daughter, was the beautiful young Esther.  Mordecai sent Esther to the palace to take the beauty treatments and go in to the king, but not to tell him she was a Jew.  Think about what that meant:  She was to try to pass as a non-Jew, to do things Jews do not do – sleep with a man she wasn’t married to, eat and drink whatever was put before her without regard to the dietary laws.  Esther was to go and break God’s law . . . but it worked:  The king “loved Esther more than all the other women; of all the virgins she won his favor and devotion, so that he set the royal crown on her head and made her queen instead of Vashti.”  (Esther 2.17) 

Act 1 is love story, such as it is.  Act 2 is political intrigue.  Mordecai would go to the king’s gate every day to see Esther, and there he overheard two guards plotting to assassinate the king.  Mordecai told Queen Esther, she told the king, and the plot was averted.  But the king forgot about Mordecai, and he promoted a man named Haman to the highest position in government, effectively the prime minister.  Haman loved the trappings of his office, especially the way everyone had to bow to honor him, but Mordecai would not bow.  Haman plotted, not just to kill Mordecai, but to convince the king to commit mass genocide against all Jews and fatten his coffers at the same time, and the king went along.  Haman cast lots (called “Pur,” the singular form of “Purim”) for a date and issued an edict under the king’s signature that, on that day, every Jew in all 127 Persian provinces would be slaughtered and their goods plundered.  When Mordecai learned of the edict, he sent word to the new queen to plead to the king for the lives of the Jews.  Esther didn’t want to go – she had a taste of life in the palace, and now Mordecai wanted her to reveal her nationality, to reveal her deception and, in the same breath, mark herself for death along with every other Jew in the empire.  Mordecai told Esther she couldn’t keep silent, and “Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.”  (Esther 4.14)  Esther agreed to go beg for the lives of her people, and she said “If I perish, I perish.”  (Esther 4.16b) 

Esther invited the king to a banquet she would host just for the king and Haman, his prime minister.  Meanwhile Haman had a gallows built fifty cubits high to hang Mordecai the morning after the banquet.  At the banquet, Esther asked for and won her life and the lives of her people, and the king turned against Haman and had him hanged on the very gallows Haman had built himself for Mordecai.  Because in Persia an edict sealed with the king’s ring couldn’t be rescinded, Haman’s decree to kill all the Jews was still out there like a ticking bomb.  The king took the signet ring he had given Haman, gave it to Mordecai, and Mordecai issued a counter-order to allow the Jews to defend themselves against any attack.  The day that the enemies of the Jews had hoped to gain power over them became the very day the Jews gained rest from all their enemies.  (Esther 9.1)  From that day, the Jews have kept the Feast of Purim, giving gifts to each other and to the poor, to celebrate how Queen Esther saved them from destruction. 

Two quick points about the story – First, the actor hidden in the story.  Notice what is missing:  Esther is the only book in the bible that doesn’t directly mention God at all.[7]  Nothing specifically about prayer, about sin, about worship; nothing about God.  But you can’t read the story and not see God’s fingerprints all over it.  The point of making God conspicuously absent from the story is to make clear that God doesn’t have to speak in thunder and he doesn’t have to part seas in order to do what he sets out to do.  He uses the mundane and everyday, what from our perspective may seem a random jumble of events.  Corrie Ten Boom was a Christian who was part of the Dutch underground that hid Jewish refugees during WWII.  I have heard it said that later in life she kept a tapestry she always insisted be displayed wrong-side-up.  Her point was that a tangled, discordant mess of knots and random threads appears, viewed from the other side, as an object of great beauty.  We can’t always see life from God’s side, but God is present in your life and in the life of this parish, even when he doesn’t show up and thunder away, even in random, seemingly insignificant events –talk around a table at coffee hour, appearance of a solitary newcomer on a September Sunday, serendipitous .  These are not coincidences; they are how God acts in our lives.  Look for God in the ordinary. 

And, second, the gospel is hidden in the story.  Haman was killed on gallows he built himself, and that’s more than just poetic justice.  It’s an example of something a seminary professor of mine named Gordon Hugenberger called the “Benaniah Principle.”  In 2 Sam. a warrior in David’s army named Benaniah went out to fight an Egyptian armed only with a staff, but Benaniah disarmed the Egyptian and killed him with his own spear.  (2 Sam. 23.21)  In the bible, when someone falls into his own trap it implies God is judging him, so Haman hanged on his own gallows isn’t just irony or a nifty plot device; it’s God judging Haman as the enemy of God’s people. 

So how is the gospel hidden in the story of Haman dying on his own gallows?  Interestingly, Hebrew doesn’t have a word for “gallows.”  The word here is etz, or “tree.”  Think forward five centuries – there was another tree erected to kill a man.  Jesus’ death looked to be the end, but the tree built for him became the instrument of death’s defeat.  The gospel says God turned the tables, defeated the ultimate enemies of his people – sin and death – and he did it at a tree.  “Since the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil.”  (Heb. 2.14)  On his lips was a prayer of forgiveness for us – Jesus was the ultimate Esther, pleading for his people.  And the cross was the ultimate etz, the tree where death died.  Esther is more than just a book in the bible nobody can find.  It can remind us God is working even when we can’t see him, and it invites us to our feast, our Lord’s Supper, and ultimate rest from all our foes.   

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen.