How long since you gave thought to the most godless book of the Bible? Godless I say! It’s godless because there’s absolutely no mention of God whatsoever. Nothing, nada – no pious tip of the hat, not even a silent prayer offered in the face of the immense silence of God. The Old Testament book of Esther contains no mention of God leaving us to wonder about faith anytime we look for God and God is not to be found.

What does it mean that we have a biblical morality tale with heroic characters but without God as one on whose behalf the heroism is offered?

A while back, I watched a preschool boy who was obviously bored at his grandmother’s funeral, so he walked over to the table where a row of desserts were lined up along the table’s edge. The little boy walked over and passed slowly down the row of desserts deliberately sticking his index finger into each piece of cake with great care, leaving an indelible sign of his presence even after he returned to his seat. Absence can be a powerful reminder of how presence can continue to be experienced.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Bruce Springsteen wrote a collection of songs that explored the despair of the families left behind when their loved ones didn’t come home that day. His lyrics echoed the deep personal loss and the multi-layered feelings of absence felt by the survivors. In the song “Missing You,” he soulfully explored how powerful one’s absence can be experienced in grief:

Shirts in the closet, shoes in the hall
Mama’s in the kitchen, baby and all
Everything is everything but you’re missing
Coffee cups on the counter, jackets on the chair
Papers on the doorstep but you’re not there
Everything is everything but you’re missing
Pictures on the nightstand, TV’s on in the den
Your house is waiting for you to walk in
But you’re missing
You’re missing when I shut out the lights
You’re missing when I close my eyes
You’re missing when I see the sun rise

Arguably one’s absence speaks as loudly as one’s presence. Is there anything more empty than the emptiness of the bed? Is there anything more empty than clothes hanging lifelessly in the closet? All are reminders of how loudly absence can be felt.

God may not be identified in this little book, but God is anything but absent. Even though the writer of Esther goes out of the way in not mentioning God, there’s the strong promise of God’s presence even when absent. We live life connected mysterious to the silence of God more often than we would ever care to admit – an inexplicable fact of the mystery of faith itself.

It’s not human nature for us to look outside the fence of our own lives and to see clearly “the other.” This year I’ve learned the term “the other” is recognized as anyone outside our own culture or our own world of experience. It is, in short, those who are different from us. Not better, mind you, just different. Conversely, I should suppose someone I might label “the other” looks at me the same way.

But there’s another added value to the concept of “the other” that indicates those we call “the other” are also those we don’t let into our circle. We control who gets in and who stays out. We have the power to ignore them so no matter what they do we’re still the gatekeepers. It’s true when we’re kids there are “innies” and there are “outies” and so “the other” is a grown-up phrase suggesting maybe we haven’t grown up all that much as we might think.

We gather at the table of our Lord  and thus we come under the reminder that no one holds the upper hand here. At this table, there are no “innies” any more than there are “outies.” At the table of Christ’s love we’re all “innies.”

Even Jesus had a twinge of Jewish provincialism in him when he told the outsider who wanted full access to the right of healing - whereupon he told her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” The use of children referred to the children of Israel while the reference to a dog was the typical Jewish slur about anyone outside Jewish faith. Undeterred, she begged him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

When Jesus faced the Syro-Phoenician woman who refused to be insulted by Jesus and claimed the crumbs as her own (Cf Mark 7:24-30), it illustrated how intense the struggles were in the early church as it learned to open wide the doors of the church to non-Jews. Jesus and his earliest followers were all Jewish and it’s not hard to read between the lines of the New Testament to see what appeared to be Jewish resistance to becoming an ecumenical church open equally to everyone.

MLK’s honest line about Sunday morning being the most segregated day of the week was inspired by the New Testament’s struggle with this issue. It was true back then and it’s true today. We’ve always struggled about this and today our church must confront its own “isms” that keep us from fully loving everyone who comes through these doors to worship.

Roger Paynter tells the story of a girl he knew who discovered the difficulty of what it means to be a faithful follower of Jesus in regard to “the other.”  Shannon Johnson was a senior at Vanguard High School, a prestigious college prep school in Waco. Shannon was also the daughter of the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Waco. She was the valedictorian and head cheerleader of her school and she was beautiful, exceptionally bright, and a very sensitive, caring eighteen-year old trying her best to live out her faith.

In the spring of her senior year, the Waco Tribune-Herald ran a story about the Cotillion, a dance with a tradition that stretched back to the days of an old slave system where blacks were slaves who worked the cotton fields of the white landowners of Central Texas. The Cotillion was obviously for the children of the white social elites of Central Texas. Remember, this is not an old story from those unchallenged days prior to the Civil Rights Movement. This is a story from recent history, just a decade and a half ago. Quite simply, the Cotillion had survived the social gains of the Civil Rights Movement because it was a private social institution outside the reach of federal laws and no one had challenged its continued existence.

This tradition meant that Michelle Russell, one of Shannon’s best friends at Vanguard would not be invited because Michelle was black. The more Shannon thought about it, the more disturbed and angry she became about this ancient injustice. So she arranged a meeting with the Cotillion Board to ask them to change their long-held policy. What made that so difficult was that four of the twelve members of the board were also prominent members of the First Presbyterian Church, the church her father pastored.

They turned her down, refusing to change a policy that went back to the old confederate days of Waco’s Cotton Pageant, a garish festival celebrating the gathering of the cotton crop harvested by black slaves. But Shannon refused to be placated by their simple refusal and organized a boycott of the Cotillion Dance, the main event of the season.

Almost the entire senior class at Vanguard High School refused to go and their action made the front-page headlines of the Waco paper. Because of the action spurred by this courageous young girl, within a few days, under the public pressure and censure of the community, the Board was forced to alter their historic policy.

Late one night a few days after everything died down, her father went into her room to say goodnight. And while he was there, he told her how proud he was of her standing up for her convictions. And in reply she said, “Daddy, this is so hard. I never knew this would be so hard. If I had known, I’m not sure I would have done it. But I think this is what it means to be baptized.”

Making the connection between our baptism and our lived out commitments may not be your first reaction to Jesus’ welcoming inclusion at the Table of Remembrance, but I believe it’s what we are about as followers of Jesus. In God’s wide world of absolute acceptance, the bread, the wine, even the crumbs under the table are signs of the great generosity of God who welcomes us to this table and to the family of God’s children.

Souls have bodies the Bible tells us … or is it the other way around? The earliest theologians who penned the various books of the Bibles struggled with the dual mystery of merged bodies and souls and so have the rest of us throughout time. Our soul (our self) is housed in a physical, mortal body … how else can we imagine ourselves apart from them? We’re equal parts body and soul and in this merged existence they’re so united as one it’s hard to distinguish them as one separate from the other.

But over time, that merger comes under scrutiny. “Thou art dust and to dust shalt thou return,” the Old Testament reminds us. Poet Theodore Roethke pondered the betrayal of our bodies in his poem Infirmity:  “How body from spirit does slowly unwind until we are pure spirit at the end.”

Thus the Apostle Paul referred to our human bodies metaphorically as clay jars (literally, earthen vessels).  Our bodies are the containers of the self and by faith we believe the soul transcends them when they return to dust. Similarly then, our buildings do not define our church anymore than our bodies define our souls. Perhaps these “bricks and mortar” buildings are the clay jars the church lives within.

Years ago we launched a building program that hasn’t paused for long. Even the briefest reading of our church’s history reveals we had the itch to build from the beginning. The money raised and the money financed for our earliest projects looks small from the vantage point of the present but I know this church like every other young church were pressed hard to pay their operating expenses from week to week much less meet a mortgage payment in those days. “The wolf at the door,” might be said under the pressure of overtaxed pocketbooks. But our church met each and every one of those challenges through one project after another. Constructing new buildings and renovating older ones. We’ve been busy builders!

Meanwhile, this rabbit warren of hallways and the various buildings tied together by one spirit are the clay jars of our church. Over the years, while we’ve attended to the needs of the community through the ministries of our members, we’ve also built buildings and remodeled them. We raised money to do all those things even though we had other needs and we did it because we lived fitfully with the tension of the duality of community ministry and structures of steel and wood in which to welcome the people.

Five years ago, Dr. Jack Wilson, our founding pastor, preached from a sermon from this pulpit from Isaiah 40:28-31 in which the prophet describes a progressive sequence of movement:  Don’t you know anything? Haven’t you been listening? God doesn’t come and go. God lasts! God is the Creator of all you can see or imagine. God doesn’t get tired out, doesn’t pause to catch his breath. And God knows everything, inside and out. God energizes those who get tired, gives fresh strength to dropouts. Even young people tire and drop out, young folk in their prime stumble and fall. But those who wait upon God get fresh strength. They spread their wings and soar like eagles. They run and don’t get tired; they walk and don’t lag behind.

Our clay jars are in need of remodeling again and it’s time to go to work. So while we’ve adopted yet another refurbishing project, we still have work to do in this field where God planted us nearly 55 years ago. In truth, we can do whatever it is God leads us to do as we’ve done over and again in the past. That’s our calling and that’s our belief.

George MacLeod, founder of the Iona Community, wrote a prayer that is said every Thursday at the Iona Abbey:

It is not just the interior of these walls; it is our own inner beings you have renewed. We are your temple not made with hands. We are your body. If every wall should crumble, and every church decay, we are your habitation. Nearer are you than breathing, closer than hands and feet. Ours are the eyes with which you, in the mystery, look out in compassion on the world. So we bless you for this place, for your directing of us, your redeeming of us, and your indwelling. Take us outside the camp, Lord, outside holiness, out to where soldiers gamble, and thieves curse, and nations clash at the crossroads of the world. So shall this building continue to be justified.
Amen.