rich’s blog

This is the second in a series on the book of Esther.  Surprisingly–I know–it covers 1:4-22. 

“It’s Not Easy Being Queen.” 

Welcome back!  Pray with me, would you?

 

Prayer:

 

Introduction:

So. Last week we started walking through the book of Esther; a thing we’ll be doing for a while.  We looked at the major characters in this story, talked about the ways they interact and the roles they play in the book. What else? We noted some historical context; the way the book is a “court tale,” of goings-on at the center of the Persian Empire, it’s capital, Susa, some 17 generations before Jesus.  It’s a story that explains the beginnings of the Jewish holiday, Purim. 

 

And we discussed just a couple of ways we could apply Esther–the book itself–in our lives. 

 

It was a great time.  

 

And it was all in service to today, really!  This morning!  Okay–and the Sundays that follow. But last week’s message was an introduction that I hope will serve us as we dig deeper into Esther, and discover ways we might bridge the gap in between us and our lives and our stuff, and this little Old Testament book   

 

This Morning: 

This morning, we’re going to look at the passage that Denny–thanks Denny–read to us.  We’ll note some ways we might bring this passage into our lives, and allow it to affect the way we live, allow it to challenge our self-interest and our attitude to those who are different from us.  And we’ll talk about what it can cost both us–and even others–when we act with Christian integrity. 

 

Book Structure: 

But before we talk about these things, we need to do something that’s really basic for any sort of Bible study, a really foundational thing, which is review the structure of the book of Esther.  We looked at the historical context last week; this week, briefly, we’ll look at the book context; how the book itself is put together.  Because the way a book of the Bible is put together; how it is structured; can sometimes tell us quite a bit about the intentions of the author of the book.  

 

So.  Let me present a structure–one out of many structures that would naturally fit the book of Esther.  This one isn’t too detailed, but it will serve our purposes well, I think, and we may refer to it now and again. 

 

A Narrative Structure: 

Remember, with me, that Esther is a story, right?  It’s got a beginning; it has an end.  It’s not a list of proverbs, or a poem, or a genealogy; it’s a narrative.  And it’s not just one narrative; it’s actually a whole string of narratives–9 years worth of narratives–that together form the bigger story of Esther.  

 

(Oh, and I should say that we could–without being untrue to the book–structure Esther differently than this.  But I think this will be helpful for us. This will more or less line up with what we’ll look at over these next weeks.)

 

So.  A narrative Structure. 

 

Introduction to Esther: 1:1-3

Narrative Strand 1: Vashti: 1:4-22

Narrative Strand 2: Esther & Mordecai: 2:1-23

Narrative Strand 3: Haman: 3:1–8:2

Day One: 5:1-14

Night: 6:1-10

Day Two: 6:11-8:2

Narrative Strand 4: The Plan Undone: 8:3–9:19

Purim Inaugurated: 9:20-32

Conclusion to Esther: 10:1-3

 

Now, we could be much more detailed than this.  But basically Esther starts with a little tiny introduction, and it ends with a little tiny conclusion, and in between we see a string of narratives that build upon each other.  One causing a problem that the next one solves, until finally we reach Chapter 9, and all the problems are solved, Purim is inaugurated, and we’re told just how great our heroes are.  

 

Remember, Esther is at its most basic a book telling us why Purim is, where it comes from, and all these narrative strands, these strings of story, get wrapped up and made into a little shiny bow right there at the explanation of Purim.  It’s what Esther builds towards 

 

But today we’re talking about this first narrative strand; the first story we’re invited into in the book of Esther.  It’s a story about Vashti; and what happens to her will ultimately be the set up for our introduction of Esther.  

 

So without this passage, without this person, there is no Purim, no festival, no Esther.  

 

Let’s review what Denny read for us. 

 

Review: 

So.  Remember last week we saw King Xerxes in the third year he’s been the king of the Persian Empire, throwing a big party.  The army was there (and you don’t have much of an Empire without a huge army, you know), every governor that he’d placed over the territories he conquered was there, officials, nobles–anyone with any power or authority in the empire had shown up for this party (because, again, in an empire you can’t really refuse to show up, right?  Dictators don’t appreciate that.) 

 

And the party lasted half a year. I mean, we’d start tomorrow and be done at the end of March. We’d eat and drink our way through six months. 

 

And the king–I don’t know if he has a lot of leftovers, you know, or what–but decides to throw another party for everyone in Susa’s citadel, which is the capital city, where he lives.  Everyone is invited to this party, and things are opulent; I mean, royal splendor is in full force, expensive fabric in royal colors, and there’s expensive furniture and flatware, and the materials in the floors and the cups would cost you your whole life savings.  Over the top, opulence, you know.  People are eating and drinking and making merry.  There’s no restraint, no pause, just consumption; and the King basically orders everyone to do whatever they want.  Whatever they want to do; no responsibilities, no inhibitions, no constraints.  Have at it. 

 

And even Queen Vashti is throwing a party. 

 

 

I think we’re supposed to be surprised at this: Whoa!  What an opulent king!  Even the queen gets to throw a banquet! She gets to play host for the women, even, while the men booze it up and do whatever it is they feel like doing. 

 

Review: 

And what King Xerxes feels like doing is showing off the Queen–whose name probably means, actually, “beautiful.” He’s “merry with wine,” the NRSV says–and we know what that means, right? And Xerxes sends his eunuchs to go get her, with her crown on–people have debated if the intention here is that all Vashti will have on is this crown.  But regardless of this, the king wants to show off his wife, let everyone gawk at her. 

 

But Queen Vashti refuses.  She refuses to do as she is told.  As though she has rights, or something, right?  She guards her own honor–by staying at the party she’s hosting, by avoiding the lusty stares of Xerxes drunk army and drunk friends–and because she protects her own honor, because she acts with integrity, some things happen.

 

She makes the king mad.  I mean, he is not to be refused.  He’s sitting there with everyone who is under his power, waiting to see her–and she never arrives!  It’s a slap in the face, right?  And more of a slap in the face, in that this is probably a party that is more than just a party, but a party that is explicitly meant to show off just how powerful Xerxes is.  From the accounts of one ancient historian, Herodotus, we can draw the conclusion that this part is actually part of a council of war that Xerxes is holding, and he’s pulling out all the stops to let his empire know that they had better gather behind him in his attempts to take out Greece, actually. (NIV app. comm. 60ff.) Vashti’s refusal not only challenges his honor as King; the one to be obeyed no matter what, but it also challenges the support and loyalty he’s trying to gather around him.  So he gathers up his advisors, who know all about precedents and laws–the most important people in the Kingdom, really– and what he should do with that impudent slave–sorry, “wife”–of his. (And it’s been pointed out how ironic it is that this powerful man is so easily refused by Vashti and then needs advisors to figure out what to do about it.) 

 

And we assume these advisors talk for a bit; we aren’t told that they do.  We could also assume they’ve been enjoying the party for not only the last week, but the last six months, because they are some of the most important people in the Empire.  All we know is that their team leader, Memucan, goes up to the king, who’s surrounded by his officials, and says, “Look, the first thing we need to recognize is that Vashti hasn’t just dishonored you–she’s dishonored everyone!”  

 

And for this to make sense we have to understand how the King functioned in the Persian Empire. 

 

Kings: 

Xerxes wasn’t just another guy.  He was king; and the King of the Empire was the empire.  The empire was held together by his will, by his might: and anyone loyal to the empire was loyal to the King; and vice versa.  They were indistinguishable.  And the King, as the embodiment of the empire, was the embodiment of it’s people!  

 

But “people,” did not really include woman in the ancient near east.  Women were, by and large, property of men.  They were useful property; they helped align families and nations, they gave a person status; but they were property.  There were rules about honoring women; but any honor that a woman had came second to the honor of the woman’s closest male relative.  

 

(And just in case I do need to mention this, that’s unChristian, right?  Thought I’d toss that out there.) 

 

And if in the King we have the example of what it means to be a man, all the virtues of the empire are wrapped up in him, but his property, the Queen, has gone and disrespected him so publicly, then we officials and advisors–we’ve been disrespected too.  And not simply derivatively, because how much honor the king has reflects how honorable we are, but really, once all the women in the empire find out about this–well, then we’ll have an uprising!  Our wives won’t do what we say! Every woman will realize that she can disrespect our honor and get away with it.  They’ll think they can say no to us!  It’ll be outrageous!

 

Review:  

And so the officials, the advisors, suggest–”if it pleases the king”–that Xerxes make a permanent law (these kingly laws are tossed out all over Esther) that Vashti never go near him again.

 

(Which someone noted is sort of ironic, because, that’s what she did in the first place, but…) (NRSV S.B., 379)

 

They say he should replace her, the way you replace broken things that don’t do what they’re supposed to do. And this will send a message, too, to all those ladies out there in Persia, that you had best protect the honor of your husband, and do whatever he says, because if you don’t, you’re going the way of Vashti. 

 

Much to my surprise–I bet you were surprised, too–the King was pleased by this idea. Who would have guessed that.  And letters are sent out to every nation and people group that the Empire has swallowed up, making it Empire Law that every man be the boss of his household.  

 

And Vashti is forgotten, left behind.  Until a few years later when the King finally replaces her, which we’ll talk about next week. 

 

So what do we do with this. 

 

What do we do with this? 

We could do all sorts of things with this passage, right?  Figure out ways this passage could speak into our lives. Everyone who shows up in this passage could be a sign that challenges the way we live because of the things they do or say. 

 

Advisors:   

We could talk about the self-interested advisors, and the way the advisors specifically, drunk or sober, are concerned only with their status and their honor and their place in the world.  They are self-interested; interested in keeping something that is good for them going, maintaining the order of things that they are comfortable with.  They like the status quo; it’s really good for them. 

 

And the advisors could be a reminder to us to examine the status quo, and to acknowledge how deeply we benefit from it.  It might be a small thing; because of the color of our skin, we don’t get suspicious looks in our neighborhood, or it might be a bigger thing: because we’re men when we make a dollar an hour, but if we were women we’d make only 78 cents. 

 

And we shouldn’t be overwhelmed with guilt over the benefits that we get from the status quo, but maybe we could consider ways to change the status quo such that everyone gets the benefits we get.  That’s a big thing, though, right?  I mean that means sitting down and discussing all the ways we benefit from our society in ways others don’t, and discerning ways to make sure that everyone can benefit. So that might be feel too big–although, there are good Christian organizations that do these sorts of things. 

 

Of course, I doubt the King’s advisors, faced with an angry drunken dictator, would have been inclined to challenge his notion of what was appropriate interaction between men and women, you know.  They couldn’t have even thought to themselves, “maybe we should try to take this moment to question gender inequality.”  I doubt they could even have considered this an option at all; it just wasn’t done.  

 

Because it’s hard to discern some new way of thinking about things by ourselves, or when we only include people in our decision making processes who agree with us.  So maybe seeing the advisors could remind us to notice something.  Or notice someone, anyway.  Maybe we could notice that person–those people–in our lives who seem to take a different view of things than we do, and wonder what we can learn from those who disagree with us.  

 

Maybe we could talk about how important it is for us to ensure that we’re hearing from people with a different perspective on things, because maybe their perspective might be one that we really need sometime.  

 

So we could this morning talk about the need to consider–as we engage in our places of work, our places of recreation and play–the voices that don’t really match our own, because we might be in a position someday where we’re making the natural, reasonable, right choice–only to discover that if someone else were reading our story it would seem like we had made the completely wrong choice.  

 

These are things that a discussion of the advisors might give rise to, right?  We could also talk about the king. 

 

Xerxes: 

And in talking about the king, we may want to look at what it meant for the king to, say, live within his means.  What it meant for Xerxes to live within his means–which is something that gets tossed around all the time, doesn’t it:  “Live within your means!”  

 

Because Xerxes did live within his means, didn’t he?  And not just his financial means, but his capabilities, his ability to express his will over the things around him. He owned every single thing he laid his eyes on, right? His will was, functionally, law.  He could suck his entire empire dry in a party that lasted years, if he could maintain enough power–in the form of fear, and force, and army, and weapons–to hold the empire together. He is living within his means.  Xerxes means may have seemed almost unlimited.  

 

And so Xerxes may seem downright alien to us, right?  I mean we have limited means, we have limited power, we’ve got limits all over the place.  Our will is not law, even when we think it might be.  

 

But maybe, if we wanted, we could talk about how everyone one of us can respond just like Xerxes responded to Vashti–with anger, and astonishment, and vengeance–when our will is not followed.  We just do it right inside those little boundaries we have around us, even while we read about Xerxes and thank God that we don’t act the way he acted, because so many people were hurt by it–Vashti, and every woman in the Persian Empire.  

 

His behavior has nothing to do with the unlimited means he had.  Xerxes, simply, did not train himself to limit his means, to do less than he was able to do, to self-limit and self-regulate.  He never learned what it was like to limit his own will; and so, when his will was forcefully limited, by Vashti, he flew off the handle.  When his power was shown to be limited, he reacted poorly.  We might say that he couldn’t help himself; because he had never learned how to limit himself.  And who knows, maybe some of us haven’t learned to limit ourselves, but instead are living within our means, and training ourselves to expect everything to go the way we want it to go.  

 

Xerxes will was nearly unlimited; and the hurt he caused was nearly unlimited, too, right?  His will extended throughout his empire, and every woman within the reach of his will was affected by his tantrum.  Our wills have all sorts of boundaries; our means have all sorts of limits; but still, when we act like Xerxes–upset because what we want to happen is refused–we can end up hurting everyone within our reach–our coworkers, the people and pets in our homes, whoever happens to be affected by our wills.  

 

This is what we mean when we say someone is a tyrant.  They enforce their will no matter how limited it is, and in the process, hurt those it is within their power to hurt. 

 

We could look at others, too, in this passage.  But who I really want us to notice is Vashti. 

 

Xerxes and the advisors can remind us of negative ways we act, we live; Vashti can be a reminder of something more positive. 

 

Vashti: 

If we wanted we could read right past Vashti, couldn’t we, in the book of Esther?  This could just be a little opening narrative about a lady who screwed up, didn’t do what the king wanted, and so she was forgotten, and maybe, I could stand and say, boldly and ominously, “If you don’t do what the king of your souls wants, you too will be forgotten!”  

 

That’s bad Bible study, of course: I don’t think God wants us to compare Him to King Xerxes.  If there’s anyone who knows about self-limiting power, it’s our God who showed up in Jesus, who probably tripped over his sandals at least once. 

 

But we could read right past this; we could look at Vashti and think that the only reason she’s in this book is as a set-up; she’s a problem Esther solves, that’s it.  And we’d read right past her.  

 

I mean it’s the book of Esther, not Vashti, right?  Vashti–she just doesn’t seem to do all that much, really.  All she does is not respond to the king. We might think, “Great! I can be passive too!  Look at me not act!”

 

Vashti Acted: 

Except that Vashti isn’t passive at all.  She acts in this passage.  Her action; her refusal to not go to Xerxes when he inappropriately flexes his power over her, choosing against her honor and stealing away her personhood, is an action.  It is a choice.  It is the opposite of passivity.  And she may not have a huge amount of power at all; but she does have some power, a little bit: she has the power to refuse to act when what she is called to take part in takes away her honor. 

 

Even though every single person in Vashti’s culture would call her crazy for her refusal–women and men both, probably, would shrug their shoulders and say, “Well, this is the way the world is.  You can’t refuse the King, you can’t refuse your husband.” Even though this was just the way Vashti’s world worked; she refused.  She protected her own dignity, and her own honor, and, I think, acted with integrity by not acting on Xerxes orders. 

 

I think that the main event we should notice in this passage is Vashti’s decision not to go to the king, but to stay where she was. It’s around this refusal, this choice to do nothing, but to instead stay where she is, that sets into play the course of the book of Esther, right? 

 

And we are not given an explanation for why she does not go when she is called.  We aren’t.  We know the king was drunk when he called her; and we’re supposed to keep that in our minds.  But we don’t know, for sure, we can only infer things. I think that we can infer that the queen is protecting her dignity; avoiding being gawked at by every drunk man in the King’s court, and staying instead at her party, acting as a responsible host.  And in this sort of behavior: keeping responsibilities, avoiding personal dishonor, I think Vashti models for us what it means to act with integrity.  She really does. 

 

You know what it means to act with integrity, right?  It means to act in line with some consistent moral code.  Now, we have just spent months together during this time talking about how the ethical imperative of our Christian lives is to become like Jesus.  I hope that’s familiar. 

 

Christian Integrity:

For Christians, our integrity is based on how much we’re like Jesus, right?  How true we are to Jesus’ call to be like him.  The standard of our behavior isn’t an arbitrary moral code, or some life lessons we gathered up from calendars, or any internal “thing.”  It’s a person; Jesus is our moral code, our ethical imperative, the one we are supposed to line up with.  This is all review, I hope. 

 

Vashti didn’t have the Holy Spirit, she didn’t have Scripture, she didn’t have Christians who could help her discern how to be like Jesus.  She didn’t care about being like Jesus; he wasn’t born yet.  But by refusing Xerxes, she protected her honor and her obligations, acting with integrity.  

But her refusal to act in the way the King wanted to, resulted in some difficult things, didn’t it? Her choice to refuse the King and protect her honor, meant that she was forgotten, banished from history, and a decree went out through the Empire forcing wives to obey their husbands–although, really, this was probably already going on. 

 

And this is a part of Esther that reminds me so much of real life. 

 

Real Life: 

Because sometimes the pursuit of integrity–which for us, means being faithful to Jesus, being like Jesus–is very costly.  

Sometimes when we act like Jesus it can result in some very hard things for us, and even for others.  

 

We are called to be faithful to Jesus, right?  

 

But real life means that we do not know what the result of our faithfulness will be when we act in ways that are faithful.  

 

And we know this, in some ways.  We have acted like Jesus, been like Jesus to another person, and it has seemed, honestly, to not really get God, or us, or anyone, much of anywhere.  

 

And that’s hard.  Right?  It’s hard.  It is difficult that we don’t know what the results of our actions will be; we can never know.  We can make all sorts of educated choices, all sorts of wise, Spirit-led, and Scripture-guided, and Christian-counseled decisions, but still we do not know the future.  

 

If we act with this Christian integrity, do whatever we can to act like Jesus in any situation, we can look forward to Jesus saying to us, “Well done my good and faithful servant.”  We can know that we are not alone in our faithfulness–that Jesus himself was faithful to God, and although it cost him his life, God worked good in the end for him–and that same good, the promise of the resurrection, is promised us, on the other side of Jesus’ return, and the end of history.  

 

But Vashti reminds us that acting with integrity may cost us.  And we can’t know how it might cost others.  But we still have to be like Jesus moment to moment, not knowing what may come of our actions. Sometimes that might take the form of choosing not to act, choosing not to take part in some thing or another–at work, at home, at school–anywhere.  Sometimes it may mean acting, choosing to do or say a thing because we desire to be like Jesus.  And we cannot know, with certainty, what the results of our faithfulness will mean.  But we can know that our faithfulness is honored by a God who has all wisdom and power to redeem and bring good out of any faithful thing we do. 

 

Conclusion:

So.  As we leave here, don’t forget the King and his inability to limit himself, and the way he responds with hurtful rage, don’t forget the advisors and their self-interested maneuverings. And remember Vashti, and let her be a reminder of what we are called to–Christian integrity, being like Jesus all the time, even though we can’t know the outcome of our faithfulness. 

 

Prayer:

Father: please.  Let us be people who can learn from this passage; who can avoid acting like Xerxes, but limit ourselves.  Help us to be people who are not like the advisors, self-interested, but learn how to be more like your son through the people around us. And help us to be people who, like Vashti, make choices out of personal integrity.  Remind us that Jesus is our standard of integrity.  And help us to be faithful, in every choice we are faced with this week–whether it is to not act, or to act, let us be like your son. And Father, in your wisdom and power, bring good out of our faithfulness.  It’s in Jesus’ name we pray; Amen.