For Such a Time As This

For Such a Time As This--September 25, 2017

"Hathach went and told Esther what Mordecai had said. Then Esther spoke to Hathach and gave him a message for Mordecai, saying, ¹¹‘All the king’s servants and the people of the king’s provinces know that if any man or woman goes to the king inside the inner court without being called, there is but one law—all alike are to be put to death. Only if the king holds out the golden scepter to someone, may that person live. I myself have not been called to come in to the king for thirty days.’ ¹²When they told Mordecai what Esther had said, ¹³Mordecai told them to reply to Esther, ‘Do not think that in the king’s palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. ¹⁴For if you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise 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.’ ¹⁵Then Esther said in reply to Mordecai, ¹⁶‘Go, gather all the Jews to be found in Susa, and hold a fast on my behalf, and neither eat nor drink for three days, night or day. I and my maids will also fast as you do. After that I will go to the king, though it is against the law; and if I perish, I perish.’" [Esther 4:9-16]

Listening for God's voice does not necessarily mean permanent silence.  Sometimes it is precisely because of listening to the voices God sends across our path that we are compelled to speak.

Just ask Esther.

A lot of people know the one verse from this passage in the book of Esther, the line of Mordecai about being placed in "royal dignity for such a time as this."  But less familiar is the context, the setting, of those words.  (Here we should confess our bad habit of selecting verses out of context and slapping them on bookmarks, plaques, and Facebook posts without considering what they are really saying.)  Those words of Mordecai's, the words that Esther finally listens to, are calling her to risk her position of privilege and comfort to call attention to a grave threat and injustice to a whole ethnicity, when it would have been easier to look the other way or keep quiet so as to avoid rocking the boat.

In case the plot of the story of Esther is a little hazy in your memory, here's the short version.  In the days when the Persians Empire stretched across much of the ancient world, the Jewish people were one of many subjugated nations who were occupied by the powers of the day.  And as the story goes, one of them, the lovely Esther (her given Jewish name was Hadassah), had been chosen by the king to be his next queen.  It was a comfortable life as queen, and King Xerxes didn't even know Esther's ethnicity.  When the villainous Haman plotted to have all the Jews in the empire killed (on account of a personal grudge with Esther's uncle Mordecai), Esther could have been in a position to keep quiet.  In fact, for a while, that seemed a likely option.

Esther could have kept herself safe, could have kept from risking her own reputation, her own position of wealth and power and prosperity as queen, and her own life by simply keeping quiet.  As long as the king never found out she was Jewish, too, she could have simply let her people die and just not made a fuss.  It was risky, after all, to speak up.  As Esther notes in her conversation with her uncle Mordecai, if she went to the king unsummoned and burst in without an official royal invitation, she was liable to be put to death.  Going in to see the king unannounced was the height of disrespect--and of course, not simply disrespect to one individual person, but to the whole government, the nation, and indeed the whole Persian empire.  Speaking up and inviting yourself in to see the king would be seen as brash, irreverent, unpatriotic, and possibly even treasonous.  It was a symbolic gesture that was likely to get Esther in trouble... and she knew that.

But she listens.  Esther listens to her uncle, and it was from that listening that she found the urgency and courage to speak up.

Mordecai says that this is her moment to use her position to bring attention to the plot and expose it so that her people can be saved.  He knows, as she does, that it is risky to her well-being, but if she does not speak up, countless lives will be lost, while everyone else will agree to turn the other way and pretend it isn't happening.  The situation calls for someone to do something dramatic enough, jarring enough, and yes, risky enough, to get the king's attention and to save the Jewish people.  Mordecai knows that Esther risks falling out of favor with the king, or even with the whole Persian empire if her act of going to the king uninvited is cast as a show of disrespect to the Persian king and its government.  He knows that there will be people who are scandalized at the thought of her breaking the established rules, violating "good order," and calling attention to a problem that everyone else had just agreed not to think about or deal with.  Esther runs the risk, even if she gets out of the situation with her life, of being seen as a troublemaker, a rabble-rouser, a disrespectful member of an ethnic minority who "just won't stay in her place."  Mordecai and Esther both know that if she speaks up about how the bodies and lives of young children are being endangered, just because of their ethnicity, she will have made powerful enemies--like Haman, the villain of the whole book--who do not want to have to see or think about it.  Mordecai knows that what he is asking Esther to do, by speaking up to the king, carries the risk of Esther either losing her life or her privilege.  And yet he asks it of her anyway--lives depend on it.

Only against that backdrop do we really get what it means when Mordecai says those words you have likely heard before:  "If you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise from another quarter... who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this."

We have a way--and I will confess, I have done this, too, all too often in my life--of taking verses out of their settings to turn them simply into self-esteem boosters or motivational clichés.  I have heard (and, Lord, forgive me if I have preached) plenty of sermons about this whole "such a time as this" idea that boil down to just, "Seize the day--make the most of today!  Don't miss an opportunity, because you might have been put here for such a time as this..."  And the danger there is that we water down the force of what Mordecai is actually saying to Esther; we can quote the verse but lose the force, the risk, the sense of urgency to speak up for those whose lives are endangered.  In its original context, these words of Mordecai's are not the Old Testament version of "Carpe Diem"--they are a call to speak up when everybody else, both the powerful and the comfortable, have all agreed not to talk about something that is systematically eliminating people.  That means these words are loaded with a call to see the threats to those who are vulnerable (something we are never really eager to do) and then to speak up about them, even if it means being called names, or losing your position, or even losing your life. 

That's simply what these words mean.  It is what they have always meant, because that is what the story of Esther is about: a heroine who speaks up, even when it is against the rules, in order to call attention to a systematic attempt to wipe out an entire ethnicity.  If we (and if I) have missed that by separating the "such a time as this" line from the setting in the story, then we (myself included) have not been really listening to the Bible on its own terms.

And that's just the point.  Esther finds the courage to speak up before the king because she dares actually to listen to Mordecai. 

It would have been so much easier for her to throw excuses like, "But the people will say I'm disrespecting the king by coming to him unannounced!  And I don't want to lose my position!" or "The people will not understand that I am using my position of influence to call attention to a wider problem, and they will think I am just an out-of-touch elitist complaining!"  It would have been so much easier for Esther to keep her head down and be a good Persian and not bring the whole extermination plot to light... or only bring it up if it wasn't going to cause offense.  It would have been so much easier to hear Mordecai without listening to him, and lob back reasons she couldn't be bothered to speak up.

But... with every passing day, Haman's plan got closer and closer to its terrible execution.  Every day, every moment she waited, the noose got tighter around their collective necks.  And so, after listening to Mordecai, Esther speaks.  She fasts, and she prays, and she asks her people to do the same.  But she goes...knowing that it might mean her death.

Now, chances are, you know how the story ends.  You know that in the end, Esther is successful in pleading with the king, her life is spared, and in fact, her whole people are saved, and the wicked Haman is exposed and then hanged on the gallows he had been plotting to lynch Mordecai with.  We remember Esther today as a hero of the faith, and an example for our children.

But to be clear, in this moment of the story where our verses come from today, while we are still halfway through the narrative, Esther isn't recognized as much of a hero yet.  There is every possibility that she will not be popular, or that her actions will be misunderstood, or intentionally slandered, or that people will see her as attacking all the fine institutions of the Persian Empire by breaking the rule about coming before the king.  This is the reality of the text: sometimes real heroes are not recognized as heroes in the moment--they are seen, like Esther here, as stirring the pot, subverting good order, talking out of turn, making a fuss, and attacking beloved institutions.  That was part of the risk, too: Esther could have come out of this with her life, but been tarred and feathered in the public eye as a troublemaker who should have stayed quiet and just kept to being a pretty face in the king's harem. 

But despite those risks, Esther listened to the voice God had put in her path... and because she listened, she spoke up. 

And because she spoke up, knowing the risk that she might ruffle some feathers for speaking, countless lives were spared.

Our calling as the people of God today is always to listen... and then as we listen, we may well find that our calling is also to speak up.  Speaking up first without listening for what (or whether) God is nudging us to say is just pushing your own agenda.  Listening without ever speaking up is ignoring your responsibility.  But when we listen... and then speak as God directs, we will find ourselves in good company at least.

Who knows, but that you and I are called to listen... and then to speak up... at such a time as this?

Lord God, help us to listen for what you are actually saying, rather than what we want you to say... and help us to find the courage to speak when you call us, like Esther, to speak for those who are most endangered.