Living With Esther

A Reflection and Poem for Proper 21 in Trinity Season                        September 29, 2024

Christ Church/ Plymouth and St. Luke/St Anne, Roper     Thomas E Wilson, Guest Celebrant

Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22           Psalm 124       James 5:13-20                    Mark 9:38-50

Living With Esther

This is the 5^th Sunday of the month, when the Episcopal churches in Roper and Plymouth come together to have a joint service and a covered dish luncheon. These churches have a history together as they celebrate the present and look forward into a future..

The Hebrew Testament lesson is from the Book of Esther, and if Martin Luther had had his way, the book would not be part of the Christian Bible. Esther began as a short novel about a young Jewish woman who intermarried into the Persian Ruler's household, standing up for her Jewish people. In the original Hebrew version, the word God is never mentioned and there are no scenes of Esther, or anyone, praying for divine help.

In the Bible, the Book of the Song of Songs and the Book of Esther were used to underline ceremonies and parties. The Song of Songs was used for Passover where God's love is present for the people, even in in bondage of Egypt and wherever faithful Jews find themselves. The Book of Esther was of God being present for the people in Exile in Persia. They became excuses to have yearly parties commemorating the power of the Jewish people to counteract the usual stigma of being Jewish in a gentile country.

For the Book of Esther, the celebration is called the “Feast of Purim” and it is a yearly celebration of being proudly Jewish. There are overflowing plates of delicious courses of so many Jewish foods giving energy to a loud and raucous celebration of the story. Not only is food over the top but the noise of booing, hissing and using loud noise makers at the mention of the villains and cheering the heroes. With centuries of having to secretly hide their religion; Purim is the place to loudly proclaim their pride in their faith and in their heritage. My wife and I were lucky enough to have good friends in Temples and Synagogues in some of the communities in which we lived, and we were invited to participate in feast and joy at Purim celebrations. They were usually in the beginnings of Spring when we Christians decide to go overboard in being somber in Lent.

Despite all of the loud noise, Purim is an exercise in memory. The story of Esther was a at first a novel, a made up story with no historical evidence. But the story was told so often that it became a part of how the people talked about their ancestors. They told the story over and over again to each generation and the fiction was gradually accepted as fact.

I remember the stories that my Grandparents on my father's side, who we knew as “Daddy Wilson” and “Nana”, my Grandparents, on my Mother's side, who we would call “Madegar” and “Mamita” and along with our Great-Aunt Ora, the oldest of my mother's Aunts, would tell my brothers, sister and I about the families experiences of centuries before. The stories were full of heroes and villains. I think every generation had put an extra layer of spin. We were told these stories to show how we had the right kind of heritage to live into. We were to see ourselves not as a haphazard collection of DNA, but a a group of people from whom much was expected. My father would tell “Daddy Wilson as a young man” stories when he would tuck my brother and I into bed at night when we were young. How much of the memories was really an attempt at nostalgia to control the future? It depends on when you ask? I know that I have passed on stories to my daughter, and much later my grandsons, when I would tuck them into bed at night.

I remember one of my favorite songs “Try To Remember” from the off-broadway play The Fantasticks, about memory based on nostalgia to control the future, to which I was introduced in the mid 1960's:; The lyrics were engraved in my heart

Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and grain was yellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When you were a tender and callow fellow.
Try to remember, and if you remember,
Then follow.
Follow, follow, follow, follow, follow,
Follow, follow, follow, follow.

As the Jews became more and more dispersed, they tended to speak in the language of the ruling classes in the places they lived, often which was Greek. The Jews started to translate their literature into Greek, called the Septuagint, meaning the “70 books”. These translators of the Bible did not do a mere translation of the novel of Esther;; rather they re-wrote the book to include the elements of faith, prayer and divine intervention. The Septuagint were the documents used as the Roman Church translated it into Latin for their Bible.

In the Reformation, the Bible started to get translated into the languages of the people. Martin Luther had problems with the Roman Bible and started to cut away books he though as less than helpful. Luther had started his ministry with a friendship toward the Jewish people, but when they did not convert to Christianity, he became more and more an antisemitist, and he debated including Esther into the Apocrypha. The book of Easter barely made it into his Bible. The English Bible translators did not share Luther's hesitations. The monarch, King James, in whose rule the King James version of the Bible was compiled, especially liked the idea how people who disturbed the peace of the realm were punished by death as God's will..

The Book of Esther is about standing up to power. When it is so easy to just hide and avoid noting injustice, the heroine of the Book of Esther by her example calls people to strive for justice. Since we have included the Book of Esther in our lectionary; we are called by that book, not to keep silent, but to denounce any time a person is taken advantage of. We are called to risk our safety of silence and speak out.

When I was a teenager, we attended the small Episcopal church in our suburb. I was confirmed by our Bishop Peabody. It was not a magic moment of transformation for me, but it was the growth of an awareness that as an adult I was called to do something more with my faith than just sit in Church pews. Later, in my Senior year of High School, as I struggled to live in a way to being a confirmed Christian, my Bishop's wife showed a side I had not usually seen in my Episcopal Church. She was Mary Peabody, the 75 year old wife of that then retired Bishop and the mother of the then Governor of Massachusetts. She with a group of people, went down to St. Augustine, Florida to join with some black people to desegregate the Episcopal church in that town. She was hustled out of the church and arrested later for disturbing the peace, by moving their protest to a restaurant.. For me, she was the embodiment of Esther, who stepped away from her position of privilege, to stand up for what was right and just.

A couple years later, when I was in college, I was a drama major and I accepted a part in the Outdoor Drama in Saint Augustine. I had been offered parts in other Outdoor Dramas,that summer, but I took the St. Augustine position because it paid twenty dollars a week more. That summer, on a day off from laying on the beach with my girl friend, I walked into the church where Mrs. Peabody had been evicted and arrested. I was 19 years old and my life seemed so unimportant. Yet, in that empty church building, I now agreed with the physicists who were telling us that the universe was expanding; because my universe was expanding and it told me to make a decision to change my major at Carolina from Drama to Education, and then to History and to be more involved in social justice. Mary Peabody was my Queen Esther, being a model to urge me to go deeper to do good and make the world a better place. It was the beginning of what Mark in his Gospel for today calls being “salted with fire”, a beginning of burning for justice. Also I saw as what I had been doing earlier was what James in his Letter for today called “wandering from the truth”. For the first 13 years after graduation. I worked as a Social Worker, got my Master's and later taught Social Work at a Undergraduate College while working with counseling people. In 1981, I left that, in my mid-life crisis, to go to seminary. In 1984, a little over 40 years ago, I was ordained .

Today, you former members of divided churches come together; once formally divided by race, you come together to share a service and a meal; knowing the God who passes all understanding, whose love of us all, brings us together. We challenge each other to find ways that we can unite deeper to help our communities celebrate tough women, and men, who challenge the tired status quo. We are not prisoners of the past, but we are free for a future that is beyond our imagination.

I was blessed this Friday as I was writing my draft of the reflection and I came across , and stole, a part of a reflection that morning by Br. Curtis Almquist, a member of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist about generosity:

There is something about participating in life as a gift, not clinging to it, not hoarding it, but cherishing it, then sharing it with a kind of reckless abandon that is the real deal, because that's like God. We are invited to be generous with the things in life to which we have been entrusted, as well as with our kindness, attentiveness, gratitude, gentleness, and interest for others.

My brothers and sisters, you have been entrusted with your life to make the world a better place. Thank you for taking on that calling.

Living With Esther

There are times, Esther's in our hearts,

When they open to hear her standing,

Away from privilege, and demanding,

That we listen to voices of many parts.

We aren't all of the same persuasions.

Not holding all of the same memories,

But we're passing hopes into treasuries,

Filled to the rim for the new situations,

'cause we're opening into a new future,

Untinged by all the whiffs of nostalgia,

Unburdened by a remembered myalgia,

Freed from the old past without a suture.

All those good old days are now past.

It's a time to give blessings that'll last.

Attention, Attention Musr Be Paid

 

A Reflection/Poem for XVII Sunday after Pentecost                         September 15, 2024

St Luke's & St. Anne's, Roper and Grace Plymouth, NC                   Thomas E Wilson Guest Preacher

Proverbs 1:20-33                         Psalm 19    James 3:1-12                   Mark 8:27-38

Attention, Attention Must be Paid

Last Sunday I went to attend the Second Sunday of the new Priest at the church in Hertford. I had done some fill-ins, a couple times a month, for that church for a year until they called a new Rector. I called the new Rector and welcomed him and then asked permission to visit the church and him on his 2^nd Sunday, and take him out to lunch after the service.

He is different than I am, but I was not there to grade his performance, I was there to welcome him as the new minister to some people that I had grown fond of. I was there to share support and wisdom; wisdom without support is meaningless. It was his church and not mine. He was their Pastor now and I wasn't. So, part of why I was there was to trust their choice and to be able to leave; to leave the church alone so the new relationship could grow. Part of me did not want to go since I had accepted the invitation to fill in a couple days after my wife's funeral and I needed to do something to help fill the emptiness I had inside my heart. I was reminded of a quote from Therapist Marion Woodman whose books we had read when my wife and I had been doing dream work, She wrote: “It takes great courage to break with one's past history and stand alone”. Woodward also wrote “How we see ourselves determines what happens to us in our lives. If we do not respect and love ourselves that will carry over into our relationships and others will not respect us.”

I was reflecting on what a ministry of any church is, and I was also reading about Edith Hamilton, a scholar who translated and re-introduced ancient Greek and Roman Stories and myths into the last century and into common understandings of ourselves.I spend a lot of my life looking at ancient texts of my faith and try to translate them into 21^st Century American mindset. Robert Kennedy trying to make sense of his brothers deaths, was so enamored by Hamilton's books that he carried a copy of one of her books wherever he went. In a speech he gave, he said: “"Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago––to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world." In one speech he quoted Aeschylus from memory: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

Nadia Bolz-Weber, a Lutheran Pastor in Colorado wrote about her wisdom about how to leave: “The truth is that we can only hold handfuls of life at a time and room must be made for what enters next. Maybe to live a human life is to lose everything while also gaining everything.”

In the Hebrew Testament lesson for today, the Spirit of Wisdom is like a mother who comes to the market place to warn her children of the need to hold onto the Divine Wisdom. “ For waywardness kills the simple,/and the complacency of fools destroys them; but those who listen to me will be secure/
and will live at ease, without dread of disaster.”

I am reminded of when I went off to college and my parents individually would set me down from time to time as the day to leave for college was drawing near, and they passed on their wisdom about how it was to leave what you knew and enter into an unknown future. Wisdom comes at the time of need when our old homes and our lives are changing.

In Mark's Gospel for today, Jesus is letting his disciples know that he will be leaving them, so that they will be able to live deeply into a new future with the Holy Spirit. Peter wants to hold tightly on to the present and desperately on to the past. Peter is rebuked because Jesus is speaking that the deepest wisdom is that he (and we) are called to give your (and our) life away in love.

This last week ,we remembered the events of terrorist attacks on 9/11; the death of so may innocent people. We keep trying to make sense in days after the 9/11 attacks in New York City. Prime Minister Tony Blair gave a speech honoring British victims that he ended with the final lines of The Bridge of San Luis Rey:, a novel written by Thornton Wilder in 1927 about the collapse of a bridge where five characters fell to their death. In the novel, the bridge is a metaphor for the path each of us take between life and death.

But soon we will die, and all memories of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love. The only survival, the only meaning.

This week, Deacon Joanna Seibert wrote about reflecting on Thornton Wilder's The Bridge Of San Luis Re. “Love is all we have to contribute to this life that will be lasting. Love is all we will carry with us into the life of the resurrection. Love is the bridge between these two territories.”

Decades ago, when I was so much younger I was acted in a play, “Death of a Salesman” written by Arthur Miller and I played the character of Willy Loman. In his introduction to the play, Christopher Bigsby wrote

Death of a Salesman had its origins in a short story Miller wrote at the age of seventeen (approximately the age of the young Biff Loman), when he worked, briefly, for his father’s

company. It told of an aging salesman who sells nothing, is abused by the buyers, and borrows his subway fare from the young narrator. In a note scrawled on the manuscript Miller

records that the real salesman had thrown himself under a subway train. Years later, at the time of the play’s Broadway opening, Miller’s mother found the story abandoned in a drawer.

But, as Miller has noted, Death of a Salesman also traced its roots closer to home. Willy Loman was kin to Miller’s salesman uncle, Manny Newman, a man who was ‘‘a competitor, at all times, in all things, and at every moment. My brother and I,’’ Miller explains in his autobiography, ‘‘he saw running neck and neck with his two sons in some race that never stopped in his mind.’’ The Newman household was one in which you ‘‘dared not lose hope, and I would later think of it as a perfection of America for that reason. . . . It was a house . . .

trembling with resolutions and shouts of victories that had not yet taken place but surely would tomorrow.’’

The part in the play; it was haunting because I was in my own life almost running in a race that never stopped in my mind. The play ends with a warning about such people running those kinds of races :

"I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person."

In your life, in your family, in your neighborhood; is there someone for whom “Attention must be paid.”?

Today, my hope is that each of us will remember the wisdom that was shared in our lives and how we are able to hear that love that comes with the wisdom.

Attention, Attention Must be Paid

Decades ago, I played the character, Willy Loman;

a week on a stage, and for some years in my life,

I'd often find myself in his shoes and in his strife;

of course long before becoming a small theologian.

Today, usually I can try to find paying attention

to a wisdom, a power, much greater than myself,

speaking to me to pick up some books on a shelf.

to use as a path of prayer to a deeper dimension.

Or, to turn to friends in whom I'd have some trust,

to listen with the ear of a loving heart, and to speak

after thinking deeply, maybe from translated Greek,

a small peace might come from what we discussed.

It is what happens. when some attention is paid

and I am not alone while the fear begins to fade