September 14, 2025
• Rev. Dr. Rob Fuquay
St. Luke’s UMC
September 14, 2025
Heroes of Hope
Courageous Hope
(Paraphrase of Esther 4)
I started with a football story last week, so I thought I’d continue that trend this morning. Did you know that at the start of this season the Colts are the most hopeless team in the NFL? That’s actually a fact. The Athletic, an online sports news source, conducted a Hope-O-Meter before the start of the season. They measured the optimism of each team’s fan base and ranked them 1-32. The Colts came in dead last with less than 7% hope for a good season.
As you might guess, the teams with a higher percentage are ones who’ve had a better winning record in recent years and more positive hype around expectations. But that isn’t really hope. Hope isn’t based on evidence for optimism. Hope is what you carry when you don’t have a reason to hope. Hope looks like the Colts.
By the way, what was the number one team in the hope-o-meter? The Broncos, who the Colts play this afternoon. I hope the Colts will win.
I wonder if you had a Hope-o-meter measuring your optimism about our world, how it would read? Would it be more like the Colts or the Broncos? Another killing this week of a high profile individual and another school shooting. How is your hope? Just remember, hope is not based on evidence for optimism. Hope is what we carry when we don’t have reason for hope. Hope requires courage.
So as we get ready to consider an important story of hope in the Bible, would y ou join me first in prayer…
Esther was a Me-Too story before Me-Too became a story. It begins with the misogyny and sexism of a king, whose wife, Queen Vashti, one day has enough. This causes a crisis among the king’s council. They tell the king that if he doesn’t dismiss the queen then every wife in the empire might start disobeying their husbands. It would create total chaos. Can you imagine wives becoming strong and confident and speaking their minds to their husbands? Me and my sons-in-law can.
So the king deposes Queen Vashti and a beauty contest is held to choose a new queen. A woman named Esther entered the contest. She had to go through 12 months of beauty treatments. I once heard a speaker reflect on this part of the story. He asked if any woman in the audience had ever spent hours getting ready for a date, maybe even a whole afternoon? He then asked, “Have you ever spent more time getting ready for a date than the date actually lasted? So imagine spending a whole year getting ready!
For Esther, it paid off…sort of. She emerged the winner of the contest. She was chosen to be queen, but she was Jewish. Her uncle, Mordecai, who raised her, advised that she keep this a secret, lest her racial identity should jeopardize her position. Its tough enough being a woman in a world like that, let alone a woman of a minority race. But then, a dark turn of events would cause Esther to have to make a decision that would risk her position and security.
A few years ago the toy maker, Mattel really messed up. The voice boxes made for Barbie dolls ended up in G.I. Joes and vice versa. When you pulled the G.I. Joe string he said, “Let’s shop til we drop,” and when you pulled Barbie’s string she said, “Hit the ground hard, Now! Now! Now!”
The story of Esther is about a woman who starts out like Barbie but ends up more like G.I. Joe, because she shows that hope looks like courage.
Now before we go further I have to address a couple of important aspects to this book. First, the Book of Esther barely made it into the Bible. The key objection was its lack of religious emphasis. There’s no mention of worship or the temple and there is not one mention of God. God is not named. What swayed the deciders is that God is clearly the supporting actor in the story. God is understood as the prime determiner of events.
God is present, just not obvious.
The other problem is that the story is not historically true. Most historians and Bible scholars agree that Esther was a work of fiction that explains how a Jewish Holiday of Purim came about. This is a celebrative holiday. You could call it the Jewish version of Mardi Gras. But most likely the story of Esther is not historical.
Now this can offend some people. If Esther is just a made up story then what value is it? But let me suggest that good fiction can change reality. How many of us have had our lives changed by parables of Jesus? The Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, The Unforgiving Servant. These are not people who lived. They were figments of Jesus’ imagination. But how many realities have been changed by these stories?
In fact, just think about stories we tell our children. The Three Little Pigs, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, The Tortoise and the Hare. We don’t tell these stories to our children because we want them to believe they’re true. We tell them because we want them to be respectful, and honest and develop perseverance.
Nothing shapes reality like good fiction.
So back to Esther. About the time she became queen, the king promoted one of his advisors named Haman, a cruel, egotistical man who started making people bow down in his presence. But, Esther’s uncle, Mordecai, would not do this. When people told Haman, he was enraged. And his response is interesting and concerning, “But he thought it beneath him to kill only Mordecai. So, having been told who Mordecai’s people were, Haman plotted to destroy all the Jews…” (3:6) Haman realized it would look petty to kill someone for not bowing to him. So he decided to turn it into a conspiracy and accuse all Jews of being a threat to the empire. In other words, he creates a holocaust to justify a personal grievance. Hate never stays confined.
Haman gets the king to sign a decree calling for the genocide of all Jews in the realm. He even has giant gallows built to hang Mordecai.
When Mordecai learns of the decree he puts on sackcloth and ashes and sits in the town square to lament what is happening. No more hiding his identity. This makes Esther uncomfortable. She calls for her uncle to persuade him not to do this. Instead she gets a challenge put back on her. Mordecai says to his queen niece,
“Do not think that in the king’s palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.” (4:13-14)
That last line is one of the great sentences in the Bible. “Who knows that you have come to your position for such a time as this.” Courageous hope is needed and Esther is in a position to give it.
How does God need people right now to demonstrate courageous hope for such a time as this? We had another killing of a high profile figure this week. On the same day as another school shooting, which happened just 20 minutes from where our daughter and her family live in Denver. This adds to a school shooting two weeks ago and the assassination of a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband a few months ago, and the burning of the governor’s home in Pennsylvania, and the firebombing of the republican Party headquarters in New Mexico, and the assassination attempt of President Trump just over a year ago.
Our division, that is becoming acts of violence, toward each other is not one sided. Hate doesn’t stay confined. It must spread to survive. And when hate spreads, anyone can be a target. But even more, the greater hate spreads, the more discouraged we can get. The easier it is to lose hope. And like Esther, we can find ourselves just wanting to keep our head down and stay safe.
The story Where the Crawdads Sing is about a girl who, for different reasons, the death of her mom, her brother moving out, and her father abandoning her, ends up living alone in the marsh of eastern North Carolina in the 1950’s. She goes into the nearby store that is run by a black couple. They sense what’s happened and the wife wants to help. This makes the husband nervous because of what people might say. Take a look at this scene from the movie that came out a couple years ago…video clip.
It’s nothing huge. It’s just helping a girl who needs a few things. But its an act of courage…For such a time as this.
In every time, in every life, there are events that happen that contribute to the harm of others. And God calls people to see what they have, where they are, what they’ve been given as opportunities to show bold hope for such a time as this.
Mordecai says to Esther, “Who knows but you have come to your royal position, for such a time as this.” And that does it for Esther. She realizes that where she is might not just be because she is beautiful, or worked really hard, or made her own lucky breaks. Perhaps there is more behind her own story. Perhaps there is a God who has put in her a position for this very moment. And that awareness must have been gripping, because she immediately replies to her uncle: “Go, gather all the Jews to be found in Susa, and hold a fast on my behalf, and neither eat nor drink for three days, night or day. I and my maids will also fast as you do. After that I will go to the king, though it is against the law, and if I perish, I perish.” (4:16)
She now speaks as a person no longer committed to just holding onto her position. She may be afraid but she wont let fear immobilize her. She speaks as someone who realizes that her greatest asset, her greatest possession, is not even life itself, it is the ability to choose what she does with her life. If I perish, I perish.
I called my friend, Rabbi Brett Kirchiver at Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation the other day to find out his take on Esther. He shared that one of the prominent Jewish commentators compares the story of Esther to the Israelites in the wilderness under Moses. There they had nothing. They had to accept the 10 Commandments. What else could they do. But Esther has everything. Yet she chooses to risk it all. This why the holiday of Purim is such a celebration. It celebrates what happens when we choose to use what we have for the good of others and what God can do with that.
Esther made this decision and then we get to learn what Esther has no way of knowing. You see her Mordecai, years before, had been the hero in preventing an assassination attempt against the king. It was all recorded in the king’s annals.
So about the time Esther is making her bold declaration to her uncle, we discover the king can’t sleep. So he starts reading his annals. I mean what better way to fall back to sleep than to read about your own accomplishments. He reads about the assassination attempt and what Mordecai did. He calls his servants and asks what was ever done for Mordecai, and his servants said, “Well, nothing.”
So, now get this irony, the king calls for Haman to go and honor Mordecai. Haman does this, but now he’s beside himself. And even more, that evening, Haman attends a feast with the king and queen, and Esther tells the king all that has been happening, how she and her people are destined to die because of what Haman has done. The king is incensed. He orders for Haman to be hanged on the very gallows Haman built for Mordecai.
And all turns out well. Esther gets the king to issue orders revoking his previous edict. It is a cause for celebration. As it says, “For the Jews there was light and gladness, joy and honor” (8:16). And yet the story ends on a somewhat disturbing note.
“On the very day when the enemies of the Jews hoped to gain power over them…the Jews gathered in their cities throughout all the provinces of King Ahasuerus to kill those who had sought their ruin, and no one could withstand them…” (9:1-2).
How are we to understand this? In one sense this could not be the moral to the story, that hope means being able to return to others the harm they intended for us. That can’t be right. Genuine hope cannot contain evil.
In fact, the story indirectly hints at this. We are told on several occasions that Haman is an Agagite. That means he was a descendant of King Agag. Who was that? He was king of an enemy Saul conquered and was supposed to kill. He didn’t, but the prophet Samuel did, taking off his head with a sword. So you wonder, what Haman inherited in his soul toward the Jews? Seeing a chance not only to eliminate a man he despised but learning that this man was a Jew, was Haman motivated by revenge?
If so, there is a clear message in this story that retribution can never be a sign of hope. Returning verbal vitriol to someone who has bad-mouthed us is not going to lead to hope. Returning injury to someone who has injured us, regardless of where we have a right, does not produce hope. Hope for our world looks like giving back better than we received. Hope looks like Jesus hanging on a cross saying, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.”
But there is one more thing to remember about the end of the story of Esther. It is fiction. It did not happen. Innocent people were not killed because they were of the same race as Haman. It was the writer’s way of saying, one day God will reverse the conditions of our world. One day God will turn things around. What is wrong and evil now, what causes us to lose hope and despair today, will one day be upended.
And that upending happens when each person, in their own way, performs a bold act of hope. This is what Esther shows us. Hope often looks like a courageous thing. Something you do when you don’t believe it will matter. When doing such a thing feels like it will cost you all you have. But you never know the sureness of what you do until you act.