July 14

Esther 1-3; Psalm 79

 

Ah, now we come to the reason that I volunteered for this week! Esther. What a great story! But, do you know something odd about it? Once you have read the whole book, you may have noticed this. The name of God does not appear anywhere in the book. God is not even really referred to at any point. Instead, this is a story about a woman who saves her people. Esther is in a long line of women who use the power they had in that society to save the day. Think about Rachel when she and her family were fleeing from her father. Think about Rahab in Jericho. Think about Jael at the time of Deborah. The list goes on.

 

And here is Esther. She became the queen in Persia (well, she was in the king's harem among many wives) when the king's first wife refused to do the king's bidding. From the very beginning of the story we get the idea of what life was like for women there. These first three chapters set up the story. Esther is chosen to be in the harem. We learn that she and her uncle Mordecai are Jews. And we meet the power hungry advisor to the king, whose name is Mordecai, and learn that he wants to have all of the Jews in the kingdom destroyed. We also learn a little detail about Mordecai discovering a plot to kill the king and getting word to the king in time to save him. This little detail will play a part later in the story.

 

There is no way that Protestants in the middle of the United States in the early 21st century can understand what it has been like for Jewish people in many places around the world for centuries. But, read Psalm 79 and it might give us a little glimpse of that. You have surely seen pictures of concentration camps during World War II into which Jews and others were placed by the German military. No matter how far back we can trace our own families, most of us could not point to any kind of treatment of our own ancestors that would come close to rivaling that.

 

If we look very far back into our religious heritage though, we are of course linked to the Jewish people who were treated in the way this book of Esther reminds us about. Our Christian ancestors in the early days of church were also subjected to torture and death because of their faith.

 

If you were threatened with death because of your faith, what would you do? Would you bow to the emperor or whoever was threatening you or would your faith hold strong? Do our friends and neighbors know how important our faith is to us, or do we hide it so as not to offend or to embarass ourselves?