Queen Esther and Me

The Revolutionary Hope So Many of Us Need Today

You may have been raised in an evangelical Christian home if… you dressed up for Halloween, multiple years in a row, as the biblical Queen Esther. (Who’s that, you ask? An orphan lifted from obscurity in Persia to become not only a queen, but the one who rescues her people, God’s people, from a wicked, deadly plot.) And you didn’t dress up this way just at the big Harvest Festivals that your church hosted as an alternative to this spiritually dubious holiday. No, you did it even on the rare occasions you were allowed to roam from house to house, begging for candy in the twilight. “Trick or treat,” you’d shout, convinced the neighbors all instantly recognized who you were in your nubby, long-sleeved, pink and white nightgown - as befits ancient royalty, clearly.

“Where do you think this fascination with Esther came from?” my therapist asked recently. “Was it a princess thing?” I tried not to be offended that she would ask me this after so many years of working together. I may have dipped my toes into the worlds of My Little Ponies and Rainbow Brite as a child, but I was much more into He Man and Thundercats than Disney’s pantheon of princesses.

“No,” I answered slowly, “I think it was more of a hero thing. A women-can-be-strong-and-important-too thing.” I certainly felt that way after one amazing morning when I was chosen to stand upfront and play Esther in the Sunday school skit. I imagine I was on tiptoes, waving my hand wildly to be selected…And then there was Behold Your Queen, a fictionalized retelling of the tale that somehow found its way into my public school library. I devoured the book over and over again, savoring that message of significance. (I now recognize that retelling and many like it as deeply flawed - more on that later.) For me as a socially awkward girl-child who never quite fit the narrow boxes conservative religion offered, this church-sanctioned, God-breathed story of Esther sounded like freedom - like revolution. It offered hope that maybe there was a bigger, better story for me to fit into - that God might actually have a plan for even someone as different as me.

Now as an adult, parent and co-pastor of a quirky but welcoming little church, I sense many of us need that kind of revolutionary hope. Situated in the port city of Long Beach, California, I’m honored to call friends and congregants many who in recent years have been treated as political punchlines and punching bags rather than real people with tender, complicated stories. I think of the elderly and impoverished in our community who were already struggling to make ends meet, to buy groceries, pay rent, cover their medications and just live with basic human dignity, before a fleet of billionaires moved in to establish their own fiscal priorities for the country - of the brown and immigrant friends whose fear of being stopped and questioned, perhaps even deported without due process, seems to grow daily, whatever the state of their paperwork - of the queer and trans folk I love, whose creation in the imago Dei has been assaulted again and again by smear campaigns and government policies, not to mention the physical attacks their bodies experience far too often.

Others of us may not be so directly affected by the changes the last few decades have wrought in American politics. But we have all been touched. We’ve all been challenged to examine where we stand in relation to the forces of fear, anger and greed so powerfully at work in our world and to the already-marginalized communities they are scapegoating for their own purposes. (We’ll call these forces “empire” from here on out.) Even if we don’t personally know someone with immigration struggles or someone who is trans, even if we don’t fully understand these communities, even if our finances are just fine, something within us knows that it’s not right to treat people this way. The media talk about fascism and oligarchy; we recognize bullying when we see it. We know it’s not right for a small group to keep making their own lives better at the expense of so many others, and with particular cruelty towards the least of these. So we ask ourselves - what does love, what does justice ask of us in this moment?

As it turns out, the book of Esther was written for people asking just these kinds of questions. Though written for a particular religious-ethnic group in a much different time and place, it speaks with evergreen freshness to our struggles with empire today. When the forces of fear and division are flexing their muscles, where is God, and what are those committed to the ways of Love to do? It’s not a book for those who would be or prop up princesses or kings; it’s for those pondering the path of everyday heroism and communal resistance.

🎁 Share, 💬 Comment or ✅ Subscribe to Support My Work.

Today’s prompt for the comments: Tell us about a story, poem or song that has been a revolutionary spark for you, the way the book of Esther has been for me.