11/4/56

Scripture: (Read Esther 4: 10 - 5: 3)

On next Tuesday, every American worthy of the name, and able to reach to polls, will cast his ballot in our national election. We may have gotten, by this time, a little heated over exchange of charges, and counter-charges; and we may deplore what bitterness develops in a campaign. We may disagree with some of the methods used by candidates and supporters of either party to influence voters. But it is a heartening spectacle to see a nation choose its leaders by free and secret ballot. It is the more heartening in a world so anxiously concerned with desperately important issues as those faced at this time in 1956.

Criticisms hurled at the USA by Soviet nations and satellites have at least one impressive answer. We expect our people to choose their leaders. Both nations and individual must settle the seat of sovereignty. There must be some voice that has the last word. For increasing numbers of individuals in this land, the last word is the word of God as each of us understand it. What is the final word for the nation? The sovereign authority is not our President; not the Congress; not the Supreme Court. Our President is the commander-in-chief of our armed forces and, in times of emergency, is granted sweeping powers. He salutes no foreign ruler, no superior uniformed officer. But there is one thing he does salute; and that is the flag of the USA. Why? Because the flag of this nation stands as a symbol of the sovereign people.

When the citizens of our nation express their will through a majority vote, such a vote is recognized as the sovereign voice of the people. Every candidate for elective office must submit his candidacy to that voice. And every officer-holder, from President of our nation down to the officials of a township, must, if he is to continue in office, submit his record and his intentions to that voice.

Yet even the President is an individual. When he is inaugurated into office, he is required by the sovereign people of the land to take an oath, or affirmation, with his hand on the Bible, thereby symbolizing that he holds his powers under a divine authority. When our Congress convenes to represent the people in the making of laws, its sessions are opened with prayer invoking the guidance of a Divine Lawmaker. Our constitution, moreover, sets apart certain areas of freedom, such as that of conscience, in which it is recognized that an individual is responsible to God alone.

And so our so-called sovereign people recognize, implicitly and explicitly, the supreme sovereignty of God. We should press home to our minds and hearts the wonder of living in a land where no dictator has the last word, where appeal may be made to the general public conscience, where there is definite looking up to the Divine Source of right and justice. For this is not the experience of those who live in some powerful lands of this time in history. And this difference is an issue that is being so vigorously tested that it is incumbent on every able citizen of our nation to exercise -- eagerly, earnestly, responsibly -- his franchise.

It is a thrilling thing for many millions of us to go to American polling places and cast a free, and secret, ballot. There is something sobering and exalting about standing, for a few power-directing moments, in a polling booth, alone with one’s conscience and one’s God, to choose our leaders. It is a duty to be thoughtfully done; gratefully and responsibly performed. No other land offers a greater, more responsible opportunity to its people than we of this country have in voting for the leaders we have studied, and whom we stand ready to choose and support.

Perhaps it is not amiss to dwell, for a while this morning, on the implications of opportunity. How much wisdom has been written about it through the years! Paul said to the Christians at Ephesus: “Corner your opportunities, for the days are evil.” [Ephesians 5: 15, 16]. Emerson wrote: “No man ever complained of want of opportunity.” One of our common aphorisms is: “Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.” Celebrated men have filled pages with striking things said about opportunity.

But opportunity is like life itself: it is a neutral matter that may become good or bad according to our handling of it. Any opportunity is made great or poor by the quality of character we bring to it. If you bring to it all of your Christian concern that it be used for the good of man and the glory of God, then you are making the most of it. But if you let it pass in carelessness. or jump in where there is only personal benefit to you, then you are a selfish opportunist, an enemy of mankind and a grievous disappointment to God.

There have been voters who have cast their ballot with little thought for aught except their own ambition and special interest. And there have been, noticeably in some other lands, citizens who by their neglect of voting, or by their disillusionment, have thrown away their responsible freedom, in exchange for the irresponsible promises made by dictators and demagogues. What an abhorrent, evil use to make of so high a privilege!

But, so long as there may be a majority of citizens who will seize each election day to go and cast a vote in the interest of the nation’s welfare, and that of all its people, ours will continue to be a great country.

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One of the Old Testament books which some scholars consider of little importance, or at least of lesser value that many others, is the book of Esther. It is an interesting and exciting story. It is strongly tinged with an expression of vengeance and struggle for power. But I commend it to your reading for what queen Esther did with an opportunity. You remember that Esther was a beautiful Jewish girl living with her people in exile in the 4th century before Jesus came. She was forced to marry the coarse and boorish Persian king. She was a little like Moses who, though reared in royal Egyptian home, never forgot the needs of his own people. Esther, living as queen in the limitations and protocol of palace, never forgot her foster uncle and guardian, Mordicai, a pious and devout Jew.

A man named Haman served as king’s secretary. He despised the Jewish minority, and he particularly hated Mordicai for stoutly refusing to bow to him. Finally he declared that he would not stop until he had exterminated every Jew from the face of the earth -- not Mordicai alone, but all the rest! He contrived to get a king’s decree authorizing such extermination. Naturally the Jews of that country were prostrate with grief and fear. There was only one very slim chance that they could see for survival. Mordicai must send to Queen Esther and ask her to intercede with the King on their behalf. She hesitated as she thought it over, reminded Mordicai that no one might enter the presence of the king without being summoned (this was one of the king’s own rules for violation of which the penalty was death unless he himself willed otherwise.) And Esther remarked that she had not been summoned for a month, now.

But there was no time to lose. And Mordecai made clear to her the responsibility of her opportunity: “If you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another quarter --- and who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”

Is not that a clear and deeply challenging description of opportunity? And does it not point obvious lessons to us in our day? Do you realize the responsibility that is yours, not just on election Tuesday, but on every day of life in these anxious and challenging times?

The world’s moral needs have never been deeper. Never have opportunities been more plentiful. And because you and I claim the Christian gospel as our own, we are God’s people, whose assignment is to know it well enough to bring it to bear on the problems and needs of our time; to make it available for the salvation of all mankind. If we keep silence, this needy world is going to look elsewhere for deliverance. And who knows whether or not you and I have come to the Kingdom for such a time as this?

1) A first lesson suggested in the ancient story of Esther is this: a true believer sees the element of duty in every opportunity. It is arresting to notice how Mordecai puts it: “-- For if you keep silence --” Isn’t this the attitude that tempts us in the face of many of our opportunities? --- to keep quiet, to shirk our responsibility, to evade the call of duty? Of course it is true that we frequently blunder by speaking out; and it is ill-advised to sound off just for the sake of making a noise and being heard. People can be wounded, and causes injured, by ill considered and thoughtless utterance. But part of the duty is to become informed, so that we minimize the blunders of mistaken choices and mistaken utterance.

When issues of great moment are faced, or some tremendous cause is at stake, when right and wrong are locked in mortal struggle, you and I have a duty to take the side of right. It is spiritual poverty in our lives to fail to see our duty in time of opportunity. Perhaps, in the field of politics, this is seen in the difference between some ordinary run-of-the-mill politician and an outstanding statesman. If a politician lives in narrowness of vision, and actual terror of what the ballot box may do to him, he is made an opportunist without character. No great call of duty summons him to the opportunity that is far more than temporary expediency.

But a great statesman is different. He brings to each opportunity qualities of character that speak in the name of duty. He may have to risk some of his support; he may at times be convinced that he must deviate from party line in order to declare: “Here I take my stand. This is right.” Was it not Gladstone who spoke this way at the height of his political career: “I know people will hate me bitterly today, but tomorrow is coming and I must follow the clear call of right.” The same is true in matters of religion. Open doors have spelled out duty to some, while others have kept silence through caution, indifference, neglect, or downright fear.

More than a hundred years ago a young Scotsman sailed from a Canadian harbor for the South Pacific Hebridean Islands. He was following a call of duty. It was known that opportunities were tremendous. But his Presbyterian Synod of Nova Scotia had never sent out a foreign missionary; there were no funds, no extra minister; and other plausible excuses were advanced. But young John Geddie stood up baldly to state the challenge, to picture the opportunity, and to point out the duty. He said: “The glory of God calls us to it. The commandments of God call us to it. The sorry lot of the heathen calls us to it. And, last but not least, the spiritual deadness of our churches calls us to it!” During the next 24 years a blazing chapter in Christian missions was written by the young man and the churches that elected to support him, until finally the natives on the island of Aneiteum set up a tablet in their little white church inscribed: “To the Glory of God and in Memory of John Geddie. When he landed in 1848, there were no Christians here. When he died in 1872, there were no heathen.”

2) A second lesson to be received from the Esther story of opportunity is that a true believer sees in his opportunities the element of his privilege. Esther was reminded that she was a privileged person. As such she had an obligation to her people.

It may easily be seen that the greater the privilege the greater the responsibility. The men and women who grow in any kind of greatness are those who recognize these elements in their opportunity. As Christians, you and I are people of privilege. The world needs us. It needs deliverance from the evils that applied Christianity can assuage and cure. If it doesn’t get that deliverance from our faith and effort and concern, it will turn to something else that will probably be much worse.

We are people of privilege, not for our own sakes, but for the sake of others. If God has saved us in any measure, it is to save others; if He has taught us, it is to teach others. The stewardship of our privilege and opportunity is to use it for others. And if we do, the world will find in our faith the way to light and hope.

3) The ancient story teaches yet a third lesson: that a true believer sees the element of destiny in each opportunity. “Who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” Is not every soul in this room a creature of destiny? There is a sense in which each generation, and every individual in it, is destined to bring in the Kingdom of God by his service in it.

Soon after Europe was engulfed in the flood tide of the first war, Lord Kitchener arose in Guildhall in London in July of 1915 to say: “In every man’s life there is one supreme hour toward which all earlier experience moves, and from which all later results will be reckoned. Let us take heed to the great opportunity and grasp it now, and at once -- or never.”

We have our responsible opportunities, including of course the one on next Tuesday, but including those of every other day. Let us take heed, then, remembering our duty, our privilege, our destiny. And let us each day, without fail, seize upon the opportunity within our grasp.

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, November 4, 1956.