Salted
Esther 7:1-10, 9:20-22; Mark 9:38-50

September 28, 2003

It is possible to be good without God. That may not get much reception inside churches, but well over half of the population believes it, and perhaps half of the United Church of Canada as well.

What purpose and what good is a God then? If we say that the idea of God is old, do we really mean antiquated and obsolete?

In the past year, three new Gospels have appeared at Chapters and Book and Briar Patch: The Gospel according to the Simpsons, the Gospel according to Harry Potter (J. R. Rowling), and most recently, the Gospel according to Tolkien (the Lord of the Rings).

These stories do not deny God, but they talk about godliness and holiness without mentioning the traditional Judeo-Christian God and without referring to the Bible. Actually, the Simpsons do refer to God and the Bible, but do we want to buy what they claim to be the nature of the Ultimate Concern and the Word of God? That is the point of the Simpsons – they parody the ludicrousness of our ideas and practices of faith and culture. Believe it or not – eat a cow – this kind of story-telling pushes us shoving and kicking towards the Gospel. God certainly can handle being unmentioned and distorted. Happens even in the Bible.

The book of Esther has been something of an enigma for many a generation of readers. It is a great story of a Jewish heroine living in the Persian Empire well after the Babylonian Captivity. Anonymity is the basic mode of operation. She does not reveal her religious faith until the climax of the tale and never a mumbling word is uttered about God. There are some who declare that Esther is a story extracted from elsewhere and inappropriately planted in the Bible.

Yet, one cannot read it without feeling that God is lurking between the lines. God does not feel absent, even though the name is not mentioned. But just like the Simpsons, Harry Potter, and the Lord of the Rings, you and I are the ones who are supposed to supply God in the mix. You and I have to add the salt.

Esther is not a story for the squeamish and politically correct. Feminists will have to work overtime to find a justifiable place for the heroine. The story is messy from a spiritual sense; it is how theology is done in the midst of a normally messy and bland world.

There are lots of characters in the 10 chapters of the Book of Esther, but really only four. King Ahasuerus (Xerxes I) is the central figure in this typically patriarchal and royal story. He is the king and no one breathes without his permission, his pleasure granting benefits to his beloved ones, and his hot anger eliminating those who excite his displeasure. Is he a good man or just a powerful one? The story never quite settles the issue.

Ahasuerus has a Queen Vashti, but she is a rebellious one, refusing to appear before the court during a gigantic banquet. Ahasuerus is affronted, and figures Vashti is a dangerous example to the other wives of the kingdom who might just disobey their husbands and who knows where we would be then? I am just telling the story!

So Ahasuerus de-queens Vashti, or whatever it is when you take away one’s queenosity. He then sets out on one of those fairy tale kind of searches for a new queen. All the fairest young maidens in the empire apply.

The second person is the story is Mordecai, a Jew living in the city of Susa. He was the uncle and guardian of a young woman named Hadassah in Hebrew, but known as Esther to the Persians and us. Mordecai figures she is qualified and capable of such a role and will prosper greatly. He enters her in the sweepstakes on one condition, that she not tell anyone that she is a Jew. That’s for her own safety. The short story is that Esther pleases Ahasuerus the most and wins. She is Queen Esther. The fairy tale is partly over.

The fourth person in the story is the new prime minister of the king, Hanam, a man who quickly shows himself to be a pompous and ruthless excuse for a human being. He runs into Mordecai and is insulted that the Jew will not bow and scrape before him as he has insisted everyone else do outside the royal palace.

Hanam decides Jews like this impudent Mordecai are dangerous, so he casts a diabolical plot for the final solution. Lots are cast – the ancient word for a lot is Pur – and they fell on the 13th day of Adar, the 12th month, about 11 months in the future. Hanam convinces the King that this should be the day that all the empire should rise up and kill all the Jews, that insurrectionist and lawless race. Hanam agrees to pay 10, 000 talents of silver into the kingdom’s treasury as a bribe – the same amount of money the man in Jesus’ parable owed to his master and was forgiven.

Mordecai sends word to Esther who makes a presumptuous visit to the king to set up a counter-plot and trap for Hanam. No one is allowed to visit the king unless summoned, not even the queen, so this was a dangerous move. It worked, however, and finally Esther is able to convince the king that Hanam has tricked him into killing all her people. Hanam had arranged for a gallows to be erected to hang Mordecai, but is himself hanged on that gallows.

The festival of Purim, the “lots”, is then established on the very day the Jews were supposed to be genocided. It is still one of the great celebratory feasts of Judaism.

But is Purim and Esther really religious? Is it Jewish at all in the spiritual sense and should we as Christians pay any attention to it? Jesus was confronted by a complaining disciple John: “Lord, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, but he wasn’t one of us. We tried to stop him.” Jesus answered, “Don’t stop him, for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us.” He must have had the right amount of salt.

Salt in the ancient world was more than a spice: it was a preservative of meat and other foods and so guarded the purity of many things. It has to be the right amount of salt, neither too little nor too much.

The Jewish rabbis proclaimed the Law or Torah as the salt of the world, prodding and instigating our faith. Jesus never did say he was the salt of the world, but he certainly could have.

Being salty as Christians describes what you do, not so much who you are. Our saltiness is not something we keep for ourselves, but what give away to give others life and zest and resurrection. Being Christian is not a game of how tasty you and I can become individually. It is all about how out of your faith, you can make others tasty. Esther was humble and salty, and she saved her king and her people time and again.

William Willimon had a conversation with a professor in Islamic studies at Duke University. The professor bemoaned the fact that “the Quran has no help whatsoever for how one is to behave when one is Muslim in a majority non-Muslim culture.”

There is the first bit of Good News for our changed situation today, for Christians do not have any good instruction in our Scriptures on how to behave when we are in the majority in a given culture. All of our writing in the Bible is written for a minority, people on the margins, people without power and great social significance – just like Esther in a Persian empire, like Jesus in a Roman-ruled Palestine, like us living in a post-modern thoroughly secular world in the early 21st century. We are not called to be powerful, but salty, provocative, nudging, transforming of the mind of the world.

A few years ago we bought the Smithsonian Blues Collection, the really old stuff. One of my favourites was a song by Aleck Miller, aka the Original Sonny Boy Williamson, a man born in Mississippi when the only thing free about his life was his music. This particular song was written in 1951, still a time of Babylonian or Persian captivity, and the song was a earthy and probably too chauvinistic for consumption by today’s standards. The song is about his girl friend who he believes is absolutely wonderful.

“I wish you could see my woman, Oh, she’s mighty fine,” the prettiest woman in the whole state. “And when she love me, she bring eyesight to the blind, she make the deaf and dumb talk… What a woman, what a woman, what a woman!”

My Lord, there’s a woman, call her Esther, who is being all the salt she can be. Can any of you say that when you love, that loved one can now see where once he was blind, that now he can talk and sing when before no sound came out, that he who stumbled and crawled can now run and leap? Don’t laugh. You are the salt of the earth.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan