Dare To Be Salty
Mark 9:38-50 Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22
September 27, 2009
I am impressed by Esther. She took a risk when she confronted the evil Haman. Women, even queens, in that day, were cheap commodities. A man, especially the king, could easily find a replacement if need be. Esther was well aware of this. She knew that it was just a matter of her beauty that she was chosen as queen. She knew that if the king was aware that she was a Jewess, he never would have chosen her in the first place. But there she was in the palace, married to the king. If any woman had power or influence, it was her. Even still, she had to plot and plan. She couldn’t come right out and ask for what she wanted from her husband. So, she planned some delicious meals for him, and entertainment. She planted information about Mordecai’s heroism. And she bided her time, hoping that he would finally ask her if she wanted anything in return for the fine meals she had provided.
For most of us, action is difficult. I don’t mean the normal every day activities of getting up, perhaps taking a walk, preparing meals and doing our work. These activities are a part of the weave of our lives. What is difficult for us is the kind of activity that takes us outside of our comfort zones. The kind of activity that Esther engaged in. Friday night I went to a lecture by Andrew Harvey, an internationally acclaimed author, mystical scholar and visionary thinker. He was speaking about“Sacred Activism.” I was a little worried, as one friend who almost came said to me, “I don’t really want to go and listen to someone who is going to make me feel even more guilty about not doing anything.” It is tough. We are all busy enough. we have plenty on our plates, and so we don’t really need one more thing to worry about, one more thing to add to the already overly full schedule. The way that Andrew Harvey approached his subject though, shifted my feelings about all of this. He asked us what makes our hearts break. “What is it that you are aware of, that breaks your heart?” He wasn’t asking me to do something that I felt guilty about or thought was yet another “should,” he was asking me to identify something that hit me so deeply that if I dwelled on it, my heart would break.” I thought about Esther, as he was talking, and how her heart broke for her people. She couldn’t not act. She couldn’t not take the risks she took. The people whom Haman intended to kill were her people, and she was quite literally the only one who had even the smallest chance of saving them.
Andrew Harvey’s question is sifting through my mind now, as it has been since Friday night. “What is it that breaks my heart?” What do I care about that deeply? There are so many things going on these days to care about, that we have become immune to caring on so many levels. Climate change, nuclear buildup, war in Iraq and Afghanistan, people losing jobs and homes, tainted food supplies, strip mining, animal testing, clear cutting forests, endangered species, and so many other things that start rushing into our minds and hearts once we open the floodgates. We have become numb to the painful realities with which we live every day, because it hurts way too much to care about them all. It is far easier to shut them all out and even to shut down our capacity for caring. But what if we could and did let ourselves care for just one thing? What if we allowed ourselves to sift though the long list of things that are wrong in our world, and just started to notice which one hit some kind of resonating chord within us? As I sat listening to Andrew speak, I began thinking, “well, I could do one thing. I could take action if something really hit my heart and broke it open.” It was a relief actually, to realize that I am not being asked to do something about everything. I am not being asked to take action in response to all of the myriad of requests that come my way every day. No wonder we shut down and become numb. We can’t possibly do everything there is to be done, and so we don’t even venture out to try and do anything. We are too overwhelmed.
Sometimes, even the one thing we may feel called to do is overwhelming and may feel like it is too much. I think of Esther when I feel this way. Of course, she was overwhelmed. She was also most likely pretty scared. After all, she could easily have been killed along with all of her people at the whim of the king. Things could go either way, and she knew that, but her heart was pounding with the need to act, and she could not make a different choice. She had to put her plan into action and do what she could to save her people. The heart pounding and driving one into action is a familiar feeling to Quakers. For them, worship is conducted by sitting in silence until the Spirit comes upon one of them, often felt in the pounding of their heart, and they feel moved to speak or sing.
“What is it that makes your heart pound?” What issue or concern or crisis shakes you to the core? In order to hear the voice of the Spirit, in order to feel our heart’s response to something, we need to break through our numbness. We need to open ourselves up and allow our feelings to resurface. It takes courage and strength to allow this to happen, and I don’t think we can really do it all on our own. Andrew Harvey suggests that we have some form of a spiritual practice in our daily lives in order to support ourselves. Prayer, meditation, a mindful walk - any of these things can ground us in our lives as well as in the life of the Spirit. From this place of strength and renewal, we are better able to open our hearts and let them be broken. From this place of deep grounding, we find in ourselves the courage to look at the world around us with clear, unclouded vision. Queen Esther was living the life of luxury. She lacked for nothing, and it would have been easy for her to close her mind and shut herself off from anything horrible that may have happened to her people. But her uncle Mordecai acted as her conscience, keeping her informed and waking her up to the reality of the situation outside the palace walls. We too, need to wake up to what is going on outside the walls we have carefully constructed around ourselves. Maybe we need an uncle Mordecai to nudge our conscience, but chances are we are already aware, at some level, of the brokenness of our world. Chances are it won’t take much more than setting our intention, to wake ourselves up. Then it becomes a matter of figuring out what we can do.
Esther had to operate on her own. She was the only one with access to the king, and so she had to carry out the entire plan all on her own. But we don’t have to work alone. We can search for people whose hearts carry the same burden as ours, and then work together to make plans and eventually make a difference. Andrew Harvey calls these small groups part of the “Network of Grace” that he envisions springing up all over the world as people respond to the breaking open of their hearts. It occurred to me that our churches are perfectly situated to become parts of this network of grace. Our grounding in the Spirit is already in place. We know and care about one another already. So, all that is left for us to figure out is what it is that breaks open our hearts. What cause or issue or concern grabs us so strongly that we cannot leave it rest? What is it that we are passionate about?
Maybe churches can provide the starting point for these groups, and maybe several groups will form within any one church family. It is easy to see these groups drawing people from the community into the circle and into the network of grace as issues touch their hearts, breaking them open as well. I can see it, really. I can see a revitalization of our churches caused by getting in touch with something that we care deeply about, and I encourage and invite us each to be in prayer about this. What is amazing and so very powerful to me about this whole concept is that it is very much in line with how Jesus conducted his life and ministry. If you were to think of someone who lived his or her life in accordance with the things that broke their heart, Jesus would be at the top of the list, wouldn’t he? He even went so far as to die for it, didn’t he? He followed his heart rather than the cool voices of reason and kept protecting and speaking up for those with no voice: the poor and the women, the sick and the children. So, what better way to honor him and live out our faith than to do the work to which the Spirit operating in our hearts calls us? At the very least, let’s start asking the right question: “What is it that absolutely breaks my heart?”
God of our lives, we want our hearts to start feeling again. We want to wake up from this slumber of numbness and overwhelm. We are scared that we won’t be able to respond well, and yet we know we have to try. Stay with us and guide us into sacred action. Amen.