I suppose that many writers write for many reasons and out of many motivations. I imagine one could spend a great deal of time cataloging those reasons, and could come up with a fantastic array of vices and virtues, healthy and abnormal psychological conditions. I used to wonder what sort of mood fed my times of most intense creative writing--especially the reams and reams of ink on works of fiction (each ream having 500 or so pages, quite literally). At some point in time, I called it "joy", but I think it is more verbal than that--I think I write fiction especially when I am in times of celebration, and find it difficult to write when I lose touch with that sense of celebration.
I originally entitled my blog "sublimation" because the bits of non-fiction writing I've been most happy with lately (because they've been the most creative) have been bits of sublimation: things I have written to process that have been caught up in something a little bit better than my confusing whirl of thought and emotion about them. In the past, my fiction creative writing has been much different--it has been an almost aggressive pursuit and delight in aspects of God's creation (all of it--physical, spiritual, personal), God's own self, and God's interaction with us. There's something about writing fiction and I think fantasy/science-fiction in particular that lets one really grasp creation--createdness--by two hands and shake it in joyous enthusiasm. Tolkien and Lewis had their conception of "sub-creation" by which an artist of some kind enters into the similar (analogously so) kind of work that God does in creation. In writing a story, I get to celebrate all of God's marvelous creativity by demonstrating the creation's awesome contingency: the fact that it could be, it has been, and it will be other than it is right now, and that is a good thing! No where else is God's generosity and plenitude on display than in the vastness of the cosmos . . . and the sci-fi/fantasy section at Barnes and Nobles! This is a part of God's own mind and character that we get to see and imitate whenever we do art, and especially when we imagine alternate worlds and histories and species and persons. Paradoxically, we illuminate what is and call to mind what could be by celebrating what is not.
Question 44 of the Summa Theologica is the first "question" that Thomas Aquinas puts to exploring the creation and it goes like this: "The procession of creatures from God, and of the first cause of all things." (As you can see, the question isn't exactly in question form . . . this probably isn't a case of allofunctional implicature, but I will bring it up anyway.) I love this "question" and especially the grand use of the term "procession" almost as much as I love Boethius' definition of eternity. Aquinas uses the term "procession" somewhat loosely. God has both internal processions and external processions. The internal ones are nothing less than the Personal processions of Son and Spirit and the external procession is the creation as a whole. Procession simply refers to God as source, but it gives such a richness to the imagery! When I think of the creation "processing" from God (though not from his being and substance, of course), I think of everything God has made marching before his throne in humble but joyous celebration of the goodness of God and the goodness of the gift of their own creation and existence. That, perhaps, is why celebration is the key to my creative writing. When I write, I celebrate the goodness of the created order and my own creation: I celebrate everything particular to that order, it's richness, its giftedness, its contingency, its fleetingness, the fact that it must begin and end.
Which is also why I'm not always in the mood to celebrate the createdness of the creation. Oftentimes, I am more frightened than joyous at the fact that neither creation nor myself are necessary beings. Oftentimes, I want to be a determinist because I want to be able to figure out all things before hand. Or, I want to be a panentheist and be merged with God such that I am just as necessary to exist as God. In short, I often either want to make an idol of myself or of the world in order to bring false comfort to myself that all is safe and sturdy and secure. Contingency and giftedness displace us from occupying a too central role even in our own estimation because it displaces us ontologically, at the very root of our existence and our being. But all false comfort is ultimately poison, and when I try to make myself too necessary (logically, ontologically, relationally) I end up making a burden for myself that I cannot possibly bear and web myself in with anxieties. When I really trust God enough to relinquish control to him and accept my existence and my life and my being as the contingent, unneccesary, but beloved gift that I am, I can start opening my heart and hands to embrace createdness and creation again. Otherwise, I close my heart and resent everything I don't know and don't understand. I would rather have the spirit of adventure, but the spirit is willing while the flesh is weak.
There's something that happens in the transition from childhood to adulthood that makes most of us have to learn how to accept again. (In many childhoods, anyway.) Both my childhood and adolescence were fairly undisturbed and thus free to be filled with wonder. But when I ran off to college I found myself confronted with crises after crises of different sorts (some personal, some epistemological, some in matters of faith) that made trusting God and myself and the basic goodness of the world quite a bit more of a challenge! I imagine some people never experience basic trust of the world in that way, and some people never have that trust shaken. But I wonder whether the majority of people have a hiccup or two at the beginning or end of adolescence and have to learn again what it means to be a child. I also imagine that many of us spend a great deal of time flubbing this lesson and having to be taken through it again and again until we really learn how to be led to Jesus like little children.
There's something childlike about joy and celebration--which makes it harder for those of us who feel the need to be sober-minded adults much of the time. I don't have anything against genuine adulthood--in fact, praise Jesus if you actually manage to become a self-respecting, contributing adult. But not if it makes you boring and self-protective and think you are the one who must be in control and in charge of your life. That pose sometimes makes me feel more secure or more adult, but it also makes me curl up in on myself and have less to give and less to celebrate.
Art is one of the closest things we have to pure gift on this side of the veil. Ultimately we engage in art for the sake of beauty and not for the sake of utility. We know that beauty makes life better, but only because it appears that human beings are made for beauty, not because of any "practical" gain or reason. The thing that refreshes us about the imagination-in-act is that it awakens us to our true nature--to our true identity as beings given an identity for no other reason that we were thought by One to be lovely, to be worthy, to be gift. In life we are receivers before we are ever givers, and what we receive is as deep as our own bodies, souls, and minds.
Saturday, October 6, 2012
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Sermon: The Silence and Absence of God in Esther 7
Our passage today is from the middle of the book of Esther. We have to talk a little bit about what makes this book unique before we go on to examine the particular passage we find ourselves in this morning. Esther is set in the period of the Exile—after the conquest of Jerusalem by foreign powers, and it is set among the people of the Exile—a people who have been banished from the land promised to their forefathers and to their decedents. It is set in a time between times—between judgment and punishment by God and the deliverance promised. Right now Esther and Mordecai are a part of a people vanquished and banished, one conquered people among many conquered peoples, scraping along by wit and guile for survival. It is a book that resounds with the silence and the absence of God, or so it appears, and it is filled with people that do not necessarily seem to have personal faith and devotion to Yahweh, the God of Israel, or the Law of Moses, or even Jewish identity. We don’t hear the name of God in this passage, we don’t hear any mention of the Law of Moses, and you won’t find either in the rest of the book either.
There’s something else odd about the way the characters act in this book. In other books of the Bible, the Biblical heroes are normally remarkable because of the ways in which God interacts with them. We remember Abraham because God first spoke the words of promise to him. We remember Moses because God revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush. We even remember a sneaky trickster like Jacob because God sent him dreams and answered his prayers and eventually transformed Jacob into someone you might actually like to meet. We even have other stories in the Bible that are set in the Exile in which the characters and heroes do all of the normal things (Daniel is one conspicuous example): other characters pray, they keep the Law of Moses, they hear from God, they do great deeds in the name and power of God. But not in Esther. In Esther, the characters fast, but they don’t pray, it is not certain whether Esther or Mordecai are interested in keeping the Law, and they certainly aren’t getting about the task of evangelizing Haman or King Xerxes or anyone else. Esther seems to have hidden her Jewish identity for most of the story, and would have gone on hiding it had not she been forced to reveal it for the sake of saving her people. The characters in this story don’t seem to do what they do for the glory and fame of God. The most religious thing a character does besides fast is cast lots, and that’s what Haman does in order to discover when he ought to begin exterminating the Jews. In the rest of the story, religious observance is inconspicuous if it is present at all. But this story is still about redemption, and our passage today is about the defeat of the enemy who is seeking to destroy all of the Jewish Exiles. Let’s get caught up on the action.
Esther 7 walks us into the climax of the action of the story. Esther 1 sets the scene for our story with the downfall of the previous queen, Queen Vashti, which paves the way for Esther to rise in the Persian Court. Esther 2 paints a pretty distressing picture of how Esther is chosen by the licentious Xerxes as queen and shows us just how little power Esther has had over her own life and her own fate. Esther 2 also tells us how Mordecai warns the King about an assassination plot against his life, and establishes Mordecai as an important figure at least temporarily in good graces with the king. Chapter 3 tells us about the rise of Haman the Egomaniac and how Mordecai slights him and Haman the Egomaniac decides a fitting punishment for Mordecai should be the destruction of all of Mordecai’s people. (By the way, the portrayals of Xerxes and Haman are preposterous and exaggerated on purpose—their evil is so evil, it’s absurd. Both of them are insanely greedy egomaniacs who have incredible amounts of power and seemingly very little discretion. Your reaction is supposed to be something like, “These are the people in power? Who put them in charge?) Chapter 3 also chronicles Haman tricking Xerxes into killing off the Jews—Haman doesn’t actually tell Xerxes it’s the Jews he’s killing and Xerxes seems perfectly willing and content to commit genocide just on the word of one trusted official. And Haman gets the king to pay him to do it. Chapter 4 is about Mordecai freaking out and rightly so, and his appeal to Queen Esther to intercede for the Jews. Esther initially refuses, saying she risks her own life in such an appeal and Mordecai responds with some of the most important words in the entire book: "Do not think to yourself that in the king's palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silent at this time relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father's house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?" Esther's response is also pretty awesome: “Hold a fast on my behalf, and do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. I and my young women will also fast as you do. Then I will go to the king, though it is against the law, and if I perish, I perish.”
The rest of the book until our passage chronicles Esther’s response to Mordecai’s words, and foreshadows Haman’s demise. She gathers her people together to fast, and then approaches the King. She spends what we might consider a really ridiculous amount of time buttering up King Xerxes to accept her petition—apparently she has no reason to expect benevolence from him, or to be able to appeal to his better nature. Xerxes doesn’t appear to have a hard time ordering the death of an entire group of people and Esther has to use wit, guile, and charm in order to maneuver Xerxes into favoring her over Haman.
Which brings us to our present passage. This is the second banquet that Esther has hosted for Xerxes and for Haman, and our scene finds Haman and Xerxes relaxing and drinking wine after the feast. Xerxes says to Esther for the second time, “What is your wish?” Xerxes said this to Esther at the feast on the day before, but Esther deferred her request, asking for a second banquet. Even now, she must wait until the end of the feast, until Xerxes turns to her and asks her what her wish and her request is. It is clear that Xerxes is the one with absolute power here. Esther knew she was taking her life into her own hands by going against the law to approach the king without being summoned. Now she does it again, knowing that Xerxes could banish or depose or even kill her for opposing Haman. She doesn’t bother to try approaching Haman at all, to try to wheedle a compromise of some sort from him. In Persia, she doesn’t have that kind of independent power.
The words that Esther uses to beg the king for her life and the life of her people are interesting. She speaks in terms of finding favor with the king, and she finally identifies herself with her people (though she doesn’t mention she’s a Jew, yet, that’s the next chapter), and identifies herself with her people when it means getting killed along with her people. She asks for her life and for her people and doesn’t allow herself to be parted from them, and doesn’t allow Xerxes the chance to only save Esther—she demands that he save her people as well. She also casts her presently unnamed enemy’s motives in economic terms—in terms of greed: “we have been sold to be destroyed, to be killed, and to be annihilated.” Haman’s a greedy would-be mass-murderer.
These three words are a constant refrain in Esther: the Jews are “to be destroyed, to be killed, and to be annihilated.” It is said this way and repeated so often I think for a couple of reasons: On one level, it’s a part of the exaggeration we see throughout the book. The villains are crazy villainous and the dramatic tension is epic—so why not turn up the hype? On another level, you can tease out distinctions between destruction, killing, and annihilation. “Destruction” in this context suggests something being violently ripped apart. If the decree of Haman goes forward, the Jews as a people—as a corporate body with corporate unity—will be destroyed. Probably not every single Jew will be killed—no doubt some will escape. But the Jewish identity will be destroyed and erased from the face of the earth. “Killing” is the most literal—Haman destroys the Jews by killing them all, not just destroying their capital city or their local places of worship, or enslaving them all or forbidding worship of the True God. Horrifically, he actually wants to kill them all. Finally, Haman’s purpose is annihilation. He doesn’t just want to kill a few Jewish troublemakers like he perceives Mordecai to be, he wants to completely and utterly destroy them and wipe them off the planet. Annihilation is an appropriately dramatic word for genocide, especially for a coolly calculated genocide such as this, which is motivated solely by Haman’s egomania. A normal person would have found a way to punish Mordecai alone—who resorts to genocide because of personal insult?
Almost surprisingly, Xerxes is moved by Esther’s plea. Partially this is true because he doesn’t really know that he is ultimately the one responsible for the decree. Esther has set it up such that the plight of the Jews is identified with her and has managed to get Xerxes enraged on her behalf. It is only then that Esther identifies Haman as the villain. It’s all over for Haman now. The rest of our reading and the rest of the book of Esther is about poetic justice. The plan that Haman devises for Mordecai falls on his own head, and the people who set out to destroy the Jews on the day that Haman appoints are actually destroyed by the Jews because Xerxes allows the Jews to arm and defend themselves. Genocide is averted and Purim is inaugurated to celebrate this kind of second Passover.
And what is it that we are supposed to learn from this peculiar story of deliverance, in which we see vividly evil and powerful characters at work and so much absence from God? First, God wants us to know that he works through history and he works for our good—for salvation and for redemption and for peace—whether or not we are aware of it. So God seems silent in Esther. Well. Take a look at the world. Take a look at secular history. Take a look at your own life. I am sure that there are gaps and moments or maybe even decades in your own life and in the life of the world in general when God seems conspicuously absent. It doesn’t seem like he’s speaking. It doesn’t seem like he’s around. It certainly doesn’t seem like he’s delivering. It seems as though the powers that be who are in control of the world are evil and clueless and who really knows what God is up to. I think there are a lot of people who spend a lot of time in God’s silence or apparent absence—and they don’t know why. Now, we happen to know that there is a reason for silence in the book of Esther because Esther and her people are in Exile—they have been thrown out of the Promised Land because of the sin and rebellion of the people just as Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden. Part of the reason that God is silent is because the people don’t listen and that lack of ability to hear and obey creates distance between us and God. In Esther we find ourselves with a heroine who may have some strength of character, but may not necessarily have any faith. Maybe she does, maybe she doesn’t. Probably she doesn’t—books in the Bible like to mention faith if people have it.
Another reason why this story is good for us is because it tells a story of God’s faithfulness and God’s redemption of people who have been Exiled, who are religiously clueless and probably disobedient, and who don’t seem to deserve or warrant God’s use of them . . . even as, to a certain extent, they still remain in Exile. So often in Scripture we find heroes—like Abraham, for example-- that seem to “deserve” being used by God. That’s probably not a very good way of reading those stories, but biblical heroes are often remarkable and we oftentimes wish that at the very least, we had their connection to God. I don’t how you feel, but I don’t feel that way about Esther. Esther is basically a slave who is valued because Xerxes thinks she’s beautiful and thinks that he is in love with her. She’s stuck with a powerful man in the most powerful country on the planet, and that man is not a good man. She hides her identity and who knows what kind of freedom she has. Esther doesn’t seem to really know what’s she doing insofar as God is concerned. And at the end of the day, she delivers her people and is herself delivered, but she still doesn’t meet with God. Yuck. I don’t want anything to do with any of that. In many respects, she isn’t your typical role model, and her life is not enviable. But God still redeems her life. He takes someone who could have done absolutely nothing remarkable and made her a deliverer of the entire Jewish people. In that way, she is on par with the earlier Judges of Israel. She’s like Gideon or Sampson or Debrah. And that is completely characteristic of God. He takes our lives, and the lives of others less fortunate than ourselves, and turns what is simply unenviable and tragic into his vehicle for redemption. That is what God does—and you know what, he is always doing it for people who don’t deserve it and for people who don’t recognize that he is the one acting in their lives. And the weakness of Esther reminds us that we, too, are unable to save ourselves and must appeal to someone else with power—to Xerxes. We may think it unfortunate that Xerxes has the power he does, but it does serve to remind us that we don’t have enough power in ourselves to defeat the evil and brokenness in our own hearts and minds.
In many ways, I wonder if the story of Esther is for people who don’t recognize that the good that comes into their lives, the gifts they receive, whatever kind of redemption they receive, is really from God. God doesn’t sign every good thing he does, “Love, from Jesus.” But he does sign it, “Love.” Or “Grace.” or “Mercy.” Or, “Salvation.” As Christians, we know that God is the author of Love and Grace and Mercy and Salvation. Jewish theologians and later Christian theologians knew that God was the only redeemer, the only one who saved. If there was salvation, it was from God. That’s part of the reason we know Esther is a theological book—because it’s a story of redemption, and only God redeems, though he often uses human instruments, willing or unwilling, knowing or unknowing, to do so.
There’s one more element of the story that is important. And it is this element of the story that makes remembering why “believing that only God saves” crucially important. This last element of the story is the character Haman. Haman is the enemy, and in so many ways he is The Enemy, and yes, I mean, Haman is really a Satanic figure. Haman and Satan have a lot of things in common insofar as the Bible characterizes both people. Satan is always someone who is out to get human beings out of pride and malice. He is always accusing people or tempting people or deceiving people who have certainly done him no wrong—and he is always a force working for destruction, for killing, and for annihilation. For whatever the enemy’s reasons are, he wants to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate the people of God. He tricked Adam and Eve into something that actually got them killed and doomed the entire human race to the daily struggle with evil and brokenness and sin. While Haman’s powers are a little more constricted, he is little less malevolent. He only goes after the Jewish people (though the Jews are often representative of humanity in general in Scripture), but does so for senseless and malicious reasons. He wants to destroy all Jews because of a small slight to his pride, and he is only satisfied with their complete destruction. I think this serves as a warning to us on more than one level. After all, Haman’s evil notions aren’t unique—genocide is an old evil that people with too much power seem to employ all too readily. Esther does a good job of showing how absurd and truly insane Haman’s malice is. But why does Haman choose such disproportionately evil actions?
It’s because there is an enemy behind Haman and Hitler and all the other power-crazed psychopaths that keeps creeping back into the scene from every nook and cranny possible, and keeps coming back, time and again. If Haman were unique, Esther’s story would be a little happier than it is. But Haman’s story isn’t unique, and because his story isn’t unique, we know there’s something more going on. That something more is the spiritual kingdom of darkness that wars against God, against human beings, and especially targets the people of God to take them out—to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate.
And this is why Queen Esther is only a temporary deliverer, who is upheld by the Great Deliverer. This is why Mordecai can say to Esther, “For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place.” The Jews and human beings will always have a deliverer because God is present even when he appears to be absent. Esther just had the privilege of her life being redeemed to serve God’s purposes. There will always be salvation for the undeserving and for the weak, and we always have a defender.
And we know how this story plays out better than Queen Esther does. We can see the universal themes in Esther because we already know what Jesus did. We know from the New Testament that the real fight for the life of the world doesn’t ultimately concern things like murder and genocide and hatred—unfortunately, those horrible things are only symptoms of a condition that would have been utterly tragic had not God intervened at the source. We need someone who can intercede for us, who can fight that battle for us. Jesus, when he fights for us, wins the battle at the very root of the problem. He’s takes on all the powers of the world and all the spiritual powers behind those powers and shows them how he takes on humanity’s sin in the cross and defeats their punishment and defeats death in the Easter Resurrection. By mercy and grace and redemption and destroying death for us, Jesus humiliates the evil powers. Jesus destroys the real power that sin has, so he can start to loose the chains that enslave us to brokenness, to sin, to defeat, and to evil. But it’s only when you take on the real problem that you have real results. We can’t pretend that symptoms are causes. Esther is a small story that tells the same story as the big story, and reminds us not to fool ourselves about what’s really going on in human life. What’s going on with both the problem and power of evil and the deliverance and salvation of God is far more than immediately meets the eye.
Let’s take a moment to remember who we are and where we are. Father, we live in the midst of a broken world that you sent your Son Jesus to save. Jesus has completely his work and sent his Spirit to create a new people with whom you are very present and very active. But we still live in a time of Exile even though we know that time is coming to an end. Help us to remember who the real enemy is and who the real Deliverer is, and that because of what you have done for us in Jesus Christ, life triumphs over death.
Sources: I found two books of particular use and interest in crafting this sermon. The first is The Gospel in Esther by Michael Beckett . . . and I can’t quite find the second book, so I will update it when I do.
There’s something else odd about the way the characters act in this book. In other books of the Bible, the Biblical heroes are normally remarkable because of the ways in which God interacts with them. We remember Abraham because God first spoke the words of promise to him. We remember Moses because God revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush. We even remember a sneaky trickster like Jacob because God sent him dreams and answered his prayers and eventually transformed Jacob into someone you might actually like to meet. We even have other stories in the Bible that are set in the Exile in which the characters and heroes do all of the normal things (Daniel is one conspicuous example): other characters pray, they keep the Law of Moses, they hear from God, they do great deeds in the name and power of God. But not in Esther. In Esther, the characters fast, but they don’t pray, it is not certain whether Esther or Mordecai are interested in keeping the Law, and they certainly aren’t getting about the task of evangelizing Haman or King Xerxes or anyone else. Esther seems to have hidden her Jewish identity for most of the story, and would have gone on hiding it had not she been forced to reveal it for the sake of saving her people. The characters in this story don’t seem to do what they do for the glory and fame of God. The most religious thing a character does besides fast is cast lots, and that’s what Haman does in order to discover when he ought to begin exterminating the Jews. In the rest of the story, religious observance is inconspicuous if it is present at all. But this story is still about redemption, and our passage today is about the defeat of the enemy who is seeking to destroy all of the Jewish Exiles. Let’s get caught up on the action.
Esther 7 walks us into the climax of the action of the story. Esther 1 sets the scene for our story with the downfall of the previous queen, Queen Vashti, which paves the way for Esther to rise in the Persian Court. Esther 2 paints a pretty distressing picture of how Esther is chosen by the licentious Xerxes as queen and shows us just how little power Esther has had over her own life and her own fate. Esther 2 also tells us how Mordecai warns the King about an assassination plot against his life, and establishes Mordecai as an important figure at least temporarily in good graces with the king. Chapter 3 tells us about the rise of Haman the Egomaniac and how Mordecai slights him and Haman the Egomaniac decides a fitting punishment for Mordecai should be the destruction of all of Mordecai’s people. (By the way, the portrayals of Xerxes and Haman are preposterous and exaggerated on purpose—their evil is so evil, it’s absurd. Both of them are insanely greedy egomaniacs who have incredible amounts of power and seemingly very little discretion. Your reaction is supposed to be something like, “These are the people in power? Who put them in charge?) Chapter 3 also chronicles Haman tricking Xerxes into killing off the Jews—Haman doesn’t actually tell Xerxes it’s the Jews he’s killing and Xerxes seems perfectly willing and content to commit genocide just on the word of one trusted official. And Haman gets the king to pay him to do it. Chapter 4 is about Mordecai freaking out and rightly so, and his appeal to Queen Esther to intercede for the Jews. Esther initially refuses, saying she risks her own life in such an appeal and Mordecai responds with some of the most important words in the entire book: "Do not think to yourself that in the king's palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silent at this time relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father's house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?" Esther's response is also pretty awesome: “Hold a fast on my behalf, and do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. I and my young women will also fast as you do. Then I will go to the king, though it is against the law, and if I perish, I perish.”
The rest of the book until our passage chronicles Esther’s response to Mordecai’s words, and foreshadows Haman’s demise. She gathers her people together to fast, and then approaches the King. She spends what we might consider a really ridiculous amount of time buttering up King Xerxes to accept her petition—apparently she has no reason to expect benevolence from him, or to be able to appeal to his better nature. Xerxes doesn’t appear to have a hard time ordering the death of an entire group of people and Esther has to use wit, guile, and charm in order to maneuver Xerxes into favoring her over Haman.
Which brings us to our present passage. This is the second banquet that Esther has hosted for Xerxes and for Haman, and our scene finds Haman and Xerxes relaxing and drinking wine after the feast. Xerxes says to Esther for the second time, “What is your wish?” Xerxes said this to Esther at the feast on the day before, but Esther deferred her request, asking for a second banquet. Even now, she must wait until the end of the feast, until Xerxes turns to her and asks her what her wish and her request is. It is clear that Xerxes is the one with absolute power here. Esther knew she was taking her life into her own hands by going against the law to approach the king without being summoned. Now she does it again, knowing that Xerxes could banish or depose or even kill her for opposing Haman. She doesn’t bother to try approaching Haman at all, to try to wheedle a compromise of some sort from him. In Persia, she doesn’t have that kind of independent power.
The words that Esther uses to beg the king for her life and the life of her people are interesting. She speaks in terms of finding favor with the king, and she finally identifies herself with her people (though she doesn’t mention she’s a Jew, yet, that’s the next chapter), and identifies herself with her people when it means getting killed along with her people. She asks for her life and for her people and doesn’t allow herself to be parted from them, and doesn’t allow Xerxes the chance to only save Esther—she demands that he save her people as well. She also casts her presently unnamed enemy’s motives in economic terms—in terms of greed: “we have been sold to be destroyed, to be killed, and to be annihilated.” Haman’s a greedy would-be mass-murderer.
These three words are a constant refrain in Esther: the Jews are “to be destroyed, to be killed, and to be annihilated.” It is said this way and repeated so often I think for a couple of reasons: On one level, it’s a part of the exaggeration we see throughout the book. The villains are crazy villainous and the dramatic tension is epic—so why not turn up the hype? On another level, you can tease out distinctions between destruction, killing, and annihilation. “Destruction” in this context suggests something being violently ripped apart. If the decree of Haman goes forward, the Jews as a people—as a corporate body with corporate unity—will be destroyed. Probably not every single Jew will be killed—no doubt some will escape. But the Jewish identity will be destroyed and erased from the face of the earth. “Killing” is the most literal—Haman destroys the Jews by killing them all, not just destroying their capital city or their local places of worship, or enslaving them all or forbidding worship of the True God. Horrifically, he actually wants to kill them all. Finally, Haman’s purpose is annihilation. He doesn’t just want to kill a few Jewish troublemakers like he perceives Mordecai to be, he wants to completely and utterly destroy them and wipe them off the planet. Annihilation is an appropriately dramatic word for genocide, especially for a coolly calculated genocide such as this, which is motivated solely by Haman’s egomania. A normal person would have found a way to punish Mordecai alone—who resorts to genocide because of personal insult?
Almost surprisingly, Xerxes is moved by Esther’s plea. Partially this is true because he doesn’t really know that he is ultimately the one responsible for the decree. Esther has set it up such that the plight of the Jews is identified with her and has managed to get Xerxes enraged on her behalf. It is only then that Esther identifies Haman as the villain. It’s all over for Haman now. The rest of our reading and the rest of the book of Esther is about poetic justice. The plan that Haman devises for Mordecai falls on his own head, and the people who set out to destroy the Jews on the day that Haman appoints are actually destroyed by the Jews because Xerxes allows the Jews to arm and defend themselves. Genocide is averted and Purim is inaugurated to celebrate this kind of second Passover.
And what is it that we are supposed to learn from this peculiar story of deliverance, in which we see vividly evil and powerful characters at work and so much absence from God? First, God wants us to know that he works through history and he works for our good—for salvation and for redemption and for peace—whether or not we are aware of it. So God seems silent in Esther. Well. Take a look at the world. Take a look at secular history. Take a look at your own life. I am sure that there are gaps and moments or maybe even decades in your own life and in the life of the world in general when God seems conspicuously absent. It doesn’t seem like he’s speaking. It doesn’t seem like he’s around. It certainly doesn’t seem like he’s delivering. It seems as though the powers that be who are in control of the world are evil and clueless and who really knows what God is up to. I think there are a lot of people who spend a lot of time in God’s silence or apparent absence—and they don’t know why. Now, we happen to know that there is a reason for silence in the book of Esther because Esther and her people are in Exile—they have been thrown out of the Promised Land because of the sin and rebellion of the people just as Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden. Part of the reason that God is silent is because the people don’t listen and that lack of ability to hear and obey creates distance between us and God. In Esther we find ourselves with a heroine who may have some strength of character, but may not necessarily have any faith. Maybe she does, maybe she doesn’t. Probably she doesn’t—books in the Bible like to mention faith if people have it.
Another reason why this story is good for us is because it tells a story of God’s faithfulness and God’s redemption of people who have been Exiled, who are religiously clueless and probably disobedient, and who don’t seem to deserve or warrant God’s use of them . . . even as, to a certain extent, they still remain in Exile. So often in Scripture we find heroes—like Abraham, for example-- that seem to “deserve” being used by God. That’s probably not a very good way of reading those stories, but biblical heroes are often remarkable and we oftentimes wish that at the very least, we had their connection to God. I don’t how you feel, but I don’t feel that way about Esther. Esther is basically a slave who is valued because Xerxes thinks she’s beautiful and thinks that he is in love with her. She’s stuck with a powerful man in the most powerful country on the planet, and that man is not a good man. She hides her identity and who knows what kind of freedom she has. Esther doesn’t seem to really know what’s she doing insofar as God is concerned. And at the end of the day, she delivers her people and is herself delivered, but she still doesn’t meet with God. Yuck. I don’t want anything to do with any of that. In many respects, she isn’t your typical role model, and her life is not enviable. But God still redeems her life. He takes someone who could have done absolutely nothing remarkable and made her a deliverer of the entire Jewish people. In that way, she is on par with the earlier Judges of Israel. She’s like Gideon or Sampson or Debrah. And that is completely characteristic of God. He takes our lives, and the lives of others less fortunate than ourselves, and turns what is simply unenviable and tragic into his vehicle for redemption. That is what God does—and you know what, he is always doing it for people who don’t deserve it and for people who don’t recognize that he is the one acting in their lives. And the weakness of Esther reminds us that we, too, are unable to save ourselves and must appeal to someone else with power—to Xerxes. We may think it unfortunate that Xerxes has the power he does, but it does serve to remind us that we don’t have enough power in ourselves to defeat the evil and brokenness in our own hearts and minds.
In many ways, I wonder if the story of Esther is for people who don’t recognize that the good that comes into their lives, the gifts they receive, whatever kind of redemption they receive, is really from God. God doesn’t sign every good thing he does, “Love, from Jesus.” But he does sign it, “Love.” Or “Grace.” or “Mercy.” Or, “Salvation.” As Christians, we know that God is the author of Love and Grace and Mercy and Salvation. Jewish theologians and later Christian theologians knew that God was the only redeemer, the only one who saved. If there was salvation, it was from God. That’s part of the reason we know Esther is a theological book—because it’s a story of redemption, and only God redeems, though he often uses human instruments, willing or unwilling, knowing or unknowing, to do so.
There’s one more element of the story that is important. And it is this element of the story that makes remembering why “believing that only God saves” crucially important. This last element of the story is the character Haman. Haman is the enemy, and in so many ways he is The Enemy, and yes, I mean, Haman is really a Satanic figure. Haman and Satan have a lot of things in common insofar as the Bible characterizes both people. Satan is always someone who is out to get human beings out of pride and malice. He is always accusing people or tempting people or deceiving people who have certainly done him no wrong—and he is always a force working for destruction, for killing, and for annihilation. For whatever the enemy’s reasons are, he wants to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate the people of God. He tricked Adam and Eve into something that actually got them killed and doomed the entire human race to the daily struggle with evil and brokenness and sin. While Haman’s powers are a little more constricted, he is little less malevolent. He only goes after the Jewish people (though the Jews are often representative of humanity in general in Scripture), but does so for senseless and malicious reasons. He wants to destroy all Jews because of a small slight to his pride, and he is only satisfied with their complete destruction. I think this serves as a warning to us on more than one level. After all, Haman’s evil notions aren’t unique—genocide is an old evil that people with too much power seem to employ all too readily. Esther does a good job of showing how absurd and truly insane Haman’s malice is. But why does Haman choose such disproportionately evil actions?
It’s because there is an enemy behind Haman and Hitler and all the other power-crazed psychopaths that keeps creeping back into the scene from every nook and cranny possible, and keeps coming back, time and again. If Haman were unique, Esther’s story would be a little happier than it is. But Haman’s story isn’t unique, and because his story isn’t unique, we know there’s something more going on. That something more is the spiritual kingdom of darkness that wars against God, against human beings, and especially targets the people of God to take them out—to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate.
And this is why Queen Esther is only a temporary deliverer, who is upheld by the Great Deliverer. This is why Mordecai can say to Esther, “For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place.” The Jews and human beings will always have a deliverer because God is present even when he appears to be absent. Esther just had the privilege of her life being redeemed to serve God’s purposes. There will always be salvation for the undeserving and for the weak, and we always have a defender.
And we know how this story plays out better than Queen Esther does. We can see the universal themes in Esther because we already know what Jesus did. We know from the New Testament that the real fight for the life of the world doesn’t ultimately concern things like murder and genocide and hatred—unfortunately, those horrible things are only symptoms of a condition that would have been utterly tragic had not God intervened at the source. We need someone who can intercede for us, who can fight that battle for us. Jesus, when he fights for us, wins the battle at the very root of the problem. He’s takes on all the powers of the world and all the spiritual powers behind those powers and shows them how he takes on humanity’s sin in the cross and defeats their punishment and defeats death in the Easter Resurrection. By mercy and grace and redemption and destroying death for us, Jesus humiliates the evil powers. Jesus destroys the real power that sin has, so he can start to loose the chains that enslave us to brokenness, to sin, to defeat, and to evil. But it’s only when you take on the real problem that you have real results. We can’t pretend that symptoms are causes. Esther is a small story that tells the same story as the big story, and reminds us not to fool ourselves about what’s really going on in human life. What’s going on with both the problem and power of evil and the deliverance and salvation of God is far more than immediately meets the eye.
Let’s take a moment to remember who we are and where we are. Father, we live in the midst of a broken world that you sent your Son Jesus to save. Jesus has completely his work and sent his Spirit to create a new people with whom you are very present and very active. But we still live in a time of Exile even though we know that time is coming to an end. Help us to remember who the real enemy is and who the real Deliverer is, and that because of what you have done for us in Jesus Christ, life triumphs over death.
Sources: I found two books of particular use and interest in crafting this sermon. The first is The Gospel in Esther by Michael Beckett . . . and I can’t quite find the second book, so I will update it when I do.
Monday, September 24, 2012
Dreamform
In my second year of seminary, I went to a conference at the Falls Church on dreams and healing prayer. It was led by one Russ Parker, who is something of an Anglican guru on dreams and healing prayer. Healing prayer has always been an interest of mine, as emotional healing and contemplative prayer has always been a substantive way in which God has shown himself to be Lord to me. I had always been curious about dreams, as is probably anyone with half a mole of imagination, but I had not had any particular reason to take them seriously or believe that dream interpretation was anything more than a gift sometimes but not frequently given by God to help his people. At that conference, I was persuaded otherwise and have come to believe that dreams are a valuable source of spiritual insight and that they are more often "written" (as Russ Parker says) by our own minds than by the Holy Spirit. Sometimes the Holy Spirit speaks to us in special visions, but more often God speaks to us through our own imagination and the normal processing of dream work.
Since then, I have had an unusually rich dream life. Partly that comes out of concerted effort to remember my dreams--I've spent a few weeks here or there writing down every bit of every dream I can remember, mostly as an exercise to develop my skill at remembering dreams. (I'm told one only remembers dreams if one wakes up during a dream.) I've also spent a fair chunk of time praying through dreams and have found that it is one of the most reliable ways I hear God speaking to me. If I am having trouble hearing God's voice because of my own anxiety or distress or doubt, I oftentimes ask him to tell me something in a dream. I find--not surprisingly--that the medium of narrative is a medium I understand well. It is easy for me (and I imagine, for lots of people) to understand the point or morale or even the nuances of a story I read.
I find there are two or three kinds of dreams I have that are valuable. There are "normal" dreams in which I normally pray about how the emotional resonances of a dream match up with strong emotion in my life, and discover what that has to tell me. Sometimes this is as simple as, "Gee, I didn't know I was anxious about that!" Or, "I had no idea I was feeling resentment toward this." There are also dreams that are heavily "plot-driven" in which I generally do pray about the emotional resonance, but the plot of the dream itself mirrors something that has happened in my life, but not in a way that is immediately obvious to me. (Partly, that's because I dream mostly in science-fiction as a language of metaphor--space ships, other planets, apocalypse, unidentified bizarre objects I assume are alien . . . so far none of these things have shown up in my waking life.) Sometimes when I pray about those dreams, it isn't long before an "Aha" moment occurs. I often have plot-oriented dreams after I have prayed for discernment for something specifically, and also prayed to have my answer come in dream form. A third type of dream--or perhaps it is a subset of plot-oriented dreams--are dreams that are plot-oriented with strong enough emotional resonance that they bother me or continue to bother me as I have prayed through them. At that point, I have either been prompted or decided to take Russ Parker's advice and invite Jesus into the dream and imagine him there. His actions are always surprising!
I will be writing a few synopsis or descriptions of some dreams I have had. Partly I do this because some dreams I have had are so vivid and creative they might as well be stories, and partly because I think this is an overlooked part of our humanity that God has always intended to integrate into our life with him. Enjoy!
See also Russ Parker's website for more information. I do believe he is leading a conference in Eastern PA this October on healing prayer.
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Enneagram and Identity: What makes Enneagram Distinct from Myers-Briggs and All the Rest
I am not claiming to be an expert on the Enneagram or on Myers-Briggs (or the thousand other personality tests and inventories), but from my amateur study of the two, I have reached a couple of preliminary conclusions. As I said in my previous post, I think Myers-Briggs is interested in providing a description of how cognitive processes work in human beings, but makes no claims about what human identity is or ought to be. The Enneagram is different. It has a "narrative" so to speak, about the origin of human personality and the neuroses thereof, and the story of redemption is about a return to the primeval harmony. In most accounts, although some tend to Christianize the Enneagram, the story is what I would call secularized pantheism. The problem is mostly one of being reconnected to the One, but the One is not necessarily Other, nor is the One a discreet Person, as far as I can tell. (Actually, the way the folks on the Enneagram Institute's website tend to talk about the relation between the individual and the One reminds me more of Spinoza's Ethics than anything else, but that may be coincidence. They point to medieval mystic traditions of all sorts, and back to Plato or Pythagoras, if I'm not mistaken.)
Though I am by no means a pantheistic and am not quite sure what I think about "secularized mysticism" of the kind proposed by the folks at the Enneagram Institute*, I do find the Enneagram's understanding of the connection between personality and identity to be one of the most helpful in contemporary psychology. In this, the Enneagram seems to be in tune with what much of Christian mysticism (especially medieval mysticism) has said about personality, and I find this true, helpful, and mostly unsaid in modern settings.
What the Enneagram writers and the Christian mystics (and possibly other mystics) agree on is this: personality--the sum of habit, inclination, predisposition, orientation, and desire in a human being is not necessarily helpful, and it is not necessarily essential to our identity. In fact, personality (our inclinations, habits, predispositions, orientations, likes, dislikes, loves, hatreds) oftentimes gets in the way of true identity formation. Personality is either unshaped or it is misshaped or it needs to be reshaped or finished--and some parts of personality have to be abolished altogether in order for the person to be made whole. The Enneagram folks will say that every person is a sum of all the Enneagram points as represented by numbers 1-9, and the number you identify as is the way that your personality has become fixated on a certain thing. In other words, personality--the fact that I am a "5"--is much more about how my soul has wrapped itself around my own brokenness than it is about anything else. And what self-work in the Enneagram is is a way of getting "unfurled"--a way of relaxing into who you really are, a way of easing yourself out of being wrapped up in yourself out of some anxiety or knowledge of some deficiency in yourself or in the world.
If you're even a passing admirer of the work of Martin Luther, perhaps my description of the Enneagram makes it sound like Luther's description of original sin--that human beings are all incurvatus in se--all curved in on themselves. Inflamed with the love of self and cold toward God and neighbor. The way the Spanish mystics such as Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Ignatius of Loyola used to describe it, human beings are attached to the wrong things. Part of our cure is being detached from wrong things (mostly creatures, created things) in wrong ways (i.e., idolatrous ways), re-attached to God in the proper way, so that we can also be present but non-attached to creatures. John of the Cross' famous Dark Night of the Soul is all about this journey of proper attachment and non-attachment. And for him there are two dark nights--the first is "sensible" (about stuff: feelings, experiences, etc) and the second is "intellectual" (about the work of reason, the intellect, knowing, the possession of the good). But both nights are about deprivation--God deprives first the sensible part of human beings, and then the whole intellect of knowledge, sensation, use, in order to correct their disordered attachments to wrong things. (This is why the theological virtues--faith, hope, and love must lead. God must lead where we cannot even see, especially where we cannot we have gone wrong.) In other words, this correction in the form of deprivation occurs in order to reform identities properly. But what ends up happening is that the mature person, having died to self as one might also call it, has become less involved with their own inclinations. Those inclinations are purified, reformed, remade, brought back into submission to reason and to faith and ultimately to God. That is the work of the dark night and that is the work of sanctification.
The idea that we can love the wrong things in the wrong way is by no means unique to the medieval period. It's essential to the whole scheme of virtue ethics and can be found in different forms in both Aristotle and Augustine. For Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics of course moral virtue is about the proper response (the mean between extremes) to emotion or desire. For Augustine, having the right loves is essential to living well, but we need the Spirit of God to give us love and to reshape our loves. The Enneagram is helpful because it is friendly to the idea that we need to change and be reshaped, and that our identity does not . depend on our behavior or even on what we see in ourselves at this very moment. Myers-Briggs can sometimes be used superficially--"See, look, the MBTI says I'm like this, so don't ask me to change." The Enneagram calls us to deeper observation and to the continual work of transformation.
I'm not knocking Myers-Briggs. I think cognitive process theory is helpful, especially when what we struggle with is the fact that someone gets at the world differently than I do. For that, it's a nice idea to do a nice jaunt through the pages of a good MB book or website. It can be a great aide for self-knowledge or even for just helping one think more clearly about how to play well with others or with the world. It can be helpful for self-acceptance or acceptance of fundamental non-moral ways in which human beings are different. But I don't think it addresses the problem of transformation or discerning the difference between personality and identity. For that, the Enneagram is an unexpected ally to the Christian agenda, even if the Christian response to questions about identity and transformation go deeper and are not, I hope, a sophisticated form of pantheistic monism!
*I am much too much a supernaturalist to be happy with any sort of system that doesn't take mysticism seriously. Either someone is communing with God in a mystical experience, or being distracted by demons. It is nothing to play with and vague notions about "the One" do leave me concerned about who exactly people are talking with. The enemy does take every advantage, whether we want him to or not.)
Though I am by no means a pantheistic and am not quite sure what I think about "secularized mysticism" of the kind proposed by the folks at the Enneagram Institute*, I do find the Enneagram's understanding of the connection between personality and identity to be one of the most helpful in contemporary psychology. In this, the Enneagram seems to be in tune with what much of Christian mysticism (especially medieval mysticism) has said about personality, and I find this true, helpful, and mostly unsaid in modern settings.
What the Enneagram writers and the Christian mystics (and possibly other mystics) agree on is this: personality--the sum of habit, inclination, predisposition, orientation, and desire in a human being is not necessarily helpful, and it is not necessarily essential to our identity. In fact, personality (our inclinations, habits, predispositions, orientations, likes, dislikes, loves, hatreds) oftentimes gets in the way of true identity formation. Personality is either unshaped or it is misshaped or it needs to be reshaped or finished--and some parts of personality have to be abolished altogether in order for the person to be made whole. The Enneagram folks will say that every person is a sum of all the Enneagram points as represented by numbers 1-9, and the number you identify as is the way that your personality has become fixated on a certain thing. In other words, personality--the fact that I am a "5"--is much more about how my soul has wrapped itself around my own brokenness than it is about anything else. And what self-work in the Enneagram is is a way of getting "unfurled"--a way of relaxing into who you really are, a way of easing yourself out of being wrapped up in yourself out of some anxiety or knowledge of some deficiency in yourself or in the world.
If you're even a passing admirer of the work of Martin Luther, perhaps my description of the Enneagram makes it sound like Luther's description of original sin--that human beings are all incurvatus in se--all curved in on themselves. Inflamed with the love of self and cold toward God and neighbor. The way the Spanish mystics such as Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Ignatius of Loyola used to describe it, human beings are attached to the wrong things. Part of our cure is being detached from wrong things (mostly creatures, created things) in wrong ways (i.e., idolatrous ways), re-attached to God in the proper way, so that we can also be present but non-attached to creatures. John of the Cross' famous Dark Night of the Soul is all about this journey of proper attachment and non-attachment. And for him there are two dark nights--the first is "sensible" (about stuff: feelings, experiences, etc) and the second is "intellectual" (about the work of reason, the intellect, knowing, the possession of the good). But both nights are about deprivation--God deprives first the sensible part of human beings, and then the whole intellect of knowledge, sensation, use, in order to correct their disordered attachments to wrong things. (This is why the theological virtues--faith, hope, and love must lead. God must lead where we cannot even see, especially where we cannot we have gone wrong.) In other words, this correction in the form of deprivation occurs in order to reform identities properly. But what ends up happening is that the mature person, having died to self as one might also call it, has become less involved with their own inclinations. Those inclinations are purified, reformed, remade, brought back into submission to reason and to faith and ultimately to God. That is the work of the dark night and that is the work of sanctification.
The idea that we can love the wrong things in the wrong way is by no means unique to the medieval period. It's essential to the whole scheme of virtue ethics and can be found in different forms in both Aristotle and Augustine. For Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics of course moral virtue is about the proper response (the mean between extremes) to emotion or desire. For Augustine, having the right loves is essential to living well, but we need the Spirit of God to give us love and to reshape our loves. The Enneagram is helpful because it is friendly to the idea that we need to change and be reshaped, and that our identity does not . depend on our behavior or even on what we see in ourselves at this very moment. Myers-Briggs can sometimes be used superficially--"See, look, the MBTI says I'm like this, so don't ask me to change." The Enneagram calls us to deeper observation and to the continual work of transformation.
I'm not knocking Myers-Briggs. I think cognitive process theory is helpful, especially when what we struggle with is the fact that someone gets at the world differently than I do. For that, it's a nice idea to do a nice jaunt through the pages of a good MB book or website. It can be a great aide for self-knowledge or even for just helping one think more clearly about how to play well with others or with the world. It can be helpful for self-acceptance or acceptance of fundamental non-moral ways in which human beings are different. But I don't think it addresses the problem of transformation or discerning the difference between personality and identity. For that, the Enneagram is an unexpected ally to the Christian agenda, even if the Christian response to questions about identity and transformation go deeper and are not, I hope, a sophisticated form of pantheistic monism!
*I am much too much a supernaturalist to be happy with any sort of system that doesn't take mysticism seriously. Either someone is communing with God in a mystical experience, or being distracted by demons. It is nothing to play with and vague notions about "the One" do leave me concerned about who exactly people are talking with. The enemy does take every advantage, whether we want him to or not.)
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