For Such a Time as This

Esther

November 8, 2009

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

I have had a feeling this past year or so that we are on the edge of something here. It’s a bit dicey on the edge, you know, and a bit dangerous. You could fall off. Or you could see something magnificent that you had never seen before. Think the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls. We’ve been talking about vitality and visitors and mission trips and worship and pews. We’re joining a broad coalition of faith communities as leaders in New Haven starting a new program to shelter homeless men in our building for a week in January, an exciting and risky venture. We continue to think together about what it really means to be a multi-racial church, which is a rare thing in 21^st century America, and that means conversations about race. Recently some of our youth spoke honestly about racism in their lives, a conversation which became a litany which some of them shared at the Conference Annual Meeting, and I was so proud of them! When most of you are not here, our building is home to multiple Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous groups, including one for gays and lesbians, as well as an organization called NOVA which helps men coming out of prison, and a new yoga group for senior citizens as part of the fledgling East Rock Village experiment, all part of our sharing our resources to help transform lives. We’re part of a group called the Connecticut Sponsoring Committee, rising like a Phoenix out of the ashes of a group called ECCO which some of you will remember, that is training leaders and doing community organizing throughout southern Connecticut. This is edgy, risky stuff, and this congregation has a history, dating back to its very formation, of embracing edgy, risky ministry!

We’re living in edgy times, where the way we thought the world worked is changing: economy, politics, and values. God is at work in this world, but it’s not always clear what God’s spirit is up to, and not always clear that we want to move with that risky, edgy Spirit.

In these edgy times, churches and individuals have some choices in response to those times and opportunities for ministry.

We can retreat, cocoon, enjoy our beautiful little world here just for ourselves, the way Esther might have enjoyed that luxurious harem.

We could deny that we have the power or resources to enter into edgy kinds of ministry or to address these edgy and challenging times and go on as though nothing has changed as Esther told Mordecai she wanted to do.

We could march boldly into the change as change agents and provocateurs, leaders in creating the new and bold as Mordecai did.

Each of us understandably might have moments of wanting to react in each of those ways from time to time in different circumstances and places.

But there is another option. We could throw a party, a feast! We could sit at table together talking about difficult and edgy times and circumstances and challenging each other about how we will respond. That, my friends, is Esther’s feast, Esther’s table, and that’s what this church can be for us.

As we sit at Esther’s table, we may take the places of Esther or the King, or maybe even Haman at different times in our lives. Think about it. Esther had some difficult and edgy and challenging things to say to the King. She asked her faith community for support, and then she fasted and she prayed to God, and one later writer imagined her prayer ending with the words “And save me from my fear.” When he held out his scepter to her, she couldn’t find her voice; it wasn’t the right context. So she came up with the idea of a party, for the King, and for Haman, the person who threatened her very life. Twice she sat at table with them, entering into stronger relationships with them around food and drink and conversation. Building community mainly with the King who needed to truly see and hear who she was, so that he might respond with love and compassion. There was so much that separated them, so many barriers to overcome in order to clearly communicate with each other, and Esther and the King needed a strong relationship. She also needed to find a way to bring Haman face to face with his actions and hold him accountable for the sin he had committed and was planning to commit. Esther set a feast that would, with God’s help, result in transforming thousands of lives.

In this congregation God has called together four generations of people, generations which have different senses of history, different world views, different understandings of technology, and sometimes gaps appear between generations. We represent a spectrum of political and social beliefs and commitments. We are black, white, Asian, Hispanic, Native American, and mixtures of those races, with sometimes conflicting experiences of the world, races and ethnic groups who, both past and present, have seen each other as enemies. We come from different levels of education and wealth. We come from religious backgrounds in Congregational churches, and Roman Catholic, Baptist, Evangelical, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Reformed, Jewish, Indifferent, and undoubtedly others I’ve missed.

We are, as someone once described the UCC, “a heady, exasperating mix.”

But at this table, every week, we have the chance to come together in a way we do no where else in our daily lives, even at work, because here we are invited to engage deeply in forming relationships, having conversations, working together in acts of charity, justice and ministry which directly engage those differences and challenge us to truly enter into relationships with one another, not despite the differences or ignoring the differences, but engaging and being transformed by our encounters with each other and God, something that we often hear in testimonies has a domino effect in your lives outside this church. We are a laboratory that helps us learn how to do this in every part of our lives. We believe and know that the people who use our building are doing the same thing in organizations like AA that also try to cross boundaries in a common purpose in edgy and challenging circumstances. And we explore the hard questions of who God is in the world today and why God makes a difference!

Heady, and exasperating, yes, but our Moderator Alan Kendrix puts it another way. He calls us a “mighty little church.” We are daily occupied in the edgy work of providing opportunities for lives to be transformed in more ways than I can count or mention, including our own lives and those of our children. This is a big table, but for it truly to be Esther’s table, it needs to continue to grow wider and embrace more relationships, even and especially risky and challenging ones. To do that, we each need to bring not only our food to this table today, but our pledges and gifts to empower the edgy, loving and faithful ministries that have always been a hallmark of the Church of the Redeemer.

Think of those in the history of Redeemer who stepped out on the word to create Welcome Hall, a ministry this church started in 1888 to reach out to new immigrants to New Haven providing a school, a place for a worship service in Italian, a savings bank for immigrants, classes in cooking and parenting and a kindergarten. One of the written histories of our church notes that in the first few months of organizing this mission, there was in the congregation “open and secret opposition, discouragement and evil prophecies.” But the committee persevered and very quickly $23,000 was raised to build a building! That’s 1888 dollars! That’s commitment to an edgy ministry!

I have spent my whole adult life in a love/hate relationship with the institution of the church, but I have stayed. I have not stayed just out of habit or because it’s my job, but because I passionately believe we have great work to do in the name of and with the help of God, together. I can’t do half of what we do here alone, and neither can any of you. You all are engaged in amazing work in your lives that is living out your discipleship and you continually astound me when I hear about what you do outside these walls as agents of God’s Spirit of transformation: teachers, healers, caregivers, bringers of hospitality, students, builders, designers, writers, justice-seekers and more. This church is here to empower you to walk on the edge in your lives and to hold on to you so you don’t fall off! We’re here to do the same thing for other people in New Haven and beyond. We’re here to raise up youth and children with that same kind of passion and commitment.

This is the table where we bring the world in which we love and work. It is a world full of hard things, like people who suddenly shoot strangers, co-workers, even family. A world where more wars simmer than we can keep track of. A world where in greed people defraud friends, charities, religious institutions. A world where genocide still happens.

But also a world where, as in Esther’s case, situations that seem as edgy and challenging as they come can, with the help of God and a faith community’s support, find resolution and life. A world where a small feast can give one person the strength to meet a task set before her and can open the eyes of those who have not seen truth.

I believe in the church, which is why Gavin and I financially support three churches. We do it even when we are exasperated with the church, because the church has empowered us to walk on the edge and held us up as well. We do it because we love to sit at Esther’s table with you and others and engage each other deeply to find strength for our daily work of ministry and hope in a heady, exasperating world, and to be challenged by you and others to see the Spirit of God moving when our eyes are clouded. We do it because we firmly believe that, like Esther’s table, the church as table can be the setting for the transformation of lives we know and more that we will never meet.

And I believe in this church, and that God is still speaking to us, and that we are the center on the edges for each other and lots of others. Come to Esther’s table. Let us keep working together with God to discern what God’s Spirit has in store for our place and time. Amen.