Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost Year B 2009

17 Pentecost B 09
September 27, 2009

Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22
1 So the king and Haman went in to feast with Queen Esther. 2 On the second day, as they were drinking wine, the king again said to Esther, "What is your petition, Queen Esther? It shall be granted you. And what is your request? Even to the half of my kingdom, it shall be fulfilled." 3 Then Queen Esther answered, "If I have won your favor, O king, and if it pleases the king, let my life be given me--that is my petition--and the lives of my people--that is my request. 4 For we have been sold, I and my people, to be destroyed, to be killed, and to be annihilated. If we had been sold merely as slaves, men and women, I would have held my peace; but no enemy can compensate for this damage to the king." 5 Then King Ahasuerus said to Queen Esther, "Who is he, and where is he, who has presumed to do this?" 6 Esther said, "A foe and enemy, this wicked Haman!" Then Haman was terrified before the king and the queen.
9 Then Harbona, one of the eunuchs in attendance on the king, said, "Look, the very gallows that Haman has prepared for Mordecai, whose word saved the king, stands at Haman's house, fifty cubits high." And the king said, "Hang him on that." 10 So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai. Then the anger of the king abated.
20 Mordecai recorded these things, and sent letters to all the Jews who were in all the provinces of King Ahasuerus, both near and far, 21 enjoining them that they should keep the fourteenth day of the month Adar and also the fifteenth day of the same month, year by year, 22 as the days on which the Jews gained relief from their enemies, and as the month that had been turned for them from sorrow into gladness and from mourning into a holiday; that they should make them days of feasting and gladness, days for sending gifts of food to one another and presents to the poor.

Psalm 124
1 If it had not been the LORD who was on our side --let Israel now say-- 2 if it had not been the LORD who was on our side, when our enemies attacked us, 3 then they would have swallowed us up alive, when their anger was kindled against us; 4 then the flood would have swept us away, the torrent would have gone over us; 5 then over us would have gone the raging waters. 6 Blessed be the LORD, who has not given us as prey to their teeth. 7 We have escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken, and we have escaped. 8 Our help is in the name of the LORD, who made heaven and earth.

James 5:13-20
13 Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. 14 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. 15 The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. 16 Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. 17 Elijah was a human being like us, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. 18 Then he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain and the earth yielded its harvest. 19 My brothers and sisters, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and is brought back by another, 20 you should know that whoever brings back a sinner from wandering will save the sinner's soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.

Mark 9:38-50
38 John said to him, "Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us." 39 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. 40 Whoever is not against us is for us. 41 For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.
42 "If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. 43 If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. 45 And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell. 47 And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, 48 where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched. 49 "For everyone will be salted with fire. 50 Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another."

Remember Who You Are

There’s a large Russian family that came to our area some ten or fifteen years ago as refugees from the Bosnian situation, a big family of brothers and their wives and children. The children were small then, and off they went to American public schools. Now, fifteen years later, those children are grown-ups. I serve with some of them on the fire department, young men with names like Sergei and Igor and Vasily who now wear jeans, chew tobacco, drive pick-ups, say “y’all” and hunt. These boys eagerly assimilated and have embraced pretty much everything about U.S. culture.

Of course, they still speak Russian with their parents, whom I haven’t met yet. The parents, having grown up overseas, have perhaps a more difficult time assimilating.

Southern culture is slow-paced, Helen Ray was telling me yesterday, so that when she went north to live with her Yankee husband and his mother, she found that her mother-in-law was always very impatient with her, because Yankee culture is fast-paced. Her mother-in-law was in effect telling her, “Assimilate. Give up being Southern and become a Yankee.”

How you talk, what you say, how fast or slow you do things, what is a priority and what isn’t, who’s important and who isn’t, what’s beautiful and what’s ugly, what kinds of things we do and what kinds of things we don’t do, these are the things of culture.

Lewis McPherren tells a lovely story about his mother. When Lewis was a little boy, every time he left the house, his mother’s parting words were “Remember who you are.” A culture, any culture, seeks to define for you who you are, and it is tremendously powerful.

Lewis’ mother was doing the very important work of training her child to be alert to the many ways the culture he lived in would try to distort him. She was well aware that every time he went out the door of her home, the world would be telling him, “Assimilate. Stop being who you are and be what we are.”

The Book of Esther begins by telling the horrifying story of the Esther’s predecessor being executed for standing up to the king. So, later in the story, when Esther’s people are in danger of being liquidated because of their refusal to stop being Jews and start being Persians, there is the very real danger that if Esther remembered who she was and stood up for her people by trying to defend them, she would meet her predecessor’s fate. But Esther, amazingly and courageously, nevertheless remembered who she was.

In our American culture, how do Christians remember who they are?

Some have simply merged the two identities. For them, to be American is to be Christian. American politics, American business, and American culture is the defining identity of the word “Christian.” To be Christian is to be for democracy, baseball and apple pie. For them, they have not stopped being Christian to start being Americans; they see no difference between the two. Quite the contrary, this group regards non-Christians as fundamentally un-American.

On the other side of the question, we find the Amish, who take the biblical injunction “Be ye separate” very, very seriously. For them, consumerism, modernism, capitalism and all the trappings thereof, including the English language, are to be wholly rejected. They live in communal groups, sharing everything, and order their daily lives through their understanding of scripture. They are in essence a monastic community that happens to affirm family life.

In between the Christian-as-Americans and the Christians-as-monks, we have all kinds of permutations.

Some would say the difference is between public and private. Christian culture has no bearing, they say, on public matters: politics or business. It has only to do with personal choices and family life. Thus, the board of a Christian church is not to be concerned with spiritual matters, but only the business of budgets and bricks and mortar, and the business of budgets and bricks and mortar don’t come under the heading “spiritual.” In this view, Jesus has nothing to say about the affairs of the nation nor about the conduct of business.

Still others would eject Jesus from public affairs, but would advocate God’s involvement in them. The distinction made here is that God’s law should be in effect in public life, while the gospel of Jesus, the message of forgiveness and mercy, only pertains in private life. These Christians lobby the Supreme Court to bring the justice system in line with God’s law, but would never dream of bringing Jesus’ gospel of mercy and grace there.

Others would say there is a greater difference. They would say that the community of the church is governed and led by the Holy Spirit of God, calling, justifying, and sanctifying a community for the purpose of healing the world. Anyone who comes within the body of Christ with some other agenda stains it.

Jesus uses the concept of “salt.”

Don Leyden, a professor of chemistry, knows that salt has some very peculiar properties that make it essential to life. What’s unique about salt is that, used in high quantities to preserve foods, it actually keeps life from developing, the life of sickness-making bacteria. In small quantities, when added to food, it brings out the flavor of the food, along with a hint of the saltiness, and we call this flavor sensation “savor.”

In Jesus’ time, salt was very, very expensive first of all because it was so useful and in demand and secondly because harvesting it was very, very difficult. Roman soldiers were often paid in salt, which could be used like money in trading.

When Jesus speaks about the relation of God’s people to the various cultures in which they find themselves, he describes the people, the community, as “salt.” On the one hand, salt is of no use if it isn’t pure, and ancient peoples understood that the making of pure salt was a very difficult and labor-intensive effort. It seems that Jesus is saying that the purity of God’s people is essential, and that this purity is not an easy thing to attain or to maintain. It involves serious discipline and the hardest kind of work.

On the other hand, the thing that makes pure salt so useful is the way is the healing power that disperses in any medium to which it is added, the way it enhances flavor, preserves what is good, and restrains what is bad.

Esther and her people maintain their purity, though it requires great effort. They work very hard to remember who they are even as they are dispersed into a different culture. From a position of weakness, Esther manages to bring about great justice and simultaneously to resist great evil. She and her people both bring out the goodness in the Persians and at the same time resists the evil growing within them. While God is never mentioned in the book of Esther, it is understood that he is there, precisely in the purity of his people. Esther and her people are a great example of the community as “salt.”

When the disciples want to exclude exorcists using Jesus’ name without Jesus’ permission, Jesus turns the table on them. Those who are “outside” the group, if they are not against Jesus, are to be considered with him. Purity is not defined as it is in the world around, by the authority of a particular man or any other human idea or system. It’s defined by the obvious presence of the Holy Spirit, doing real deeds of healing, sanity-giving power.

It is not easy to receive the Holy Spirit. It requires quite a process, quite a lot of serious effort, very much like the ancient process of making or mining salt. It’s no surprise that the metaphor for the hardest kind of labor was “going to the salt mines.”

The effect God is seeking to have in the world is the kind of effect salt has: humbly dispersing throughout with healing power, preserving the good and restraining the bad. Jesus is saying anyone who is achieving such things is with us, and anyone who is among us who seeks to undermine that mission, to make the body of Christ stumble, is the member who should be cut off, no matter what the cost to the community, no matter how powerful or important the member might be. If your eye causes your body to stumble, tear it out. Better to enter the kingdom with one eye than to be thrown into the burn-pile whole.

Did you ever think that Jesus might not simply judge individuals, but whole congregations, whole denominations? It is of course, not up to us to make those kinds of decisions. Ours is only to preach the word as purely and as truthfully as we can and allow him to make the call.

Church, remember who you are.

Amen.