Passing (Proper 21B, Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22, September 30, 2013)

Passing

Proper 21B
Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22
September 30, 2012

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
1^st United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Like the Song of Solomon, the Book of Esther is featured in the three-year lectionary only once.  Also like the Song of Solomon, the Book of Esther does not mention God at all.  But it’s a great story and I hated to let it pass knowing that the chance wouldn’t come again for another three years.

Here is an abridged version of the tale:

Long ago in the Persian Empire which stretched from India to Ethiopia, King Ahasuerus, better known to us by his Greek name, Xerxes, was living in his capital city of Susa and wanted to show off how rich he was.  So he held a series of banquets which lasted for six months.  During the banquets he showed off every possession that he had plundered from his enemies, now conquered and subdued and paying their tribute to him as part of the empire.  Last of all he wanted to show off his most prized possession, his wife Queen Vashti, so he sent his servants to summon her to the banquet.  She refused to come.  The king was angry at this display of independent will.  He divorced her so every man might remain the master of his house.

But this left the king wifeless, so he set about finding another one.  He held the world’s first Miss Universe contest and invited all the young women of the empire to enter.  Now there were Jews living in Susa and among them was a Jew named Mordecai who had an orphaned niece whom he had adopted as his daughter.  Her Hebrew name was Hadassah and her Persian name was Esther.  Mordecai persuaded her to enter the contest and she not only made the cut as a finalist, the king was so pleased with her beauty that he chose her to be his queen.  But her relationship to Mordecai remained secret.

Shortly after Esther became queen, Mordecai was hanging around the palace and overheard two men plotting to assassinate the king.  He reported this to Esther, who reported it to the officials who uncovered the plot and so Mordecai had saved the king’s life.

Shortly after this a man named Haman was appointed as the king’s prime minister.  Haman had the king order that everyone should bow down to Haman, but Mordecai refused to do this because Jews did not bow down to any human.  Haman took this personally and, having found out that Mordecai was a Jew, decided to have all the Jews killed.

Haman told the king that there was an alien people in the empire who refused to obey the king’s laws and offered to have them destroyed.  The king approved of this.  Haman picked out a date for this pogrom by casting dice, called “pûrim.”

When news of this plan leaked out Mordecai and all the Jews in Susa and throughout the empire put on sackcloth, smeared themselves with ashes, and went into mourning. 

Now in all of this time Esther had not revealed who her people were.  So when Mordecai sent her word about the plot and asked her to intervene on behalf of the Jews, she suddenly found herself caught on the horns of a dilemma.  If she revealed who her people were she would be subject to the decree just like all of her people.  But the Jews were indeed her people.  Add to this the fact that for anyone to go into the presence of the king without his invitation was punishable by death.  Esther was one torn and anxious young woman.  Mordecai refused to go easy on her:

"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."

So Esther asked Mordecai to have the Jews fast for her and three days later she took her life into her hands and stood uninvited before the king.  To her relief she was pardoned by the king who asked what she wanted.  She invited the king and Haman to dinner.  It wasn’t much but it was the best she could do, given the state of her nerves. 

Her nerves did not improve and at the dinner the most she could do was to invite them to another dinner.

In the meantime, Haman was fit to be tied over Mordecai’s continued refusal to bow down to him, so he decided to have a gallows built so that he could hang Mordecai on it.

Now the king was suffering from insomnia so he was reading the royal chronicles which was a well-known cure and he noticed a record of a Jew named Mordecai who had foiled an assassination plot but who never been rewarded for this act.  The king summoned Haman and asked him how the king should honor someone whom he wished to honor.  Thinking the king was talking about him, Haman replied:

"For the man whom the king wishes to honor, let royal robes be brought, which the king has worn, and a horse that the king has ridden, with a royal crown on its head.  Let the robes and the horse be handed over to one of the king’s most noble officials; let him robe the man whom the king wishes to honor, and let him conduct the man on horseback through the open square of the city, proclaiming before him: ‘Thus shall it be done for the man whom the king wishes to honor.’”

The king was pleased with this and told him to go and honor Mordecai in this way for having saved his life.  You can imagine Haman’s shame.  But it wasn’t the last unpleasant surprise for Haman.  That night at the banquet with Haman and the king, Esther finally worked up the nerve to reveal her people, to plead for their lives and to accuse Haman of plotting their destruction.  The king in fury ordered Haman hanged from the gallows that he had built for Mordecai.  Then he decreed that, on the date set for their destruction, the Jews be allowed to defend themselves and to plunder the goods of any attacker.

Forever after that the Jews have celebrated the festival of Pûrim, or “lots,” to commemorate how they had been rescued from danger.

That’s the story of Esther.  Although God isn’t directly mentioned in so many words God’s fingerprints are all over this story, most especially in the message that Mordecai sent to Esther, pleading for her help:  “Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this,” a message that suggests that there is more at work in these events than a single ambitious Jew and his adopted daughter. 

The story is built around several reversals: a girl from a despised minority becomes queen; Haman must honor the man whom he hates and is then hung on the gallows he had built to execute his enemy; a day planned for the destruction of the Jewish people becomes a day of celebration.  Perhaps the largest reversal in the story is that the unnamed character turns out to be the most important actor of all.

It would have been an easy matter to have preached a sermon on this pattern, a pattern that God’s people are quite familiar with.  After all, it is the testimony both of Israel and of the early followers of Jesus that the God with whom we have to deal in this text is the God who delivered slaves into freedom; brought exiles home; gave sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf and mobility to the lame; the God who raised Jesus from death to life.  This is the same God who declares the poor to be blessed and the rich to be pitied.  In Esther as in the rest of the Bible, our God is a God of surprises and reversals.  Sum it all up and it fits under the expression that Jesus apparently used in a variety of contexts: “The first shall be last and the last shall be first.”

This is a central dynamic in our experience of God’s actions among us and it gives rise to an ethic that privileges widows, orphans, strangers, the sick, the powerless, the poor, the hungry, the imprisoned and, in general, all those who occupy the margins of our culture, economy and politics.

But along the way to preaching that sermon I saw something else, something that disturbs me, and challenges the privileged stance from which I have read this text.  I noticed that the story only works at all because Esther can “pass.”  Esther—actually Hadassah—is a Jewish girl who can pass for Persian.  No one can tell from looking at her that she is not the Persian queen that she seems.

“Passing” is a notion that comes out of African American culture.  In some ways it was set up by white people and the “one-drop” rule.  That is, under the law in many states, it used to be that race—and all the barriers or access to privilege that race signified—was defined in a very strict way: if any of a person’s ancestors were black, if there was a single drop of black blood in their veins, they were black, even if they looked white.  This rule removed ambiguity: there were no bi-racial people; they were either black or white.  But in place of the ambiguity it left a great deal of anxiety-provoking uncertainty: just because a person looked white didn’t mean that they really were.  There could be—and probably were—racial imposters who looked like one thing but in reality were another.

White people experienced this uncertainty with both fear and fascination.  It’s not too difficult to imagine white people’s consternation in discovering that a person they had been treating as a social equal was an imposter who had no place among them.  But “passing” was a phenomenon that white people found fascinating.  Louisa May Alcott wrote several short stories and short novels under pseudonyms.  Unlike her bestsellers—Little Women and the related books—these were romantic stories in which the heroine was a white woman and the hero was often a “Spaniard,” code for a person whose racial pedigree could not be established with any certainty.  Miss Alcott entertained bi-racial fantasies.  No wonder she used pseudonyms!

From the perspective of the person passing the issues were somewhat different.  Passing gave a man or a woman access to all sorts of white privilege: education, careers normally closed to blacks, and social standing in the dominant group.  Of course, the greatest fear of whites and therefore the greatest coup to be scored by someone passing was to marry a white person and have children.

But a person could pass only by cutting all connection with their history and the people, social relations, and influences that had shaped and formed them.  Just who was a black person who was successfully passing as white?  Passing was a pricey privilege.

Esther was passing.  She was the queen in the king’s favor.  She had influence and some degree of power.  She certainly lived comfortably, shielded from the harsh realities of the non-elites who lived in the slums of Susa.  For a while she pulled it off.  She had evaded any final decision about who she was.  On the outside she was a Persian.  But the Jews were still “her people.”  Mordecai blew her cover with his refusal to stop being a Jew.  The decision she had evaded had hunted her down and forced a choice: either she would inwardly renounce her Jewishness and conform to her outward appearance, or she would stand with her people as a Jew inside and out.

We know how Esther decided.  Unlike many people who have attempted to pass, she “outed” herself because she could not renounce her true loyalty.  If she could not pass as Persian without ceasing to be Jewish, she would be Jewish.  If she could not pass as Esther without ceasing to be Hadassah, she would be Hadassah.

As the story suggests, though, passing isn’t necessarily an entirely bad thing.  What would have happened to the Jews of the Persian empire if Hadassah had not been able to pass for Esther?  If a Jewish girl had not been able to pass for a Persian queen?  Mordecai was right when he told Esther: “Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.”

Which brings me and you, too, if you’re willing to come on this journey, to a difficult place.  Like Hadassah/Esther we have two identities.  We carry two passports because we have dual citizenship.  We appear to be rather ordinary American citizens.  We pay our taxes, obey the laws, love our country and wish it well.  But we are also Christians who in following Jesus of Nazareth as his disciples have met the God of surprises and reversals, the God who, as the liberation theologians say, has a preferential option for the poor, where the phrase “the poor” is understood to mean any of those slaves, exiles, blind, deaf, lame, unclean, imprisoned, naked, hungry, thirsty, oppressed or powerless folk who live in the margins of our world.  This is the identity that was imposed on us at our baptism, the identity that we claimed at confirmation, and the identity we impose in our turn when we baptize our children.

Most of the time we pass.  But the two identities that we carry—Hadassah and Esther, Jewish and Persian, American and Christian—do not always sit well with each other.  Most of the time we can live in the American culture without blowing our cover.  And Lord knows the rewards for being able to do this are pretty good.  I have a house that is warm when it is cold outside, cool when it is hot.  I am well-fed.  I have nice clothes.  I can stay clean.  My bed is comfortable.  My life is comfortable.

In the midst of my comfortable life I confess to living somewhat anxiously.  Someone has said that in a world where people are starving you can either eat well or sleep well, but you can’t do both.  I don’t know if I completely agree with that—after all, I don’t know that my going hungry will fill the bellies of those whose prayer for their daily bread mostly goes unanswered.  But I have an uneasy sense that this “someone” has hit a little too close to the mark for my comfort.

Mordecai wasn’t thinking much about Esther’s comfort.  “For just such a time as this,” he said.  Those are terrible words, and yet, the two or three times that I have heard them in my life I have found them not comfortable, but nonetheless strangely comforting.  They have meant that I could no longer pass, but had to be publically clear about who and whose I am.  They also meant I no longer had to pass, but could be publically clear about who and whose I am.  There is something liberating in that.

So the story of Esther doesn’t just celebrate the God of reversals.  The story of Esther also poses a series of questions that are both uncomfortable and liberating: When push comes to shove who are we really?  What does it mean to pass?  What would it mean to stop passing?  What would we lose and gain by that?  When do we know that it is time to stop passing, when “this” time is “just such a time”?

I don’t begin to know the answers to those questions.  I’m not sure there are iron-clad answers to those questions.  But they are really good questions.  If we let them, they will shape and form us.  For all that they make us uncomfortable, they are good news.

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