October 1, 2006
Sermon Title: A Hidden God
I just came from First Congregational Church of Houston, and I was the
Associate Minister for Christian Education, which meant that I oversaw all
the educational programs of the church, from the cradle to the grave, so
to speak. And, of course, that means that I worked with the youth, and
one of the things that the church had done with the youth in its
immediate past was to do a lot of lock-ins, which meant the youth stayed
overnight at the church with a slew of chaperones and myself. All I know
is that I am not the young man I used to be and staying up all night is not
really as easy as it used to be, especially when you are trying to keep
your eye on everyone. When I got there, there was a tradition where the
youth always played the game of Snails during the lock-in, usually
around midnight. Now, Snails is a game where all the lights are turned
off in an area—in our case, in the Christian Education building—and one
person was set off to hide somewhere in the building. The game is not
exactly hide and seek, because if you found the person who was hiding,
you didn’t out them, so to speak—you actually joined them in hiding from
the others, crouching next to them, kind of like a snail, and you would
quietly kept adding on more and more people as they found you and the
first person, until the last person found you. The point was to actually
get as many people as possible hidden in one place in the building…the
more folks who found you and hid with you, the more successful you
were.
Now, I have to admit that I wasn’t a big fan of the game, and near the end
of my tenure at First Houston, the older kids were noticing that we had
stopped playing the game, or that I had not initiated playing it in quite
awhile. The younger kids, the freshman and sophomores really didn’t
know a lot about this tradition, so they rarely, if ever, brought it up. If the
youth insisted on playing it, we would play it, but I’ve never been a fan of
hide and seek in general, and, of course, being the paranoid sort of
person that I am, I was also scared that one day we would find ourselves
missing a kid because they would have walked out of the building into
the night, never to be seen again! And that would also mean that my
career as a minister would never been seen again as well! The older
kids that I was working with thought I was on some sort of campaign to
hide their “snails” game away from them, but it wasn’t intentional, really; I
just wasn’t all that into games in general, and it always seemed to be a
recipe for tripping and breaking a leg or, worse, of course, as I said
before, some kid would go missing, never to be found again, lost forever
in the wilds of Houston.
And, of course, that is silly, I know, but there is something to the idea that
if you hide yourself away really well, there is always a small chance you
won’t be found, though it’s pretty uncommon to be hidden so well that
someone won’t eventually find you. When we played Snails at First
Houston, it was pretty rare that no one would find you, but it did happen
every once in a while…sometimes you could hide yourself so well that
eventually people would just give up and go around yelling out that the
game was over, and they needed to come out of hiding. Of course, the
folks who were hiding waited until we had moved away from their “primo”
hiding spot they had been in before coming out…they wanted to make
sure they got to use that spot again in the future! If you hide yourself
well, there is a chance you may never be found, at least not until you
decide to show yourself at some point during or after the game.
And so it is with being hidden in general, or hiding things—if you hide it
too well from others, you may never find it again yourself. And who hasn’
t hidden something from someone else and then finding out you can’t
remember where you hid it, effectively hiding it from yourself! That is the
danger of hiding or being hidden—you or it may never be found, and
that truth is even the case with the book of Esther. Esther is one of the
most unique books of the Bible, in that sense that the presence of God is
a big, big secret and you can’t find God anywhere mentioned in its
pages—God is a hidden presence from the reader and maybe even the
other characters in the story. Even the trappings of religion are nowhere
to be seen: there is not even a nod and wink to the rituals and customs
that formed so much of the Jewish faith. The word for God is never used
in the text of this story—it seems to be just a story of a woman who saves
her people from the genocidal craziness of a hateful assistant to the king
of Persia. And this fact, the seemingly “godless” nature of the book
caused an incredible dilemma to those ancient folks who were trying to
put together the Jewish Bible, because they had to answer the question
of how one can include a book that doesn’t even mention God, in a
collection of writings whose sole focus is supposed to be God?! In fact,
you’ll even find different versions of Esther floating around in the ancient
world, some of which we have copies of, where people have obviously
attempted to put clear indications of God’s presence into the story, they
try to make God’s presence explicitly clear. Someone in some ancient
place thought that God was too well hidden in the book of Esther, and
they thought they would help out us readers so that we clearly see the
hand of God in the story.
Our kids this morning downstairs are learning this story and will continue
learning it over the next six or seven weeks, but I think it might be good
for us to review the story a little bit as well. Its actually a fairly
complicated tale, with a lot of plot twists and political intrigue, and
sometimes I wonder if its really material that is appropriate for kids, but
the reality is that if we always decided to keep the difficult stories away
from our kids, we wouldn’t have many stories to share with them from the
Bible…it is, after all, an adult book, with a lot of adult themes. And
genocide is one of those terrible adult realities that the Jewish people
have had to tell deal with for centuries. The story begins with the Jewish
people finding themselves captive in the heart of Persian Empire, after
having been defeated by Persians and the strategy that the Persians
had with their foes was to bring the best and brightest of them to capitals
of the Empire. You know, its the whole idea of keeping your enemies
close to you, and in fact, the Jewish people seemed to have prospered
somewhat in this captivity, though they remain vulnerable because they
were a peculiar people with a peculiar God, and difference, all sorts of
difference, was always viewed suspiciously, as it is in every culture and
in every time.
Esther, herself a Jew, finds herself being encouraged to apply for the
position of Queen, though her uncle Mordecai advises her to keep her
Jewishness a secret, another moment when something is hidden away in
this story. She becomes a queen in the court, and yet there is still
danger for her and her people because Hamman, an advisor to King
Xerxes, becomes enraged at the Jewish people because they will not
bow to him, they will not show him the proper respect he believes he
deserves as an important advisor to Xerxes. A plot is hatched to
exterminate the Jews, and Hamman essentially tricks the king into signing
a decree that allows the enemies of the Jews to lawfully kill and take their
land on some future date. Mordecia, Esther’s uncle, finds out about this
secret plot and, in great distress, begins a period of traditional mourning
by putting himself in sackcloth and ashes, attracting Esther’s attention.
That is where we find ourselves today, in the text before us this morning,
with Esther trying to find out why he is in mourning, why he is in such
deep distress. The most well known words from Esther are part of our
reading today, where Mordecai says to Esther that she may have come
into her position as queen “for such a time as this.” It is the closest
thing you will get to a nod to God in this book, some hint that there was a
divine providence at work in this world, and even then there is a fluidity
there, a “maybe” a “perhaps” that betrays a sense in which Mordecai is
not quite sure, but he is hoping, hoping that Esther’s position as queen
may yet save her people.
And Esther does save her people, and the story continues for another
six chapters, following the clever way that Esther and Mordecai devise to
expose the plot to the king and save her people from Hamman’s attempt
to wipe out the Jewish people in the Persian Empire. It ends well, though
violently because the best the king can do is to grant permission to the
Jews to defend themselves—he cannot rescind his own earlier decree,
according to the law of the land, and so he allows them to fight back
against the people who will soon be coming after them. It is an incredible
tale, and we really don’t know whether it is a factual story, whether or not
this even really took place like the writer of Esther tells it, but it has
become a “true” story for the Jewish people and for us—in fact, it is the
basis of the Jewish holiday of Purim, a time when Jews celebrate how
God has saved the people of Israel once again. The story gives witness
to God’s saving acts on behalf of the people of Israel, a people always
finding themselves the focus of irrational hatred by the nations around
them.
But the story has power beyond it being a story of a woman who
becomes a hero, something alone that we should celebrate because of
Esther’s position as a woman in a patriarchal, male dominated culture of
her time. It is also a powerful story because of the other story behind it,
the story of the struggle around whether or not to include it our sacred
texts, our sacred stories, our Bible. It is a moving and powerful story
because of what it doesn’t include as much as what it does include, I
think, because of what is hidden and what is silent in its words, in its
storytelling. This is one of those grand stories that is meant to remind us
that there are times in our lives when God seems hidden in the story, to
the lives we find ourselves living, and yet, though God may be unnamed,
or God may not be clearly seen, or God may be hidden from us, even
despite all this, God is still there, hidden between the words with which
we tell our own stories of danger and hopelessness. Even though God
is hidden in the text, even though God is silent according to the writer of
this book, that does not mean that God is absent from this story, or that
God is absent from our lives. Just because God is hidden from us
doesn’t mean God is absent from us, that is God is not right beside us all
the way, through every story, through every moment of our beautiful and
sometime difficult lives. You know, its like the kid we could never find in
the game of Snails at First in Houston—she may be hidden from us, but
that doesn’t mean she’s no longer in the Christian Education building,
despite my own paranoia that she might have walked out of the building
and that’s why we can’t find her. Now, don’t get me wrong: I wish
sometimes in my own life that God was more apparent and less hidden,
less silent, but I don’t always get what I want, and that even goes for
God—I don’t get the God I want, but I get the God who is, and this God,
sometimes mysteriously, decides to become hidden between the words
we use to tell our personal stories, who sometimes hides God’s own self
away from our view. There are some things that only the desert times
can teach us, though I wish it was different, that we could learn some
other way, but if Christ had to go to desert after his baptism by John in
order to wrestle with himself and with the shadows of this still beautiful
world, we will probably have to do the same on this side of eternity.
But God was not absent in that moment when Christ went to wrestle with
the demons of this world, and God is not absent in our lives, though it
can feel that way, and look that way, in all the ways that God seems to
cloak God’s own presence from us. The most profound thing I have
learned out of this text is that the hard work in this world is finding those
trace moments when God reveals God’s self to us, when God comes out
of hiding. Someone has said that the thing about this text is that we
forget that God is all over it and in it, within the story, even though God is
never named in that story. And that is because Esther and Moredecai
themselves are the very hidden presence of God in this text—it is
through them that God is present, just like it is in our lives. It is usually
through the kindness of friends and even strangers that God reaches
out to us, to give us that divine touch we desperately crave but which
seems hidden from us; it is through the gentleness of others that we
receive the gentleness of God, a God that may still seem so hidden from
us. And that means when we or others ask where God is, in their
desperate moments, we know the answer—we humans, more often than
not, we are the presence of God in this world, even in those times when
God is never mentioned or even thought about. God is here and there,
and everywhere, and despite the silence of God, God is not absent when
we chose to be present, with others, with friends and strangers alike.
The hard work is remembering that truth, isn’t it? The hard work is
remembering that we are the presence of God in this world, a truth
usually hidden from others and, more often than not, a truth even hidden
from ourselves. And when we do remember it, when we remember the
truth, we can see the world the way it really is: a place where God is
often hidden, but yet never absent, a God who is never not with us, and
always, always right beside us. Amen
