Vashti’s Gospel

Esther 1:10-12

Robert M Watkins

September 9, 2007

Queen Vashti is one of the most remarkable people in all of scripture. She appears in the only book within the Bible that makes no mention of God, yet she stands as a pinnacle of righteousness for all to see and strive to match.

The emperor of Babylon threw a party worthy of any tabloid figure found in the supermarket check out line. It lasted for a week and devolved into a drunken debacle whose participants hungered for even more debauchery as they sank to new lows with each passing day. Seven days in, the emperor invited the queen to make an appearance, solely so the men present could gaze upon her and wish they could so every day like the emperor himself. Vashti, the empress, ruined the plan, however. She refused the invitation. The problem was that no one refused the emperor, and that meant no one. Refusal was tantamount to questioning the emperor’s authority which was declared absolute and on the level of God’s own power. The emperor was the literal ruler of life and death for the empire. To stand against him was to ask for death. No one questioned absolute power unless they held a death wish. But Vashti stood firm. There were levels to which she would not descend. She uttered a resounding “No” into the sodden face of her husband and ruler.

The question that rises from her tale, the one that makes her someone anyone of faith needs to confront, ponder, and deal with, is--how far will you go to keep your values intact?

In our world, this question gets bandied about to the point of banality. Every candidate for public office on every level will declare that they are a person of values, ideals, and morals. They so loudly protest their purity that it becomes a game for the press to reveal the inevitable fall and report it with gleeful gusto as yet another hypocrite is revealed for all the world to see. It has become such an expected process that no one really even listens anymore when the statements are made, revealed to be balderdash, then reinvoked even more strenuously. It’s just part of the sideshow of public life.

The thing is, though, that the question itself remains firmly in place as a valid question for all of us to ask of ourselves. What we believe matters. How we behave based on what we believe matters. Capitulation of one’s ideals simply because the world declares them hopeless and bound to fail really is not an option. In order to be the people we are to be, there must be limits beyond which we will not step. To cross those limits calls into question the fiber of our existence, relationships, and even our own person.

Immediately, I can hear folks recoiling from such speaking. It sounds just like the empty words bandied about by talking heads everyday. It sounds like so much pietistic claptrap.

But think about it for a moment. Reflect for a moment on the relationships within your life that are the most important to you. If you are married, think about your connection to your spouse. If you are a parent or a child (or both, for that matter), think about the bond you feel toward your child or parent. If you share time and space with someone you openly think of as your best friend, think about what makes that friendship what it is. All of these relationships are built on a shared foundation--trust. We enter a relationship because we trust that as we do so, we will be cared for, respected, nurtured, and so on. Inversely, as we enter these relationships, we take on the commitment to be a caregiver, one who will respect the other, a nurturer, and so on. In the case of a child, this latter commitment is absolutely all powerful--a child has no choice about being born. They are wholly dependent on whoever brings them into being. Immediately, we see the power values have. What we believe will impact how we accomplish the tasks set before us by entering any relationship. In short, we have to be trustworthy. We cannot simply make statements because they sound good or look right or are simply what is expected. At our core, those statements have to be true. Nothing kills love faster than duplicity.

Again, I can hear folks shuffling away from this line of thinking. It’s a burden, it’s unrealistic, it’s pie-in-the-sky morality, yada yada yada.

Vashti didn’t budge.

As wife of the emperor, the world saw her as little more than a human hood ornament. Her job was to be beautiful and to populate the royal nursery with beautiful children and heirs to the throne. She proved to be something more. Vashti never lost sight of her being a woman, a female human being, with worth and value simply because God brought her into being, worth and value that no one, not even her husband, and certainly no emperor, had the right to take away. She was a unique act of the creative will of God. She was not to be taken lightly and she certainly was no royal plaything.

Vashti proves herself to be a child of God in that affirmation.

She recognized that she was a wife, mother, and an empress. As such, she is connected to the people around her in a variety of ways and on a variety of levels, all of which demand that she remain trustworthy in her values in each position. She refuses her husband because he is no longer trustworthy. He is abusing the gift of her love for him. He is abusing the trust she placed in him to be her protector. He has lost his right to power. The world will disagree. The world will clamor for her head as payment for her disobedience. She will not degrade herself for the sake of the world.

Think about this each time someone asks you to do something that you are not quite sure is the right thing to do. It is utterly naïve to think that no one will ever ask you to do something you do not think is right. It happens at all levels of human existence--work, love, play, study--everywhere human beings come into relationship with each other there is the potential that someone will ask too much of someone else. The simplest test of any request is will it further the cause of love as God defines it--and that means both being able to further the love of the other person, but also the love one holds for oneself. Remember, when Christ invoked the command to love one’s neighbor, it was cemented in place with the addendum to love oneself. Only love that accomplishes both is valid, and, yes, sometimes that love involves sacrifice, even the sacrifice of something we hold precious and dear, but it will never ask us to erase or debase the fact that we are all unique acts of the creative will of God.

There are real limits to what we have to agree to in order to preserve a relationship. Some choices are obvious--if your friend says they will not be your friend unless you start taking drugs with them, then the choice is simple; a new friend is needed--but there are other occasions when it will not be so simple. The cost of going along with the request will be high; the cost of NOT going along with the choice will be high; and so on--all such issues throw the whole scenario into question. Remember Vashti in that moment. She recognizes the truth. She may well suffer for standing for truth, but in this case, there is no other stance to take. What is being asked is not love. In fact, it is its opposite. She will not comply.

There are some things that can never be set aside. Being a child of God and asking to be treated as such are among of them.

No one has a right to take that from anyone.

This is the gospel of Vashti. May we have ears to hear it.

Amen.