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Our reading this morning moves from Esther’s accusation of Haman in chapter 7 to the institution of Purim in chapter 9. Clean. Tidy. A villain exposed, a feast declared, joy commanded for all generations. It’s a good story the way we read it.
But in between those verses — in the parts the lectionary leaves out — people are killed. A lot of people. The Jewish communities of Persia, facing a decree that authorized their destruction, defend themselves against those who come to attack them. It is not a small thing. It is not a footnote. And we skipped right past it to get to the party.
So before we go any further, we need to go back.
Several chapters before our reading, a man named Haman — a high official in the Persian court — had issued a decree, sealed with the king’s own ring, authorizing the destruction of the Jewish people throughout the empire. Every Jewish man, woman, and child. The date was set. The machinery was running.
And when Esther finally names Haman plainly before the king — “the enemy is this man” — Haman falls.
But the decree doesn’t fall with him. A decree sealed with the king’s ring cannot simply be cancelled. What can be done is a second decree: one that gives the Jewish communities of Persia the right to defend themselves against anyone who comes to attack them.
What happens in the verses we skipped is that defense. People fighting back against those who came to kill them.
The text knows the difference between aggression and survival. We should too.
And here is the thing about skipping those verses. The move the lectionary makes — lifting out the violence, handing us the feast — is a move we recognize.
We are very good at it.
We have been practicing it our whole lives. We know how to curate which parts of the story we bring into the light, and which parts we leave in the car before we walk through the doors.
We show up on Sunday with the edited version of ourselves. The one that has it mostly together. The one that doesn’t need too much.
We skip our own hard verses. And then we wonder why the feast feels thin.
We are, as a culture, as a church, as human beings — very good at two things that look like opposites but aren’t.
We are good at unrelenting grief. The kind of grief that becomes its own identity, that circles the wound forever without moving, that mistakes staying in the pain for honoring it. We know how to do that.
And we are good at empty celebration. The kind of party that pretends the hard thing never happened, that pastes gladness over suffering like wallpaper over a crack, that mistakes cheerfulness for healing. We know how to do that too.
What we are much less practiced at is the thing Mordecai institutes in chapter 9. Joy that holds the memory of the threat inside it rather than burying it. Celebration that knows exactly what it is standing next to.
And what makes this hard is that most of us aren’t cleanly in one camp or the other. We are carrying both at once, and often we can’t tell which is which.
Grief that has gone on so long it has started to feel like identity.
Joy that arrives and then immediately feels guilty.
Trauma that lives in the body whether we invited it to worship or not.
We don’t arrive at this text — or at this table — having sorted ourselves out first. We arrive as we are. Which is complicated.
Now — I want to say something carefully here, because it matters for how we read this text.
There is a tradition in Christian witness — a real and costly and beautiful tradition — of nonviolent resistance.
The Black church in America practiced it during the civil rights movement.
Fannie Lou Hamer practiced it.
John Lewis practiced it.
It runs through liberation theology, through the witness of communities who faced state violence and systemic oppression and chose, at enormous personal cost, to meet it without violence.
But notice: that tradition was forged by the marginalized, against the powerful. It was Black Christians resisting white Christian oppressors. It was the poor and the dispossessed refusing to become what was being done to them.
Nonviolent resistance, practiced from below, is one of the most morally serious and costly things human beings have ever done.
That is not the same thing as peacemaking as a framework available to the comfortable. Telling people with power to pursue peace is a very different thing from telling people without power to accept their own destruction quietly.
And the Christian church — our church, the white mainline church — has sometimes confused those two things. Sometimes deliberately.
Asking the oppressed to be peaceful in ways that protected the oppressor and called it theology.
Esther is not practicing nonviolent resistance. She is also not practicing peacemaking from a position of safety. She is a woman, an exile, a member of a minority people under imperial rule, with a decree already signed and a date already set. She does not have a framework. She does not have an institution. She does not have the luxury of waiting for the right conditions. She has a feast, a king’s favor, and a very narrow window. And when it is over — when her people have survived what was designed to destroy them — the text does not ask her to reflect on the ethics of what just happened. It tells her people to feast.
Mordecai doesn’t command gratitude. He doesn’t command solemnity, or reflection, or a moment of silence. He commands a feast.
Every year. Forever. Including the poor. Including gifts to friends. Including gladness — not as a feeling you wait to have, but as a practice you show up to keep.
Here is what I want you to notice about how that feast works. Purim — the festival Mordecai institutes in these verses — begins every year by reading the whole story. The whole Megillah, as people say.
The threat. The decree. The near-catastrophe. The narrow escape. You don’t get to skip to the party. You tell the hard story first. You let the weight of it land. And then you feast.
Which means the joy is not ignorant of what it cost. The celebration is not pretending the danger wasn’t real. The gladness holds the grief inside it rather than replacing it.
And then — and this is the part I don’t want us to rush past — gifts to the poor are built structurally into the celebration. Not as an afterthought. Not as a way to offset the indulgence of the party. The care for those who have less is part of what the feast is.
You cannot keep Purim faithfully and ignore your neighbor’s need. The joy is not allowed to turn inward. It is not allowed to become self-congratulation. It is tethered, from the beginning, to justice.
Joy as institution. Joy as something you are commanded into rather than something you wait to feel.
Still here. And being still here — against everything that tried to end you — is worth marking. Worth feasting over. Worth doing again next year, and the year after, and every year until the threat is finally, fully, gone.
That is not denial. That is resistance. The most stubborn, most human, most defiant kind.
And in a few minutes, we are going to do it again. In the oldest way we know. Because here is what I know about the people in this room. You are not arriving at this table having sorted yourselves out. You are bringing grief that has no clean resolution. Loss that still doesn’t make sense. Anger that hasn’t found its right object yet. Fear that woke you up at three in the morning this week. You are bringing the trauma that lives in your body whether you invited it to church or not. Complicated feelings about texts like this one — about violence and survival and a God who seems to move too slowly through history. Exhaustion. Doubt. Some of you are bringing joy that feels guilty because someone you love is still suffering. Some of you are bringing suffering that makes joy feel very far away.
All of it. You are bringing all of it.
The table does not ask you to set any of that down before you come. It does not require you to have resolved the hard questions, or arrived at peace, or felt ready. It asks only that you come. And eat. And let the returning itself be enough.
The table we come to this morning is not a new idea. Jesus knew this instinct. He was a Jewish man who had kept Purim, who understood what it meant to eat a meal that held a story of survival inside it. When he took bread and cup the night before his execution, he was reaching back into that same deep tradition: we will not let what almost destroyed us have the last word. We will eat together instead.
He institutes his commanded feast not from safety. Not from a position of privilege or peace or institutional protection. He institutes it in a borrowed room, among people who are frightened and don’t yet understand what is coming. He takes bread. He takes a cup. He says: do this. Not when you feel ready. Not when the threat has passed. Not when you have resolved all the hard questions. Do this. In remembrance of me.
“Do this in remembrance of me” sits right next to “make them days of feasting and gladness.” Centuries apart and the same gesture. Both refusing to let memory stay abstract. Both insisting that the body — bread, cup, meal, gathering — is where the story becomes real again. Both commanding joy not as a feeling but as a practice, returned to again and again, because the returning is itself the resistance.
You are about to do what Mordecai commanded for all generations. You are going to bring your unedited self — the hard verses and all — and you are going to eat together anyway.
With the poor included. With the stranger welcomed. With the grief held inside the gladness rather than buried beneath it.
That is not naïveté. That is not denial. That is not cheap hope. That is joy on purpose. And it is one of the most defiant things human beings — still here, still gathered, still at this table — know how to do.