Before we get to chapter four, we need a running start, because Esther doesn’t open quietly. There’s a king named Xerxes who throws himself a six-month party — drinking, mostly, capped by a week-long display of wealth and splendor. On the last night, drunk and wanting to show off his most prized possession, he sends for his wife, Vashti, to appear before a room of men who’ve been drinking for half a year — wearing, the text implies, nothing but her crown. She refuses. She’s banished for it, which may have been exactly what she wanted. And so nobody else gets the idea that a woman might say no, the empire issues a law: husbands rule, wives obey.
To replace her, the king’s men go out into the empire and round up its young, beautiful, unmarried women — and by “round up” I mean take, and take I mean kidnap. One of them will become queen, all will be added to the harem. Among them is Esther.
Esther is not from here. Her family are the descendants of a people taken by force from their Judea generations before — Jewish exiles who’d ended up scattered when Babylon conquered them, and again when Persia conquered Babylon. Some had gone home but for reasons unknown, Esther’s family didn’t, or couldn’t. And she is orphaned, raised by her uncle Mordecai. There she was living in a country that would never really be hers, under an empire that likely saw her as less.
As Esther enters the palace, Mordecai tells her: don’t let them know who your people are. Hide it. It’s an old survival instinct for those who have had to live in a hostile world — through assimilation, through silence, through becoming as unremarkable as possible so the people in power don’t decide you’re the problem. That’s not deception. That’s staying alive in a system built for some to succeed, and some time be destroyed. Esther does it, flawlessly, and the crown ends up on her head — the winner of a game no one actually won.
Our B-Story, is a proud, ambitious, political and social climber named Haman who hates Mordecai, and when he’s humiliated by the king’s favor toward Mordecai, his fury becomes global. He goes to the king with a plan: there is an entire people who have infiltrated our land and are clearly not like us, they are marked by their origin, and should be destroyed — not because of anything they had done, but because of where they were from and who they were and the vengeance of one petty man. And the story makes the king, trusting and incurious and he signs the order without asking a single hard question. Imagine living somewhere knowing that your neighbors have just been told, by their own government, that the way to handle you is to make you disappear, later.
Esther is a story that is humorous and horrific. It is a story, not a factual history, and yet, it is true. This week, a former national news anchor with a wide platform went on her show, hours after a Supreme Court ruling stripped legal protection from hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants — people who came here fleeing earthquake and civil war, who have lived and worked here legally for years — and told them, on air, to go home, they are not welcome.
She told them this country is better than the ones they came from, that their presence dilutes what “we” built, that they don’t belong and won’t assimilate. She repeated, again, the same debunked claim from a few years back about Haitian immigrants in an Ohio town supposedly eating people’s pets — a claim local officials said had no basis in fact even as it spread, even as it led to bomb threats and school evacuations in that town. People’s actual safety, disrupted by a story that wasn’t true, that someone with a microphone decided to keep telling anyway.
This is Haman’s playbook, almost exactly. Not a debate about policy — policies can be argued in good faith — but a flattening of an entire group of human beings into a threat, a drain, a dirty thing to be expelled. “Go home. Get out. We don’t want you.” That language doesn’t stay rhetorical. It is, historically and currently, the language that describes some as less than human arrives just before the violence does — the bomb threat, the shooting, the law that makes it all legally acceptable. Haman’s edict didn’t start with violence. It started with convincing enough people, the right people that violence against the Judeans was reasonable, was deserved, was even patriotic. That’s the part of the story that should make us most afraid, because that’s the story that keeps being told.
Mordecai sits in the dirt outside the palace in sackcloth and ashes, and Esther — who has spent her whole life learning how to be unremarkable inside this empire — doesn’t even know yet what’s happening to her own people. Through messengers running back and forth, Mordecai tells her about the edict and tells her she has to go to the king to prevent this from happening to their people. She’s afraid; approaching the king uninvited could cost her life.
And Mordecai’s answer is not gentle. Your position will not protect you either, he tells her. You will be found out as one of them no matter how well you’ve passed. If you say nothing, deliverance will come from somewhere else — but who knows, maybe this is exactly why you’re here. Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.”
That line — “for such a time as this” — gets used to mean everyone has a purpose, and I think that’s true, but only if we’re careful about what we mean by it. It does not mean Esther’s trauma, or her family’s exile, happened so that she could be useful later. God did not engineer a genocide so one woman could be brave. What it means is something humbler and harder: here is what your life has actually made you able to see, and to risk, and to say — so what will you do with that, now that it’s needed?
Because here’s the thing about Esther’s position. She had spent years learning to move invisibly through a system that wasn’t built for her — learning the language, the customs, the careful unremarkableness that survival required. That same fluency, that same hard-won knowledge of how the empire worked and what it was capable of, was the only reason she had any access to the king at all. Her history of having to hide wasn’t separate from her ability to act. It was the precondition for it.
I think about that when I think about people in our own communities right now — neighbors who’ve spent years building a life here, working, raising kids, going to church, doing everything asked of them, and who wake up to a Supreme Court ruling or a viral rant and learn that none of it guarantees safety. That the law can change. That a stranger with a podcast can decide, out loud, that they don’t belong, and a few hundred thousand other people might agree.
That is real fear, not abstraction. People in this room may know it firsthand.
And some of us are positioned, right now, like Esther was — not facing that fear ourselves, but close enough to it, with enough standing of our own, that staying quiet costs us little and speaking costs us something, but not everything. That’s worth naming honestly. Esther’s risk and our risk are not the same size. But the question Mordecai puts to her is still the question put to us: you are not obligated to manufacture meaning out suffering, but if your life has put you in a place where you can see what’s happening and you have some privilege to say something — a vote, a voice, a pulpit, a neighbor who’d listen to you before they’d listen to a stranger — then “for such a time as this” is not poetry. It’s a question with your name on it.
This isn’t a sermon that ends with everyone marching off equally able to act. Some of you are exhausted, or grieving, or surviving something of your own right now, and that is enough; nobody is required to carry every fight. But for those with some safety, some standing, some room to spend — speaking up when someone tells an entire people to go home, naming it for what it is before the rhetoric becomes a law and the law becomes a knock at the door. It’s the moment Esther was given, and it rarely announces itself as clearly for us as it did for her. It usually just sounds like a headline you could choose to scroll past.
Because unfortunately, we can’t depend on our privilege, our resources, our voting record, our silence, our flying under the radar will keep us safe. It played out in Esther, it plays out in history again and again.
It starts with the immigrant, the refugee, the one whose papers were never quite enough — a category gets called illegal, and a whole person gets folded into it.
Then it widens to take in the ones who speak too plainly about justice — suddenly there’s a new category for them too: un-American, wrong kind of Christian, divisive, dangerous, terrorist.
Then it widens again to take in our transgender and nonbinary siblings–those who are learning and practicing living into the fullness of who God made them to be. And gay and lesbian siblings — the ones this very congregation has called beloved, has baptized, has married, has buried — sorted into categories built to make exclusion sound reasonable.
The categories don’t stay put. That’s the design. Other and illegal and dangerous are not fixed boxes for fixed people — they are tools, and tools get used on whoever is in reach when more is needed. The machinery that learns to sort one group out doesn’t retire once it succeeds. It looks for who’s next; it needs to be fed.
This congregation has named itself otherwise. We have said, out loud and on purpose, that the immigrant, the outspoken, the queer and trans among us are not a separate concern to be gotten to eventually — they are us, our family, our friends, our neighbors, sitting in these pews and watching this service from home. Esther’s uncle did not let her pretend the edict was someone else’s problem just because her crown made her, for the moment, safe. Neither can we.
This year marks fifteen years since Emmanuel declared itself Open and Affirming — fifteen years of saying, on the record, that Love Welcomes All.
We didn’t write that statement to hang on a wall and admire.
We wrote it because we believe discrimination is incompatible with the gospel we preach, and because dignity isn’t something we extend selectively to the people who are easiest to welcome.
Our statement says it plainly: we welcome into full membership and participation persons of every race, language, age, ability, economic and marital status, faith background, and persons of all gender identities and sexual orientations.
We affirm and celebrate all loving and committed relationships.
And we commit ourselves to work diligently to end oppression and discrimination wherever it occurs — not only inside these walls, but wherever it occurs.
Fifteen years of Open and Affirming was never meant to be a finish line. It’s a commitment that compels us outward — toward whoever is being sorted into other right now, whoever is being told to go home, whoever needs a congregation willing to say, the way Mordecai said to Esther, that their trouble is our trouble too.
We didn’t make that promise so we could feel good about ourselves.
We made it so that when a moment like this one arrived, we would already know who we are.
Esther didn’t get a guarantee. She got a “perhaps.” Perhaps you are here now, perhaps you are here for this.
May we be as willing to act on a perhaps as she was — for our neighbors who are Haitian, Syrian, undocumented, newly arrived, queer, trans, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, or not at all, outspoken, or simply still waiting to find out whether the place they’ve made their home will let them stay.
Perhaps we are here now, for such a time as this.