Cuba Christian Church
Rev. Amy Wharton
Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22
Psalm 124
James 5:13-20
Mark 9:38-50
“Courage for Community”
Communities often have a spirit that identifies them. Large cities are usually made up of many communities, some separated by ancestry: a Czech community, for instance, or Bosnian or Welsh. Some communities are brought together by common work—the background isn’t what matters as much as the source of the means of support for families: mines or factories or mills or farms or universities or insurance companies.
Communities are often created within people of common purpose—the workers in a particular industry and the managers of those workers, though they live near one another, may participate in different communities. People may work, eat, worship and play in the vicinity of each other without being a community. Community often arises, instead, from other similarities, such as a common direction in life.
What draws people together and makes them willing to stand up with one another moving together toward some common purpose? What kind of motivation is needed to unite people?
Esther and Mordecai, as the book of Esther tells us, found that their people had been forced to choose between paying homage to God—the only God—and bowing down to the king of Persia. This act—forced upon the people by Haman, the king’s aide—made it possible for Haman to build a gallows upon which to begin executing the Jewish people—and to begin with Mordecai, followed shortly by Queen Esther, one assumes.
The story in today’s selection from Esther, as the rest of Esther, does not mention God. But this book does reveal the results of a community drawn together without common action—simply drawn together by common enemy who threatened to destroy their community and perhaps create a corruption that would destroy others as well.
As I write this, I wonder if we think it’s easier to create community out of common enmity instead of common hope and love. At first reading, I can hear that in the text from Esther. As the story in the book of Esther opens, Queen Vashti has been deposed in some way—the king was displeased with her and wanted another woman in his life. Esther is one of many candidates. She is powdered and primped and sent into the king’s rooms to please him. Her position is one created as a result of the overthrow of the current queen. As the story continues, Esther’s position of relative power is used by Mordecai and others to protect their vulnerable people—the Jewish people who were in exile. And when Haman’s plot is unfolded that protection is more necessary than every. In some sense this is community built out of enmity
Yet I also hear in Esther’s story that life is a unifying power. While the Jewish people were not happy about their lives in exile, it seems that they have made the best of their existence. Esther, Mordecai and others were participating in the society where they found themselves; they were thriving, building for the future and storing resources in hopes of the eventual return to their homeland. They didn’t completely dissolve into the majority culture, but simply took advantage of the good things they needed there. Their purpose was benefitting in each situation how they could while keeping their identity as Jewish people of faith. While the book of Esther never mentions God, their identity as Jews is dependent upon their faith in the God of their ancestors and holding onto the traditions of that faith.
And the first step toward maintain the traditions would have been to stay alive long enough to pass it on. That’s how important the desire for life is in this text. Life depends upon community strength and community is made up of living beings—the people who know God and carry on that relationship with God.
The exile in Babylon and then Persia, as the Babylonian empire was overtaken by the Persian Empire, was a defining moment for the people of the Jewish faith. They had been known as the Hebrew people before, now they were Jewish because their land had become Judea. They had seen their God, Yahweh, as their God—living in the land where Yahweh had led them to live. Yet God had stayed with them in exile, so they had to rethink their existence in relationship to God and the relationship of their land to God.
In their exile, they felt the presence of God. And the people who were left in Israel or Judea also felt the presence of God. This realization is what led them to act courageously on behalf of one another—the need for one another for the mere survival of the people of God. Esther acted courageously, not only on behalf of Mordecai, but for her whole people. She saved one man’s life directly and immediately and her people’s lives because the law promoted by Haman was destroyed as Haman’s position of power was removed from him.
The situation was risky and complex—she never knew until she asked if her request would have been granted. She and Mordecai worried that her life would have been forfeit along with all the other Jews in Persia, but it was the chance they took. It was enough to do the right thing because that righteous act was in the service of all the people of God.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “Do and dare what is right, not swayed by the whim of the moment. Bravely take hold of the real, not dallying now with what might be. Not in the flight of ideas but only in action is freedom. Make up your mind and come out into the tempest of living. God’s command is enough and your faith in God to sustain you. Then at last freedom will welcome your spirit among great rejoicing.”[1]
Bonhoeffer was a German pastor during the rise of the Third Reich in Germany. He watched as some churches were corrupted and turned a blind eye to the violence visited upon the Jewish people in Germany.
Martin Niemöller expressed the times through his own eyes. Though he had been a supporter Hitler prior to his taking power, he broke with the Nazis by 1933. But inside I can imagine the genuineness of his thoughts and feelings as he spoke these words.
When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.
Between these two men of faith, we can hear the words that push us to respond when we see injustice—when we see actions that promote the dissolution of community standards of kindness, hope and joy. We can also hear that people of faith are not perfect examples. Niemöller had misconceptions of Hitler, but changed his mind when he heard the destructive words of the Nazi party and of Hitler himself.
Bonhoeffer might be lifted up as a model for unambiguous righteous opposition to the Nazis and Hitler himself. He was pursued by the government of the Third Reich from very early and came to the United States to escape, but soon returned to fight the fight that he believed God had called him to fight. Eventually he was arrested for participating in an assassination plot against Hitler, which he did, and executed for it. His dogged pursuit of writing, preaching, and plotting against injustice is admirable, in my eyes. Yet most of us fall somewhere along a spectrum of standing against injustice. We have been taken in by some along the way and come to realize our mistakes.
We often find ourselves in the midst of that poem by Niemöller. We look the other way and say “I am not a woman—I am not chronically ill—I am not a black man—I am not a child—I am not a felon. . .” We say I am not, until we realize that “I am a human being, so I must stand up.” Or we realize “I am a part of this wondrous web of creation and sustenance, so I must stand up.”
I often am in great awe at those whose lives have expressed such wonderful “Christ-like” actions, yet they do not embrace the Christ of faith that I have taken as my Lord and Savior. I have seen a Jewish mother and professor of New Testament stand up and bravely say to Christian pastors, “Unless you can imagine yourself preaching your sermon without reservation in the presence of my 12 year old child—unless, in the light of the Holocaust you can speak these words, reconsider your words. Don’t wait until it’s your child that feels threatened, imagine your words in the ears of my child.”[2] It took courage—and the pastors around me were taken aback by her statement, many disagreed, but I was impressed by her and her willingness to stand up for her community.
The words of Jesus are important to the world—no matter what each one believes. The actions that Jesus took to reveal his love and the love of God to all those who hear his words and the stories of his life reveal how important that love and the relationship within his community of disciples—as well as the relationships that we share with all of our companion human beings on this journey of life. We are all members of community—communities of geography: municipal, county, state and nation; communities of faith: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, etc.; communities of association: Lions, Elks, Girls Scouts, Boy Scouts, choirs, bands, universities, colleges, teams, etc.
Yet within those communities we are always given the opportunity to express the values of the relationships that guide us as our more basic selves. In all of our relationship, what guides us more? Where are we given an opportunity to reveal Jesus in our actions, to preach that sermon with what we do, not what we say? Where will God give you a time to reveal your sermon of community and hope this week? Where will your courage make that possible?
In the gracious, understanding, free and flowing Spirit of God. Amen.
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[1] From The Spiritual Formation Bible, New Revised Standard Version, copyright © 1999 by the Zondervan Corporation.
[2] Amy-Jill Levine, paraphrase, Festival of Homiletics, Chicago, 2000?
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