Where is God in this?

A Sermon preached on Sunday, September 26, 2021 at St. Augustine’s and St. Christoph

Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22, James 5:13-20, Mark 9:38-50

Where is God in this? Is a question that often gets asked whenever there is a tragedy, most more recently the question has been, where is God in the pandemic? One answer, my answer, has always been that God is not in the tragedy but with those who suffer. One of Jesus’ names is Emmanuel – God with us – for that very reason. But we could ask that question – quite literally this morning, where is God in Book of Esther? It is the only book in the Bible with no explicit mention of God, and for that reason nearly did not make it into the canon. God’s people are being threatened with persecution and destruction. Where is God in this crisis? 

Today’s reading is also the only extract from the Book of Esther that we will hear in our three-year cycle of readings. So I had better summarise the whole plot first:  

King Ahasuerus has had to choose a new queen, and the young Jewess Haddassah, called Esther is chosen. The king does not know that she is a Jew. Her older cousin Mordecai, who has acted as a father to her, and who works at the palace, exposes a plot to kill the king but is left unrewarded. Later he learns of a plot to destroy all the Jews in the empire. It is the work of Haman, the new prime minister, who bears a very genocidal grudge against Mordecai and his poeple. Mordecai persuades Esther – at great risk to herself – to reveal to the king that Haman has issued a decree in the king’s name for the slaughter of the Jews and – as we heard – to ask that they be saved. The king grants that request, Haman is hanged on the scaffold that he had prepared for Mordecai: “His mischief shall return upon his own head, and his violent dealing shall come down upon his own pate” to quote from Psalm 7:16. And the whole story serves as the basis for the Jewish feast of Purim, where the defeat of Haman is often presented as a play amid a joyous carnival atmosphere.

There is no explicit mention of God in Esther, but God is still very present. At one point Mordecai says to Esther: “Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.” (Esther 4:14) There is a strong sense of her being placed there by God, of being guided by God, protected by God, and getting the courage to act from God. What causes the king to change his mind? Not just Esther’s beauty and courage. For the rabbis who put the Jewish Bible together, God was acting throughout this story of persecution and deadly threat to save God’s people both through their own actions – Jews such as Mordecai and Esther – and those of non-Jews like the Babylonian king.

This is the conviction that is expressed in this morning’s Psalm (124: 2-3) that: “If the LORD had not been on our side, when enemies rose up against us; Then would they have swallowed us up alive in their fierce anger toward us.”

And we find the same conviction later in the books of Isaiah, Ezra and Nehemiah when God acts to deliver God’s people through another king, Cyrus of Persia, conqueror of Babylon:

“The Lord stirred up the spirit of King Cyrus of Persia (who) declared: … The Lord, the God of heaven … has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem in Judah. Any of those among you who are of his people—may their God be with them! —are now permitted to go up to Jerusalem in Judah, and rebuild the house of the Lord, the God of Israel.” (Ezra 1:1-3)

Jesus too shares this conviction that God acts through anyone doing good, whether they do it in God’s name or just for the good of those who follow God in Christ. That’s why he corrects his disciples when they try to stop a man who was healing, who was casting out demons, in Jesus’ name because he was not following them. “But Jesus said, ‘Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us.’” (Mark 9:38-40) In fact he follows this up with very severe – we might even say over the top – warnings to those who follow Christ, or think they do, not to rest on their laurels, but to make sure that they let nothing stand in the way of their faith and put nothing in the way of the faith of others.

The letter of James that we finished reading from this morning reminds us that one way – really the main way – of asking God for help and support in a crisis is through prayer: individually and collectively. Prayer is all about trusting in God’s presence and power and putting everything in God’s hands. “The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective,” James writes (5:16) and in the hands of those God has called to serve “Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord.” (5:14)

We never know exactly how God will act – will there be healing, will there “just” be relief, will God act directly or through others, perhaps even through those we do not expect our God to act through (which is of course the basis of the parable of the Good Samaritan)? But James still calls us to be confident – to rejoice even – in the power of prayer.  We should not be surprised. The practice of prayer – praying for others and asking others to pray for us – is well established in the Bible. Paul especially exhorts others to pray for him and he prays for others. It is not that God is more likely to act, the more people pray for another. Or that God does not know our needs without our conscious prayer. But in some way, prayers create an additional space for God to work, often both in and through us.

In conclusion, I think the message of Esther and the message of James (and of Jesus too in those passages when he talks and teaches about prayer) is the same. When there is a need, we act: directly – as Esther intervenes with the king – and/or through prayer. And then when we have done all we can do, we leave it up to God, trusting in the words of the psalmist:

“Our help is in the Name of the LORD, the maker of heaven and earth.” (Psalm 124)

Amen.