Faith in Action: Vashti

Between my sophomore and junior years in college, I worked for a summer in St. Louis, as a summer missionary connected to the midtown Third Baptist Church. One of our tasks that summer was to conduct Vacation Bible School. One night a little girl came up to me and proudly told me her name was Vashti. She asked me if I knew where that name came from, and I had to tell her I didn’t. “How do you not know about Vashti? She is from the Bible, and a Queen, and I am named after her!”

I tucked my tail between my legs and later went to look up the story of Queen Vashti. Some of you might have been in the same boat as me. My guess is that most of us have not read a lot of about Queen Vashti, or heard a ton of sermons about her. We know the book that her story comes from—Esther. And we might even know that Esther became queen because the queen before her no longer had the title. Furthermore, we might even know that Esther was able to save her people only because that job had become available.

But what we might not know, or at least remember, is that the story of Vashti is a powerful one in its own right. Even if the rest of the book NEVER took place, I want to invite us to explore together what the story of Vashti alone might mean for us.

The king was a buffoon. He is written in the book as a buffoon. From beginning to end, every time he shows up in the story, he is a buffoon. In fact, his name was Ahasuerus (uh-HAZ-er-us), or sometimes pronounced a-huh-SER-US, or even uh-HAZ-yoo-ih-ruhs. So, to simplify that mess, I am just going to call him King Buffoon.

What made him a buffoon was his ego. At the beginning of the book, it says that he threw a party for himself, so that everyone would know how awesome he was. And that the party lasted six months! This was not the first time or the last time that a wanna-be needed to throw a party for himself to tell everyone how awesome he was. And everyone came to the party, and ate his food and drank his booze, and told him how awesome he was, at least to his face. But then, because King Buffoon still wondered deep down if he really was awesome, he decided to throw another party. At this point, his wife, Queen Vashti, perhaps a bit worn out by six months of hosting party-goers, and hangers-on, and kiss-ups, that she could see right through and apparently her buffoon husband could not, suggested that maybe they throw two parties. The women can have their own party where they can talk about stuff that the men wouldn’t be interested in anyway. And the men can have their own party without them! So that is what they did. And the text goes out of the way to say that this dude party had tons of alcohol, and ego, and buffoons. But what they didn’t have was women, so the king sent seven of his dudes to go get his beautiful wife Vashti, so that she could dance for them, and they could all tell him how beautiful she is, and how awesome he is.

Now, to state the obvious, when you have to throw parties for yourself. Or build monuments to yourself. Or show off your trophy wife. Or tell everyone how awesome you are…everyone on the planet knows that you are NOT awesome. You are a buffoon. It is the most transparent thing in the world! Now, that doesn’t mean that buffoons don’t have followers:

• If they are bully buffoons, fear will cause some people to think that they need to get in the good graces of the bully and do what he says, even though the buffoon has no real respect for them. Think Crabbe and Goyle to Draco in Harry Potter…or the goofballs who follow Biff around in Back to the Future. Bully buffoons attract more buffoons.

• Or if they are confident or brash buffoons, some people will find themselves kind-of empowered when they stand next to that confidence, even though they are really yes-men or yes-women who are too weak to stand up to King Buffoon.

• Or, if they are rich buffoons, some people will think that their money or power must be there because they deserve it, and a lot of people assume that some of those riches or power can come their way, so they spend their time sucking up to King Buffoon.

Sociologists use the word privilege to talk about an unearned reward, reminding us that just because someone possesses riches or power doesn’t mean that they actually earned it, or deserve it. Now, privilege by itself isn’t a bad thing. Depending on where we are born, or what family we are born into, or our gender or race or intelligence or cultural beauty, we don’t earn everything that we possess…that is a fact of life. People who are right-handed have a measure of privilege over left-handed folks, just because the world is easier for them. It’s just how it is.

But where it becomes problematic is when privilege becomes entitlement. We think that we deserve the things that we possess. That we earned everything that we possess. Sociologists talk about privilege out there, but psychologists will talk about entitlement in here. That’s where King Buffoon crossed the line. He had a beautiful wife, but it was a political marriage of two powerful families, that was likely arranged for him. It was his privilege to be married to her. But somewhere along the way, he thought he was entitled to her. Her body. Her time. Her dance moves. Again, not the first time that a person in a position of power felt entitled to tell a person with less power what to do. Not the first time that a male thought that he was entitled to a woman’s body or her actions. Not the first time that a buffoon thought that he was entitled to whatever he imagined. In fact, if we are being honest, there are probably times in our lives where we have acted in entitled and arrogant ways. In fact, if we are being really honest, we can probably name some ways that we still feel and act out of our entitlement, even now.

So, the bully, brash, rich, entitled King Buffoon demanded that his beautiful wife show up to dance at his beck and call…

And she said “no.”  There have been endless arguments since that “no” and whether or not it was a good thing. Generations of scholars have pointed out that things did not end well for Vashti, and that she was deposed the removed from the throne. They suggest that all she needed to do was to submit to her man and that things would have gone better for her. That she should have acted more like Esther and dressed up for the king and worked within the system and she would have enjoyed the fruits of her submission. But scholar Marcia Riggs suggests that there is more than one way to resist patriarchy. Esther’s model worked for her, in her context, but we know the name Vashti today because she chose a different model of resistance. Because she stood up to the buffoon. Because she said no.

What lessons might Vashti have for girls and women today, to remember that Faith in Action sometimes looks like a less-submissive resistance? The Two-Way [Sermon Discussion Group] last week acknowledged that this is a gendered story that has lessons for a gendered world. As one person suggested, “it is still a man’s world.” Sometimes looks like saying “no.” Riggs suggests that the church has an opportunity to tell those whose voices have been silenced, including and especially women, that there is power in standing up to authority, up to patriarchy, up to buffoonery. There can be a cost, but sometimes what is gained is worth the cost. To be able to hold one’s head high, and be on the side of the right. She points to the power of the #MeToo movement, and its parallels in the church, #ChurchToo or #SilenceIsNotSpiritual. Too many women have been told that their voices and their experiences don’t matter. Vashti demonstrates otherwise. Sometimes there is power in the Vashti-inspired movement that recognizes that men still feel entitled and have the power to act on that entitlement. Riggs writes of the power of disruption to imbalance the system of entitlement. Disrupt shallow patriarchal readings of Scripture. Disrupt male dominance. Disrupt skewed history. Disrupt pornography. Disrupt ignorance.

Disrupt buffoonery. The text doesn’t elaborate on how Vashti said no. What she said. What her facial expressions were. Any expletives that accompanied the rejection. It does, however, elaborate on the fact that when she did, the king and his buffoon party lost their ever-loving mind. Remember this is a man-child who does not know what to do when someone says no. And he has surrounded himself with yes-men who have never even heard someone tell him no. So, when Vashti stood up for herself, they had no idea what to do next. They panicked that women might notice what Vashti did and start to think for themselves! So they immediately drafted legislation that made it illegal for women to do anything except what their men tell them to do. Again, let me state the obvious. When you have to create a law that says that women need to obey their men, everyone on the planet understands that it is not going to work. If that is your game plan, you have already lost the game. And of course it didn’t work. Because of Vashti, the king was exposed. Esther knew that the king was manipulatable and so she did just that. Once a buffoon, always a buffoon. By the end of the book, he was eating out of the palm of her hand.

Author Brene Brown has a clear and concise quotation that speaks to these dynamics: “What separates privilege from entitlement is gratitude.” See what she did there? Privilege is simply a thing that happens, often outside of our control. But entitlement is up to us. We can choose if we will respond like King Buffoon, or choose a different tack. And what is the route to this different way of being? Gratitude. Gratitude takes the air out of the tires of entitlement. Because it reveals to us that everything that we have is a gift. A gift from those who came before us. A gift from our families. A gift from our culture. And most fundamentally, a gift from God. When we choose gratitude, it shifts the way that we see the gifts that surround us. King Buffoon forgot that basic fact, and it sent him down the road to entitled and arrogant abuse. But it didn’t work. He lost his queen, and he lost the respect of a nation. Esther, and Haman, and Mordecai, all saw him as the clown that he was.

 This week, with Thanksgiving on the horizon, we have the opportunity to choose a different way of being. To choose gratitude. And that choice will make all the difference. When we see the people in our lives as gifts and not as possessions. When we see the blessings in our lives as things that need to be shared. When we see our Faith as an opportunity to Act and not a thing to hoard. That’s when we hold our head up high, like Vashti, and see God working through us.

 At the end of the week of Vacation Bible School, I saw that little girl named Vashti in a new light. Some might call her precocious. Some might say that she should have respected her elders. Some might suggest that her life, in the middle of racial and gendered oppression, didn’t leave her much in the way of hope. But what I saw was a queen. A girl who knew that she mattered. Who knew that she was a gift to the world, and that the world was a gift to her.  I will likely never see her again, but I will never forget Vashti, the young and beautiful queen, who walked through the world with her head held high.