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Esther C 14.1, 3-5, 12-15a, 19

Then Queen Esther, seized with deadly anxiety, fled to the Lord. She prayed to the Lord God of Israel, and said: “O my Lord, you only are our king; help me, who am alone and have no helper but you, for my danger is in my hand. Ever since I was born I have heard in the tribe of my family that you, O Lord, took Israel out of all the nations, and our ancestors from among all their forebears, for an everlasting inheritance, and that you did for them all that you promised.

Remember, O Lord; make yourself known in this time of our affliction, and give me courage, O King of the gods and Master of all dominion! Put eloquent speech in my mouth before the lion, and turn his heart to hate the man who is fighting against us, so that there may be an end of him and those who agree with him. But save us by your hand, and help me, who am alone and have no helper but you, O Lord. You have knowledge of all things. O God, whose might is over all, hear the voice of the despairing, and save us from the hands of evildoers. And save me from my fear!”

The story of Queen Esther is the story of exile and of naming names. At the time of Esther, the vast majority of Hebrew people were living in exile in Babylon, Judea having been conquered by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, who’d destroyed Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem. The lamentations of the Hebrew people were expressed in songs and psalms, perhaps none so eloquent as Psalm 137, which begins:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

And now we find Esther, a daughter of exile, pleading with God to “put eloquent speech in my mouth” so that she, in turn, might plead with King Ahasuerus to save her people from Haman and the pack of haters who want to deny Jews their fundamental civil and human rights. A familiar story, yes?

If I recall the story correctly, King Ahasuerus doesn’t know that his queen is Jewish. He loves her and has raised her above all women in his kingdom, yet he doesn’t know this fundamental truth. But when Esther and her cousin Mordechai tell him the truth and point out the evildoer in their midst, Ahasuerus sides with the righteous and Esther saves her people from death.

It doesn’t always work this way. Often, in the bible as in life, those who speak truth to power are killed. But the need to speak out against persecution and injustice? Regardless of the dangers, that need persists. “I can’t breathe,” many of us cried—and continue to cry—after the murder of George Floyd and far too many others.

Contrary to the kinds of children often portrayed in television shows and movies, most children have difficulty speaking out when they’re in pain or when someone has said or done something hurtful. After all, grown-ups hold all the power; if children express their anger or pain, a grown-up might punish them. As the only child in a family of harried adults who frequently didn’t realize just how hurtful they could be, I turned to writing as a way to voice my pain. I found a notepad and a pen, locked myself in the bathroom, and wrote. The first thing I wrote was a list of people who were kind and a list of people who weren’t. I named names! Somehow, when I began to write things down, I began to learn who I was.

I am a Jew. I am Black and I am proud. I am gay. I am trans. Jesus says, “I am the Way and the Truth and the Light.” When asked, God tells us, “I Am That I Am.”

I am a Jew, actually! My grandparents came here before World War II, as exiles from the Pale of Settlement, where Jews were victimized—robbed, murdered—during the pogroms. In addition to their “daily” names, most Jews are given Hebrew names at birth. My Hebrew name is Judith Esther. I was named for two women, a great-grandmother and a great-aunt, murdered in the Holocaust. The biblical Queen Esther, my original namesake, was an exile; by the time of her birth, many Jews had become so assimilated within Babylonian society that they gave their children Babylonian names. The name Esther derives from the Babylonian Ishtar, goddess of fertility. (The word Easter, by the way, also derives from Ishtar and the ancient pagan fertility festival involving rabbits and looking to the east in the early morning!) Moses was an exile. And Jesus—Yeshua—, a Jew from Nazareth, was an outsider, a noncitizen of the Roman Empire, a rabbi (teacher) apart from the Temple and its Roman-corrupted set of priests in Jerusalem.

It seems to me that outsiders, even if assimilated, are especially blessed—and cursed—with an ability to see injustices and imbalances of power within the societies they inhabit. Until we recognize ourselves as children of God, all of us are outsiders looking to enter the Kingdom of Heaven; but our savior Jesus Christ tells us that the Kingdom of Heaven is here. Inside. With one another. We may have forgotten. We may have forgotten our names. We may have suffered through the sins of the world and lost our way. It might take a tragedy like exile—like murder, slavery, or genocide—to begin the lamentations and the calls for justice, but let’s. Despite our fears, let’s remember who we truly are. Let’s write it!

¹ John 1.4-7

We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.

This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.

How hard it is to tell the truth and do what is true! I confess: I was born and walked in darkness most of my non-Christian life; and even now, five years after my baptism, I still walk in darkness. But there’s a difference: I now know when I’m walking in darkness. I can tell the difference. Indeed, darkness is vastly different than light, and hallelujah!

What is the light? Who is it that has no darkness, no shadow? Who is this God made of light, walking in light, containing all? When I walk in the light, I do not become as God is, and yet, as John’s gospel tells us, I can have fellowship with you, my sisters and brothers in Christ, and pray to be washed clean of my many sins.

For me, this walking in the light so that I might have fellowship with you begins with contemplative prayer in the form of poetry writing. I’ve been writing poetry for most of my adult life—but this kind of poetry writing, this “contemplative” writing, is different and has come about very, very recently, after a long absence from any kind of writing, after the aftermath of a family crisis and the death of my aunt from COVID. Also, I’m teaching from home now, and am blessed to have a separate, quiet room at home in which to work, pray and write uninterruptedly.

I wake in the morning and cannot shake the darkness: the fears that have surfaced in my sleep, the afterimages of hospitals and deathbeds, the emotional ingestion of grief and suffering, hunger, homelessness, illness and death taking place every day for millions, corruption and incomprehensible greed at the highest levels of governance, a disregard for our natural home and its creatures. Where is the light? Who shall bring it?

Sometimes I let my fears and doubts—or my paperwork and busywork—have the upper hand, and I persuade myself that entering the light for an hour just isn’t worth it. Sometimes I manage to convince myself that the light is an illusion, and I go about my day—or days—ever so gradually turning back into a machine that churns out projects, products and results and forgets to feel.

Eventually, driven by a sense of emptiness or longing, I return to my writing. I write to God. Sometimes I ask God a question. Sometimes I offer a confession. It hardly matters. There’s a radiance, a presence. A stillness in which God’s closeness is palpable and I feel inseparable from God and you, the bare trees, the snow, the light itself and the vast silence in which God creates everything. Sometimes, God seems to answer:

Advent I

I’d been too busy to pray or write.
Too busy for God.

“Go,” said God. “Get your calendar
and cross out your appointments.

Cross out the names of the months and days.
Tear off the year in its large, heavy type.

What do you have but a series
of empty boxes?

Do you think the soul stays neatly,
first in one, then the other?

Each day is a womb the fetus outgrows.
I stretch to accommodate you—

but imagine deciding to stay small.
There was less than a nanosecond

before creation, before I decided
to share myself

and everything, even you,
yet to be born.”

Psalm 119

⁹⁷ Oh, how I love your law! *
all the day long it is in my mind.

⁹⁸ Your commandment has made me wiser than my enemies, *
and it is always with me.

⁹⁹ I have more understanding than all my teachers, *
for your decrees are my study.

¹⁰⁰ I am wiser than the elders, *
because I observe your commandments.

¹⁰¹ I restrain my feet from every evil way, *
that I may keep your word.

¹⁰² I do not shrink from your judgments, *
because you yourself have taught me.

¹⁰³ How sweet are your words to my taste! *
they are sweeter than honey to my mouth.

¹⁰⁴ Through your commandments I gain understanding; *
therefore I hate every lying way.

¹⁰⁵ Your word is a lantern to my feet *
and a light upon my path.

Lenten reflection on Psalm 119:97-105
Janet Kaplan
 
Dearest all,
 
The anonymous writer of today’s psalm, the longest one in the Bible, has much to teach us about the nature of prayer.  The psalmist writes in supplication to God and in praise of God, oftentimes in the very same verse. The psalmist addresses, seemingly at once, God (the “you” of the psalm) and the law (in Hebrew, torah, which can refer to the five books of Moses in the Old Testament or the torah given to Moses by God in the wilderness). The writer of Psalm 119 boasts more insight than all the teachers, more wisdom than any enemy, more understanding than the elders—and then seems to grow humble enough to write that God’s torah, God’s word, “is a lamp for my feet.” Such duality! Or is it?
 
We’re in a world that seems utterly topsy-turvy. The news grows more dire, we’re asked to “self-quarantine” or to practice “social distancing,” to avoid all means of transportation except for our own cars, if we own them, or to go only where our feet can convey us. We’ve gone from not partaking of the holy wine or of one another’s precious hands during the Lord’s prayer, to having a shuttered church…. Or is it shuttered? I suppose that depends on what we mean by “church.”
 
I’m not going to lie. My life feels so upside-down right now that if Deacon John had assigned me  a section from the book of Job, I’d have written it in a heartbeat. On the one hand, on-campus classes were cancelled for the rest of the semester, which means that I don’t have to schlep to work but can teach online from home. On the other hand, just two days after this news came, one of the four family elders in my care had a stroke and is now in the hospital being treated for that—and for bacterial pneumonia, too. Now, of course, I have plenty of time to visit her in the hospital and to visit her sister, my other aunt, who’s been homebound for nearly a year.
 
The emergency room was as packed as ever with the desperately ill. Frantic nurses and attendants, all of them gloved and masked, monitored, took vitals, changed bedpans, whisked the direst into isolation, wheeled new patients in on stretchers…. No one wanted to be there, and yet somehow there we were, together in the messy, precarious, dangerous heart of God’s world. Two days later, with a room finally assigned to my beloved 89-year-old Aunt Rhoda and enough testing to make the diagnoses, and with her resting comfortably enough to complain about the food, I took my exhausted self home. I decided to take the local R train most of the way from Queens to Brooklyn, hoping to avoid the Friday evening rush-hour crowds. The subways were emptier than I've ever seen them during a rush hour, with maybe one or two people per long bench in the car I happened to enter. Suddenly, a man with a guitar and an amp began playing--Beatles, Jim Croce, Bob Marley. And then “How Great Thou Art.” How Great Thou Art!--with magically gorgeous strumming, singing and even whistling. In a moment, we were all stunned out of our fear and self-protecting corners, just listening, tapping out the rhythms, humming, singing along, smiling together.
 
When I got home I did what every hospital staff and visitor was advised to do: I stripped down, threw all my clothes into a laundry bag, showered, got warm, ate a good dinner, and went to bed early. I hugged my guy, our cats hopped onto the bed to welcome me home kitten-style, and I fell asleep. Am I afraid that I might have caught something unthinkable? Kinda… Is the coronavirus horrible? Absolutely awful. But at this moment I feel utterly grateful for my life and its blessings. After all, in this one little life, I’ve gone from wretched alienation from God to the unshakable experience of God’s presence and grace through Christ. I have an at-home silent meditation practice of Centering Prayer. I’m loved and, more often than not, I know it. Through the most miraculous miracle of all, God is steadily opening my heart to return that love, and more. And I have a church, our church: from the Greek, kyriakos, “belonging to the Lord” and ekklēsía, community, “church.”
 
Duality. Good and evil. Life and death. Right-side up. Topsy-turvy. The whole story. Job never stopped praising God. Jesus gave his life for us. When we wish one another peace on Sundays, we’re offering God’s peace, or, in Hebrew, shalom—a word that means peace and, also, wholeness.
 
I suppose that all of this is to say that I miss each and every one of you—even (especially!) those of you I haven’t met yet. And yet we are together, even now, where we always were, one in Christ.
 
Shalom,
Janet