August 5, 2018

Ormewood Church

Hannah Ratliff

***

Will you pray with me?

God, join us here, in this ordinary time and place. Use our hearts and minds, our ears and our imaginations, to bring Your holy presence into our lives. Amen.

This is from the book of Esther, chapter four, verses twelve to seventeen. Listen for God’s word for you.

When they told Mordecai what Esther had said, Mordecai 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. For 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.” Then Esther said in reply to Mordecai, “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.” Mordecai then went away and did everything as Esther had ordered him.

The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

I think that, culturally, we are really bad at saying “I need help.” We’re afraid it sounds weak. That the person we’re asking, or perhaps just those who know we asked for help at all, will think we’re incapable, or stupid. We’re afraid that people will see us as less powerful, less in control. In a world that is constantly measuring your value by what you have (whether that’s monetary wealth, cultural control, physical power or a million other manifestations), it is hard to acknowledge our own limitations. This world does not make it easy to take the risk of being vulnerable. Of saying “I need help.”

A lot of you may be familiar with the author, professor, and researcher Brené Brown, whose TED Talk[1] a few years ago became very popular online. Brown spent sixteen years researching human connectivity, and found that the people who were what she called “wholehearted,” – that is, they had meaningful and healthy relationships with those around them – they were all comfortable with the hard truth that connection requires vulnerability. Actually, she said it requires excruciating vulnerability. The kind of earnest and honest vulnerability that is scary. The kind that’s a risk. It’s pretty countercultural, but I think that same kind of vulnerability is necessary of our leaders, too. Esther shows us this perhaps better than any other Biblical story.

Esther is a weird book of the Bible by almost any standard. It’s one of only two books of the Bible, by my count, that are named for women (the other being Ruth). It is not set in Israel, and has little mention of Jewish culture, tradition, or faith practices. In fact, there is no mention of God by name anywhere in the book’s ten chapters. Unlike poetic books like Proverbs or Psalms, or sweeping grand books that tell stories of generations of people, like Genesis or Exodus, Esther is concise, tight, and plot-driven. Some scholars even call it a novella because of it’s reliance on narrative, the sort of stereotypical characters, and the clean resolution of the story.[2]

A lot happens in this book, so really quickly, let me give you a refresher of the book of Esther: Esther is this young Jewish woman in Persia, being looked after by her relative, Mordecai, who is also Jewish. After the foolish Persian king drunkenly exiles his queen for disobeying him, he decides to choose a new queen from all the eligible young women in his kingdom, and, through a strange series of events, chooses Esther, who then becomes Queen of Persia. A little while later, Esther is Queen, and her relative Mordecai, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, publicly embarrasses the king’s villainous advisor, Haman, by refusing to bow to him. So naturally, Haman then decides because Mordecai, a Jewish person, slighted him, that all Jews should be slaughtered, and he gets the foolish king to sign off on the order. Oh, also, the King has no idea that Esther is Jewish, and he’s effectively just signed her death warrant. Are y’all with me so far?

So the passage we read comes as Mordecai hears about Haman’s plot to destroy the Jewish people of Persia, so Mordecai begs Esther to use her position of privilege with the king to try and convince him to reverse this order. You have to understand that social convention in this specific place and time mandated that anyone who approached the King without being specifically asked for would be killed. Knowing all this, Esther agrees to approach the King without an invitation anyway, in an attempt to save her people. Basically, this is a crazy, very high-stakes soap opera. Think General Hospital, but in this case, there’s also the possibility of genocide.

Esther is in an unbelievably vulnerable position. For starters, she’s a woman in ancient Persia. Not a great start right off the bat. She’s also at the will of a king who we have every reason to believe to be irrational, brash, and pretty foolish. She has a little bit of power because of her role as the queen, which means that she’s more protected than a peasant woman of this time would be – essentially, she’s guaranteed food, shelter, and a degree of protection. But she also exists within a system of royalty that she’s only married into, and its a system that can be overturned by a violent coup at the drop of a hat, so her relative comfort now is not guaranteed by any means. She is also Jewish. Though it seems that not everyone in her life knows it, she is a part of a minority population greatly at risk in a foreign nation. Esther is vulnerable merely by existing. Those of us who belong to a population which regularly faces discrimination in our own time and place may know this feeling too acutely. So when Mordecai asks Esther to make herself even more vulnerable, she would have every right to say no. Every logical part of her should be screaming at what a ridiculous idea it is, to take her already-precarious position and seemingly hurdle it off a cliff. Approaching the king without invitation means death, and even if she made it that far, revealing her identity as a Jew could be her undoing. Esther has every reason to conceal her identity, keep quiet, and hope for the best. But Esther is a leader. She is wholehearted. She understands that the risk of vulnerability is a necessity.

This past week, our senior pastor, Jenelle, and I went to go see the documentary about TV host Fred Rogers, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor.” It was a touching, nostalgic, and heartening portrait of a man who devoted his life to educating, comforting, and ministering to young people everywhere, and I highly recommend you take the time to see it. But the thing that really struck me as I watched was the way that Mr. Rogers chose to be vulnerable with everyone he interacted with. When on the show or when visiting with children face to face, Mr. Rogers would often rely on characters from the show to talk to kids. One of the best loved characters, his family said in the movie, was Daniel Tiger, a little fuzzy hand puppet and mainstay of the show since it’s beginning. Daniel Tiger would often say the kind of candid, earnest things that only children do. In an interview while he was still alive, Mr. Rogers reflected on how he was able to say things as Daniel Tiger that he couldn’t otherwise, even if he wanted to. “I’m scared. I could really use a hug,” he said. “That’s a lot easier for me to say as Daniel, than for me to look you in the eye and say, as myself, ‘I could really use a hug.’” The world doesn’t make it easy for us to be vulnerable. But we find a way.

Though the book of Esther never makes explicit mention of prayer or God, Esther asks Mordecai, just before she approaches the king, to fast on her behalf, and tells him she will be doing the same. Fasting is a practice I don’t understand particularly well, but my limited understanding is that it allows you to refocus your attention away from yourself and onto something else. It seems a little counterintuitive to me that in this time of great need, when Esther is preparing to take one of the biggest risks of her life, when she needs strength the most, that she decides to abstain from food. But I wonder if that’s what vulnerability is in the first place. It’s a little counterintuitive, isn’t it? That the thing we need most is to open ourselves to the possibility of heartbreak, of rejection, of condemnation, of disconnection. The thing we need most is to look at each other and say “I’m scared.” “I love you.” “I’m sorry.”

Vulnerability means relying on something outside of ourselves to get us through something really big. Esther fasts for strength in preparation for this dangerous move she’s about to make. She doesn’t fortify herself with heavy food. She focuses on something beyond herself to help her get through the really big thing she’s about to do. She acknowledges her own limitations, she says she’s scared. She is, as a leader, about as vulnerable as you can be. And, if you aren’t familiar with the story, she prevails. Her people are saved, and a great celebration is held in her honor. She takes the risk of relying on God’s love when it is not possible for her to do this really big thing on her own. She says “I need help.”

Brené Brown said in her TED Talk that the people she studied who were connected, who were wholehearted, had three things: courage, compassion, and connection. She said that the connection was the result of true authenticity, and that it was made possible because that person understood and really believed that they themselves, flaws and history and mistakes and all, were enough. They believed that they were enough. Remember, friends, this day and every day, when the love is plenty and when it seems to have run dry, that you are enough. Because you are a beautiful, beloved, and incredible child of God, the God who holds us fast even when we say: “I need help.”

Amen.

 

 

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability

[2] White, Sidnie C. Esther. Women’s Bible Commentary (p. 132).