Sermon – Hidden and Active

(I preached at Christ Lutheran Church in Harrisburg, PA this past Sunday. The sermon was based on Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22, 29-32. You can also listen to the audio of the sermon at this link.)

I want to start by naming something true about today. This is a hard Sunday for many preachers to stand up and preach. It feels like a no-win situation for many pastors. Because the pews this morning are full of people carrying very different things into their churches.

Some will walk in expecting flags and patriotic hymns, something people are calling patriotic worship this year, whatever that is supposed to mean. Some will walk tired and frustrated with this country and wanting nothing to do with a single American flag or symbol anywhere near the altar. Most people are somewhere in between, and honestly, you might be carrying all of it at once. Pride. Grief. Confusion. Exhaustion. Frustration.  And some of the people walking into churches are not even citizens of this country. They live here, work here, raise children here, and on a day like today their voice, maybe even their presence, goes unseen and unheard by most everyone around them.

Here is the truth. I am not going to give you a sermon about America today. I am going to give you a sermon about God. That is true no matter which end of that spectrum you walked in on this morning, and it is true for those of you who do not feel like this is your holiday at all.  The scripture in front of us today has plenty to say about greatness, and about power, and about who actually survives in this world. It just says it in a way you might not expect.

If you have not spent time in the book of Esther, here is the quick version. Esther is a young Jewish woman living in exile in Persia. She hides that she is Jewish and becomes queen to King Ahasuerus. Meanwhile, a powerful official named Haman gets his feelings hurt because Esther’s cousin Mordecai will not bow to him. So Haman convinces the king to sign an order to kill every Jewish person in the empire. All of them. Wiped out. On one single day.

Esther is the only one positioned to stop it. But to speak up, she has to walk into the king’s presence uninvited, which could get her killed on the spot. She does it anyway. She invites the king and Haman to a private dinner. Then another dinner. And at that second dinner, the one you just heard heard, Esther finally names Haman in front of the king. She points at the man threatening her people and asks the king to save her life and the lives of everyone she loves. The king walks out into the garden to cool off, comes back in, finds Haman fallen across Esther’s couch begging for his life, and reads it as an assault. Haman is taken out and hanged on the very gallows he built for Mordecai. And in the verses that follow, the Jewish people establish a new holiday to remember it, which we will come back to in a moment.

Here is something most people miss when they read Esther. This book is quite humorous. It is dark, over the top, exaggerated humor, the kind that would have had people howling when it was first told out loud. Haman builds a gallows seventy-five feet tall to hang Mordecai on. 

Seventy-five feet. That is taller than most of the buildings in this neighborhood. And then Haman himself ends up hanging from the very thing he built for someone else. That is not subtle. That is a punch line.

The whole book works this way. Everything is too big, too coincidental, too perfectly timed to be an accident. The king cannot sleep one particular night, so he asks for the royal records to be read to him, and of all the pages in that record, the one that gets read is the story of Mordecai saving the king’s life years earlier. Haman happens to be standing right outside at that exact moment. Esther happens to be chosen queen out of every woman in the empire. Over and over, the story winks at you. Too much coincidence to be an accident.

There is an old saying that a coincidence is a miracle where God chooses to stay hidden. That is what is happening in Esther. God’s name never once appears in this book. Not one time in ten chapters. And yet God’s hand is everywhere, in every improbable turn, every reversal, every moment where the story should have ended in slaughter and instead ends in celebration.

That fits, actually. Esther’s own name means hidden. She hides who she is until the moment it matters most. And the God of this story hides too, working underneath the surface of empire, underneath the schemes of powerful men, underneath everything that looks like it is running the show.

I wonder if that is closer to how God works than we like to admit. We want God loud. We want lightning and voices from clouds. But so often God is working in the coincidence you almost didn’t notice. The phone call that came at just the right time. The person who showed up exactly when you needed them. The door that opened when every other door had shut. God prefers to remain anonymous. But God does not remain absent.

At the end of our reading, the Jewish people establish a new holiday called Purim. It happens every spring, and it is still celebrated by Jewish communities around the world today. Purim means lots, like dice, because Haman had cast lots to pick the day for the slaughter. But on that very day, the story turns upside down and the people survive instead. Purim turns that day of dice and death into a day of parties, of gifts of food to neighbors, of gifts to the poor, of costumes and noise and laughter. It takes the day that was supposed to be their ending and makes it a party instead.

That is the whole shape of the gospel, if you think about it. A day meant for death becomes a day of life. Sound familiar?

Here is the line from the commentary I read this week that will not let go of me. The pharaohs are gone. The Assyrian empire is gone. Babylon is gone. Persia, the empire in this very story, is gone. Rome is gone. The Third Reich is gone. Empire after empire has risen up, called itself great, called itself permanent, and then died.

And the Jewish people are still here.

The people with no army in that story. The people who could be erased with one signature on one piece of paper. They are the ones who survived. The empire that tried to kill them did not.

This pattern is not locked in the past. Ukraine has been standing against an invasion from a much larger power, and the outcome of that war is still being written, but the people have not disappeared. The Palestinian people have endured under governments determined to see them gone, and they have not disappeared. The Indigenous nations of this very land have survived a United States government that broke nearly every treaty it ever signed with them, and they have not disappeared. Watch history long enough and you notice something. The empire that sets out to erase a people usually does not outlast them.

This is not just a fact about Jewish history. It is a pattern that runs through the whole story of scripture, and it runs straight into Jesus. Jesus talks about a tiny mustard seed, smaller than anything else planted in the garden, and says the kingdom of God is like that seed. Not the mighty cedar. The seed. Jesus keeps pulling children into the middle of the crowd and saying, whoever wants to be great has to become like this child, the one with no power, no vote, no voice in that world. Jesus keeps talking about the poor, the grieving, the hungry, the persecuted, and calling them blessed. Not the powerful. Not the armed. Not the wealthy. The ones the world walks past.

Jesus himself lived this out. Paul writes that Jesus, though he was in the form of God, emptied himself. He did not grasp for power. He did not reach for a throne or an army. He gave himself away for people who had nothing to offer him back. There is an old saying that captures this well. When God shows up in Jesus, he does not come riding in on a tank. He rides in on a donkey. He does not carry missiles. He carries a healing touch. He does not set out to kill his enemy. He sets out to love his enemy. And it is that emptying, that giving away, that the church has always called great.

The church itself has forgotten this before, and worse, it has flat out rejected it. It has reached for the very thing Jesus turned down in the wilderness, the worldly power and might that the tempter offered him for free. 

Every time the church has grabbed for that power instead of giving itself away, people have gotten hurt. People have died. That is not a footnote in history. That is the pattern every single time.

Empire does not know how to do that. Empire only knows how to take, to hold, to impose its will on whoever stands in the way. Might makes right. The strong survive. The ends justify the means. Those are the core beliefs of empire, whatever century you find it in, whatever flag it is flying. And you can already see why empire always eventually falls. It only knows one move. It cannot bend. It cannot give itself away. It can only clench its fist tighter and tighter until, one day, there is nothing left to hold onto and it comes apart.

This country had a season once called the Gilded Age. Gilded means covered in a thin layer of gold on the outside while something else sits underneath. During that era, a small handful of men built fortunes larger than entire nations while people working in their mines and mills and factories died young, worked children to exhaustion, and buried each other in poverty. It looked golden from a distance. Fine homes, fine parties, fine speeches about progress. Underneath, it was rotten. And it did not last. It could not last. Things that are gilded eventually show what they really are.

I think we are living through another gilded season right now. Wealth stacked higher than any point in this nation’s history sitting right alongside people who cannot afford a dentist, a doctor, a place to sleep that is not their car. I have watched that up close. Some of you have lived it. And whenever wealth like that gets treated as the definition of greatness, whenever might and land and money get called the mark of a great nation, I think of Esther. I think of Haman standing at the base of his own seventy-five foot gallows. Gilded greatness always ends up building the very thing that brings it down.

But this rot showing through is not the end of the story either. It never has been. What always survives underneath the gilding is exactly what empire has no use for. The people it steps over. The people it exploits. The people it forgets. They are still standing when the gold flakes off.

My wife and I went to Cincinnati not long ago and visited the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. It is one of the best museums I have ever walked through, and one of the hardest. In the middle of the building sits an actual structure, moved there piece by piece from a farm in Kentucky. It is a slave pen. A building where enslaved people were held and chained before being sold further south.

I walked through the doorway into that building and it hit me before I even understood what I was feeling. I had to leave. Abby had to pull me out. Something about standing inside that threshold made real what thousands of human beings endured in that very structure across the 1800s. People with no power. No vote. No say in what happened to their own bodies. Held by an empire, an American one this time, that called itself great while it did that to them.

And yet the whole point of that museum, the whole reason it exists, is that people found a way through. Neighbor helping neighbor in the dark. Strangers risking everything to guide someone one more mile north. People who had every reason to believe they had no future, stepping out anyway, not knowing if the next step held ground or nothing at all. That is faith. Not certainty. Stepping out when you cannot see what is under your foot, because staying still means death and moving means at least a chance at life.

Esther did the same thing walking into that throne room uninvited. The people fleeing on the Underground Railroad did the same thing walking into the dark. The empires that held them did not survive. They did.

I want to say something to this congregation, because you already know this in your bones. I have learned more about survival from the people who walk through our clinic doors and our church doors than from any book. I have learned it from folks living in their cars, from folks I used to sit with at truck stops eating a warm meal and getting one night of dry laundry. Nobody has to tell them that the world runs on hidden coincidence and grace they cannot always name. Nobody has to convince them that the powerful do not always win. They live that truth every single day, because they have had to.

The world calls them weak. The world walks right past them, too busy, too distracted, too comfortable to look. But they are the ones who know how to survive when everything says you should not be able to. That is not a small thing. That is wisdom the rest of us are starving for, if we would only stop and listen.

So here we are, on a Sunday when this country turns 250. I will tell you honestly, I am not interested in using my collar to prop up a flag. That is not what it is for. But I do think this day, this reading, has something enormous to say, and it is not what either side of our current shouting match wants to hear.

This nation began small and weak, going up against the largest empire on earth, and somehow it survived. Imperfect from the very first day. Built with real evil baked into its foundation, slavery chief among it. Still standing 250 years later, in spite of itself as much as because of itself. I do not say that to hand it a halo. 

I say it because the same question sits underneath America in 2026 that sat underneath Persia in the book of Esther. What actually makes something great? A strong military? A pile of wealth? A lot of land? Every empire in history has had every one of those things. Every single one of them is gone.

There are voices in this country right now trying to fuse the cross with the flag, trying to convince you that God has chosen this nation the way empire chooses its winners, through strength and dominance and the ability to impose its will on anyone who gets in the way. That is not a new idea. That is Haman’s theology. That is empire dressed up in religious language, and it is just as gilded and just as hollow as it has ever been.

The God of Esther does not work that way. The God of Esther works underneath, in the coincidence, in the reversal, in the small and the hidden and the overlooked. The God we know in Jesus does not arrive on a warhorse. God arrives as a baby in an occupied territory, born to parents too poor to afford anything but the cheapest offering at the temple. That is where God shows up. Every time.

I do not know what the next chapter holds for this country. I do not think anyone truly does. But I know what the book of Esther tells us, and I know what Jesus tells us, and they are telling us the same thing. What looks strong is often already dying. What looks weak is often what survives. The people this world overlooks are the ones carrying something the rest of us desperately need.

So on this strange Sunday, here is the good news. Not that America is great, and not that it is doomed. The good news is that God has never needed empire or its core beliefs to accomplish anything. God has always worked through the hidden and the small and the overlooked, and God is still doing that right now, in this room, in this neighborhood, in the people this world has decided are not worth its attention.

Esther risked everything and found out God had been there the whole time. Every person who ever guided someone north on the Underground Railroad risked everything and found out the same thing. Every person who walks into our clinic on Tuesday afternoon carrying more than any of us can see is teaching us that same lesson, if we will let them.

The empires die. The hidden God, and the people God loves most, survive.

Thanks be to God. Amen.