Biography
Marjory Z. Bankson is the new president of Faith at Work — an organization that encourages lay ministry through seminars and a wonderful magazine called “Faith at Work”. After graduating from Radcliffe College, she got her Masters degree in history from the University of Alaska. She then taught school and was the women’s counselor at Dartmouth College until 1970. For the decade between 1970 and 1980 she was a full-time potter, a very different — but Biblical kind of activity. Since 1980 Mrs. Bankson has been writing and speaking at ecumenical gatherings. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"Esther's Story is My Story Too" 
Do you remember that little childhood rhyme that went something like this:

                  This is the church.
                  This is the steeple.
                  Open the doors
                  And see all the people.

Well, unfortunately that was the image I had of the church too. This was the church and in order to get in, you had to be very quiet, and very still, and sit very solemnly while somebody told you what you ought to do.

It wasn’t until I began to hear Bible stories in the home of my grandmother that that box that was the church began to open up, and I began to see some of the people of the Bible as being real people.

One of the favorite stories that I learned as a child was the story of Queen Esther. Unfortunately, I didn’t think that it was a very good model for women because it was the story of a beautiful woman who traded her favor with the king in favor of her people. And since I wasn’t a queen, or representing people that were in a life-threatening situation, I never thought that story had very much to say to me.

Five years ago I was asked to do a women’s event around the story of Esther. And after saying, “Oh well, that doesn’t have anything to say to women today,” I began to look carefully at that story. And it began to speak to me, and I began to realize that it was not just a women’s story. It was a story of an inward crisis, that is a crisis of faith for you and for me. Everyone of us can find a place in Esther’s story.

So tonight I’d like to tell you a Bible story and share with you some of my own journey as it has come through that story.

The story of Esther begins in the time of King Ahasuerus about 600 or 700 B.C. Ahasuerus was a great king, and his kingdom stretched from Egypt to India. He had been out doing battle for many months, and it was a time of celebration. The warlords were gathered, the banquet halls were hung, the goblets were flowing with wine. And Ahasuerus and his men were having a grand time.

The problem was that Vashti who was the queen (Esther is not yet in the story) was entertaining the wives who also were visiting, and she had been working for a long time. The king, it says, was having a great banquet for the last seven days. They were merry with wine. He called for the queen and he asked her to come with only her crown on. Now you know what that means.

Vashti said to the king’s courtiers, “I will not go.” The courtiers would not believe it. They went back to the king and asked what to do. And the king sent them back to Vashti, and she said, “No, I’m not going to go.”

What we know about Vashti is that she was erased from the kingdom. Her name was erased from the history books, and there is no record of her except in God’s story. In God’s story, Vashti is preserved as a woman who began our story of a spiritual journey by saying “no” to the cultural values of her time.

In some ways this television program is like Vashti’s “no” to the cultural values of her time. If you look at the television programming, there is a vast wasteland of violence and separation. This television program in a sense is a way of saying “no” by saying “yes”. Saying “yes” to the love of God. Now that begins the first portion of the story of Esther. Esther isn’t even on the scene yet.

In fact, we pick up the story of Esther when we look at the second chapter and we see Mordecai, the cousin of Esther, who has taken her in. She is an orphan. She has no one to care for her. Mordecai taught Esther her spiritual values.

We all know those stories that Esther grew up with. Esther grew up with the stories of the Exodus, of deliverance, of provision by God for her people when they wandered in the desert. Esther grew up with the story of God’s protection, and that’s where my life began to connect with Esther’s story.

As a child, like many people in my generation, my father was drafted and went overseas when I was three. My mother had a TB breakdown and went into a hospital. At the age of three I went to live with my grandmother, age 55, who thought she was long-finished with her child rearing.

In the evenings, my grandmother, who had only a fifth-grade education, used to get out Hurlbut’s stories from the Bible, and she propped them up like this, and she tucked my sister under one arm and me under the other, and she would read us those stories from the Bible.

And I can remember asking her one time, “Grandma, will the people of God ever be so bad that he’d leave them alone in the desert?”

And she would give me a squeeze and she’d say, “No, God never left them alone.”

That was my Exodus story, because I was wondering as a small child — would God ever leave you alone? My grandmother, as she put her arms around us, became the sense of God as protector, as deliverer.

That was the story that Esther grew up with. Esther was also a very beautiful woman so when Mordecai understood that Vashti was gone from the queen’s throne, he brought Esther to compete in a great beauty contest that the king held; and Esther was chosen to become part of the court. And when she entered the court, Mordecai said, “Don’t tell anybody that you are a Jew. It may cost you your life.”

So Esther took her faith and her stories inside, and she didn’t talk about them. And my guess is that many of us have heard stories of God’s love and deliverance, but we walk in a place where no one cares to hear. In fact, people are against hearing those stories, and so we take them inside and we don’t talk about them.

Esther entered the court, and in one way that was a little bit cynical on Mordecai’s part because once Esther entered the court, she would never again be available to be a good Jewish wife. She would be unclean. Mordecai, in a sense, sent her off into the world to be alone with her God.

Esther learned to say “yes” to herself in a different way when she entered the court, and it is a part of our spiritual journey that we often don’t pay much attention to.

The second man who really touched Esther’s life was Hegai, the eunuch, who ran the harem and who was to teach Esther how to please the king.

It says that Esther spent a year in the ultimate beauty spa being soaked with oils and perfumes, learning to be in touch with her body. My guess is that that year spent with Hegai was a year of coming home to her body for Esther. It was a way for her to remember that God’s love was a very physical, real presence — not just a story out there, not an abstraction, but something that she carried in her body.

I, too, learned that in the simplicity of a clay studio. After I married and began moving around with my husband, who was in the Army, he got orders for Vietnam and it was a time when I too was afraid and alone, without him, without my family. I was teaching school in those days, and in the evenings I began to make pottery in a pottery studio. And there was something about the clay, something that began to draw me in in a way that felt like the real presence of Jesus.

You may think that’s very odd, but what began to happen was that as I worked with the clay, I realized that there were no mistakes and that nothing was wasted. And every time a pot collapsed, I had a chance to rework the clay. And as that began to happen, I began to realize that God too could rework the clay of my life, and it was a very real, ordinary, tangible experience. Out of the loneliness of Vietnam, I began to feel like Jesus was walking with me.

Esther, as she spent her time in the harem and then spent time with the king, was so pleasing to the king that she was invited to become the queen.

Those of you who remember the story, know that Haman, the third man who touched Esther’s life, was hatching a plot against the Jews. Haman got the king to agree that the Jews would be wiped out because they didn’t bow down to him. Mordecai, who used to walk up and down in front of the castle, put on sackcloth and ashes, and Esther who could see from up on high, knew that that meant something terrible was happening to Mordecai. And do you know what she did? She did what a lot of us do. She basically said, “I don’t want to see it. Send him some new clothes to put on.”

And Mordecai sent a message back and said, “Esther, you’ve got to go into the king. Plead for our people.”

And she still didn’t want to hear it. So she sent a message back, and said, “I can’t do it. He hasn’t asked for me in thirty days. It will cost me my life.”

And then Mordecai sent a message back and said, “Esther, who knows but that you were born for just such a time as this.”

That’s the part of Esther that we usually hear preached about — that moment of call that only comes once in a lifetime. But, in fact, I think the deeper meaning of that moment was that the pieces of Esther’s life came together. Her awareness of the cultural heritage and what happened to Vashti was there. Her awareness of the Exodus story that she learned from Mordecai, and God’s protection, was there. And the physical presence that Hegai awakened was also there.

You know the story. Esther in a sense went into mourning. She went into the tomb. For three days she fasted and prayed. And there is a wonderful prayer in the Jerusalem Bible where Esther cried out to God, and she said, “God, I have no one but you. Free me from my fear for I am about to take my life in my hands.”

And I think in many ways that is the cry of each one of us — that there comes a time in a crisis when we cry out to God and ask that God free us from our fear for we are about to take our lives in our hands.

Esther then went into the king. And the king said, “Oh, what is it that you want?”

And almost in an anti-climatical moment, she says, “I’d like you to come to dinner. I’ll cook it myself.”

Well, the king loved that so he and Haman went to dinner with Esther. And I think this is the part of the story where Esther is waiting for God’s timing. It is the waiting of the disciples for the Holy Spirit to come — that sense of right timing that we have in our own bodies.

Esther wined them and dined them, and when the king was merry with wine, he said, “Come on, Esther, I know you’ve got something up your sleeve. What is it you want?”

And she said, “Oh, king, I’d like you to come back for dinner a second time.” Esther is waiting for God’s timing.

And I believe that often when we have been touched by God and called for a moment, we get in our minds the plan and we zip right ahead, and in fact, we need to wait, to wait on God.

God was doing his part too. God kept the king awake at night, and the king who didn’t have television to watch, asked for his Chronicles. And when the Chronicles came and were read to him, he said, “Oh, what is this story about — a man named Mordecai? Was anything done for Mordecai?”

“Oh, no. We’ll have to ask Haman.”

And so when Haman came in the next day, he said, “Say, Haman, if a man had done a great favor for the king and you wanted to honor him, what would you do?”

And Haman who was so inflated with his own ego, assuming that it was he himself, said, “Oh, king, I’d parade him around on a horse, put the king’s cloak on his shoulders, his rings on his fingers, and I’d have someone walk in front and say, ‘Proclaim! Proclaim! Worship this man.’”

And the king said, “Well, Haman, go do that for Mordecai. He saved my life.”

Well you can imagine what Haman was feeling. Haman went out and did that, and that very night Haman and the king went for a second time to Esther’s court. And Esther once again served dinner. And Haman had a wonderful time, and the king had a wonderful time, and the king said once again, “Come on, Esther, I know you've got something up your sleeve. What is it you want?”

And Esther, I imagine, was still for a moment, listening for God’s word. And then she said, “Oh, king, I ask for my life and that of my people.” “My life” because she knew that the king was only connected to her people through her.

I think often when we feel that call from God, we focus on what other people need and we forget that God loves each one of us and is asking for us to cry out for our lives as well as the lives of our people.

When I began in the quietness of my pottery studio to ask for my life, the answer I got back was a dream. And the dream was very curious. The dream was of me sitting on a corner with my potter’s wheel handing out pots — green, unfired — not a professional potter at all. And I wrote it in my journal, and I thought, “What could that mean?”

Within a month I got a telephone call saying, “Would you come and lead a retreat for us with your potter’s wheel?”

And I began to get a picture of the meaning of that dream. When I did go to lead that retreat, I began to realize that that is my call — that I could use clay in a different way as a story, that I could begin to tell Bible stories and help people connect with those Bible stories. I began to discover my life. And then I had to ask, “What is the other part of that? Who are my people?”

I believe that so often the closed church stops only with conversion, with our personal story, and forgets that we are called to open the doors and reach out to other people. My people are the people who don’t find a comfortable place in that closed church. My people are the ones who walk at the edge, not only of the institutional church, but sometimes of their own institutions — marginal people, people who have a sense of vision but no structure to put it in yet. My people are the people that I have begun to touch and have begun to write for in “Faith at Work”.

When Esther asked for “my life and that of my people”, she was speaking a word for all of us. We must first ask God for my life and then say, “Who are my people, and what is my call?”

There’s a final image that you find only in the Jerusalem Bible and that is a postscript by Mordecai in which he said, “Haman and I were like two dragons, and Esther like the river between.”

I think that image of Esther like the river of God, like the spirit of God in that time and place, is a call to women to be a part of the growth and life of the church of Jesus Christ, so that we can enter into full partnership with the men and women, the people of God — like Esther, a stream of life in our culture, in our day. Amen.