Feeling Salty?
Esther 7:1-6, 9-10 and 9:20-22
Proper 21 B
Those of us in the United States are starting to find election pamphlets littering our streets like the leaves making their way to my New England neighborhood. And while many of us may try not to talk politics in this polarized environment, those of us preaching are faced with the daunting task of speaking Gospel truth into a social space dominated by divisive politics. If we are going to preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, then we can’t ignore the political scene.
Week after week we step into our pulpits and face the public task of wrestling with what it means to be church in this time and space. It helps face the task if we preachers are honest with ourselves – as much as we may try to avoid preaching politics, if we are preaching the Gospel that Jesus lived then we are preaching politics every time we step into the pulpit. If we take “politics” back to its Greek root, πολιτικά, it is literally about the affairs of the city. The affairs of the city includes the housing and feeding of people, peace between neighbors (friends or enemies), the care of the incarcerated, healthcare for the sick, and all things related to the wellbeing of the people. Funny how this overlaps with Jesus’ definition of his life mission (Luke 4:18-19).
Are you feeling a bit salty because of what you are faced with in preaching during this political season? I know I am.
In his Ethics of Hope, Jürgen Moltmann framed Christian ethics with two eschatological concepts: waiting and hastening. “Waiting,” he argued, “doesn’t mean a passive waiting-it-out; it means an active expectation.” “Hastening,” likewise, “is to go from one place to another….crossing the frontiers of present reality into the spheres of what is possible in the future.” We have all seen the pushback against the insufficiency of “thoughts and prayers” in response to national crises. We who study Christ’s active life of service know that thoughts and prayers on their own are not what we are called to. In order for us to live well together - to do politics - we need advocacy and action. Moltmann’s concept of “waiting and hastening” gives us the theological background of advocacy and action: “‘waiting and hastening towards the Lord’s future’ means resisting and anticipating.” We can help our folks imagine the Lord’s future as we live lives of waiting and hastening and build communities that live well together.
And isn’t that also preaching politics?
This week’s lectionary texts can help think of our politics - our living well together - as active and engaged. These texts call us to be a people who both wait and hasten toward the promised eschatological future where God’s kingdom wins out over empire and people are freed from the systemic injustices that turn us against one another and separate us from the Good News.
This week we get the one lectionary appearance of the Hebrew Scripture book of Esther. Esther’s far from a one-act queen however. She appears annually around the world for our Jewish siblings when her story is read with great vigor and drama at Purim festivals. In the thirteen verses of this week’s readings we get the high point of the story: despite the fact that her predecessor (Queen Vashti) set back women’s rights in the Persian empire when she tried to buck the system, Queen Esther did more than think and pray and the result of her waiting and hastening saved the Jewish people from a planned genocide. Both Queens had experienced the injustices of living under a patriarchal system with a power drunk (and literally drunk) tyrant. Both had lived with a husband whose acts of showing them off as trophy wives had put them, the women of the empire, and the captive Jews in peril. They lived in a time of bad politics.
In the midst of the political machinations between different religious and ethnic groups that threatened to take down Esther’s people, her relative came to her with his infamous encouragement to her to step up and do something:
“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” (Esther 4:13b-15).
Mordecai called Esther to more than thoughts and prayers. He called her to wait and hasten.
The epistle reading from James 5:13-20 also forces us to ask: who is the church called to be in this season? In this conclusion to his letter, James outlines a number of actions he sees as essential to shaping “a particular kind of community in which people are committed to each other.” In this particular place people pray for one another. People rejoice with one another. People anoint the sick. People hold each other accountable, speaking truth to one another. People help bring other people back into the faith communities from which their sin has isolated them. What strikes me most about this section of James is the underlying assumption that people who have been isolated by sin or sickness know that they can come expecting a grace-filled response out of the church! I wonder how many people who attend AA meetings in our fellowship halls trust they can bring themselves into our sanctuaries and Bible studies knowing they will be accepted like they have been in our fellowship halls? James helps us hasten towards a new way of living well together.
Finally, Mark 9:38-50 helps us not only ask how the church is to be now but calls us to expand our vision about where God is at work in the world. I wonder if Jesus rolled his eyes when John came to tell him he had stopped some good work because he didn’t know from whence it had originated? I wonder if Jesus rolls his eyes at us when we forget that God loves people on both sides of our political divisions? Where John wanted all the players to stay on their own sides, Jesus pointed him to the actual living out of the kingdom of God in actions and advocacy - or, in Moltmann’s words, in resisting and anticipating. Jesus helped John imagine a new kind of world where the Spirit is at work outside the boundaries we set on her. “Salt is good!” Jesus proclaimed!
So, are you feeling a little bit salty this week having to preach in a contentious election season with a whole lot on the line? Salt is good!
Sometimes the social milieu doesn’t let us ignore the political implications in our Sacred texts. I preached through Revelation this summer - in an election year! What I walked away from that experience with was this: God is in all the places where creation is and God’s call has always been for us to wait and hasten in how we live with one another. In short - God is even in our politics.
In Esther’s story God was in the drinking halls and bedchambers. God was in the harem with the enslaved women. God was with Haman whose ego was so large he couldn’t see around himself. God was with the Jews while they lived as outcasts in a world dominated by empire. God was with Mordecai as he begged Esther to stop thinking and praying and to start acting. God was with Esther as she put shoes on her thoughts and prayers and stood up to a tyrannical system. And, if we trust Jesus, God is anywhere that good is being done.
So, this election season let us work together to build communities where those who are outcast by any form of sin or sickness can trust that when they ask their needs will be met. Let us look around us and see the Spirit’s work in all the places She appears.
Go be salty. Perhaps you were born for such a time as this?