August 2, 2026 Esther 4:1-17 A Hidden God

The book of Esther begins with an absence.

We have finished reading Ruth, and we might expect another story overflowing with God's covenant love. Ruth sings with ḥesed (חֶסֶד), that steadfast, life-giving love that binds Ruth to Naomi, Boaz to Ruth, and ultimately reveals God's own heart. Every act of kindness builds up God's, and the community's, language of love.

Instead, we turn to Esther, a book of the Bible that never mentions God. Like Ruth, there are no prophets. No divine speech. No miracles. No covenant repeated. If someone removed God's name from every other book of the Bible, we would notice. In Esther, God's presence is unacknowledged.

It becomes a great Biblical invitation. Can God be recognized when God is hidden? Chapter 1 hardly seems like a promising place to begin. The Persian emperor Ahasuerus throws a lavish banquet that lasts for months. Wealth is displayed. Power is flaunted. Women become ornaments for men's prestige. Queen Vashti is summoned not as a partner but as another possession to exhibit before drunken guests.

When she says no the empire trembles, not because of an invading army, but because one woman refuses to surrender her dignity. The king's advisors panic. If word spreads that women can say no, they fear, the entire social order might begin to crack. It sounds strangely familiar. Power often fears dignity more than rebellion. God is never mentioned in this scene, yet God's values quietly emerge through the courage of someone who refuses to be humiliated.

Perhaps this is how the hidden God works. Not always by speaking from heaven. Rather, sometimes by strengthening someone to simply speak from earth. The absence of God's name does not mean the absence of God's character.

After spending weeks with Ruth, we recognize the pattern. Ḥesed is still present, though disguised. In Ruth, God's steadfast love appears through gleaning fields, shared meals, and risky acts of generosity. In Esther, God's steadfast love begins by honoring the God-given worth of a woman who refuses to be treated as an object.

Before anyone rescues Israel, someone first protects human dignity. That is where ḥesed always begins. God speaking through ḥesed implies a belief that God is present, 

Here, Esther does not even express that faith. Rather than saying, "God will protect me," she says in Chapter 4, "If I perish, I perish." This is an important biblical distinction. Faith is not confidence that everything will turn out well. Biblical faith may sometimes be expressed as obedience and faithful action amid uncertainty.

Like many who watched or plan to watch the new Christopher Nolan film The Odyssey.  I wonder about our cultural assumptions about God's presence. The Greeks believed their gods might disguise themselves and act in the world 

In The Odyssey, Odysseus survives storms, monsters, temptations, and shipwrecks. The film, like the poem, suggests that gods frequently intervene, redirecting Odysseus' path with visible power. Athena appears, and it is suggested that Divine hands are everywhere and can assume any form. However, unlike today, Homer's Greeks would ask what Joan Osborne questions in her cover of the song, "What if God was one of us?' The Nolan film shies away from the ancients' true beliefs.

Unlike now, most people then commonly thought that their gods might disguise themselves as "one of us" and act in the world. In Esther, no deities ever appear. Instead, ordinary people must navigate political danger without certainty, without visions, and without miraculous rescue. God's guidance is hidden within ordinary choices, quiet courage, and unlikely coincidences.

Our present lives and beliefs probably resemble Esther more than Homer. Most of us do not receive unmistakable signs from gods or heaven. We simply awaken each day wondering how to live faithfully amid complicated circumstances. And perhaps that is enough.

Another journey that I am examining through Greek myth is the Broadway musical Hadestown. In this Orpheus descends into the underworld believing that love is stronger than despair. Around him, workers endlessly build walls for a king who promises security while exploiting their labor. Fear becomes the currency of empire. Hope becomes an act of resistance.

King Hades and King Ahasuerus are not so different. Both build worlds where power demands obedience. Both surround themselves with displays of wealth. Both confuse domination with greatness. Yet Hadestown insists that its story "is a sad song, but we sing it anyway." 

Why? Because telling stories of hope keeps hope alive. 

Esther begins the same way. The first chapter appears to belong entirely to its empire. God is silent. Justice seems absent. Power dominates the stage, but readers already know something the emperor does not. Empires never have the final word.

The hidden God is already writing another story beneath the story. This may be the deepest gift that Esther offers for our own time. We also live in an age of dazzling displays of power. Wealth is celebrated. Fear is marketed. Some voices are amplified while others are silenced. It can feel as though God has withdrawn from the public square.  Yet Esther invites us to read history with different eyes.

We seek the people who quietly refuse to cooperate with injustice, for the community that protects the vulnerable. We seek the strangers who choose compassion over comfort and for those speaking a courageous "no" that makes a thousand faithful "yeses" possible.

That is where the hidden God can often be found. Like Ruth, God still speaks the language of ḥesed. Like Odysseus, we continue our uncertain journey toward home. Like Orpheus, we keep singing against despair because hope itself becomes an act of resistance.

And like Esther, we discover that God's greatest work often begins long before anyone notices. The first chapter ends without mentioning God. Perhaps that is precisely the point. Faith is learning to recognize God's fingerprints even when God's name is missing.

Esther 4:1–17 and today's Gospel Lesson, Luke 9:23–24, speak to one another across centuries. Although Esther never mentions "taking up a cross," her response to Mordecai's challenge embodies the same pattern of discipleship that Jesus later describes. Both passages ask the same fundamental question: What is demanded when faithfulness requires risking our own security? 

For the hidden God is never absent. The hidden God is already preparing courage. Already awakening dignity. Already weaving ḥesed through ordinary lives. Already composing a song that no empire can silence. And if we listen carefully, even in the silence, we can discover that God's quiet melody has been accompanying us all along.

Ruth, Esther, The Odyssey, and the Hadestown musical are all part of a deep contemplation regarding essence, human dignity, empire, and hope. Many either provide metaphors or examples of ḥesed as God's language, or ask us for consideration of a hidden God who writes another story beneath what may be seen as an everyday story or coincidence. 

Esther and Ruth function as companion books. Ruth teaches us how God speaks, through ḥesed, steadfast love. Esther teaches us how God remains present, even when silent. Together they offer a profound theology for our own age: God is revealed not only in miracles, but in ordinary people who practice courageous love in the face of systems that deny human dignity.

 Sermon 

July 24, 2026 Hadestown Film Review

HHadestown has been influential in my thoughts and in the Wednesday Bible discussion recently, so I will include a review of the film here. 

Watching the Hadestown pro-shot was a fascinating reminder that filmed theater is not simply a recording of a stage performance. It becomes its own artistic experience, inviting the audience to see familiar moments from new perspectives while revealing details that even devoted fans may have missed in the theater.

This production was filmed during the Friday, February 28, 2025 performance and both the matinee and evening performances on Saturday at London's Lyric Theatre. Although it reunited much of the original Broadway cast, whose Broadway run together ended in 2023, the actors were given an important instruction by the directors: they were not to recreate the performances they had given years before, but to play the roles as they would inhabit them now. That decision proved crucial. Rather than a nostalgic recreation, the pro-shot feels like a mature return to characters the performers know intimately but continue to discover.

One of the first surprises was how much more visible the choreography became. In prior videos I had seen, my attention often gravitated toward the principal characters or the emotional center of a song. The camera, however, continually revealed movement happening across the entire stage. Ensemble interactions, patterns, and transitions took on a richness I had not fully appreciated before. The choreography became another storyteller.

The camera also made it possible to follow the show's remarkable visual language. Small stage props that can easily disappear in a live performance became meaningful narrative threads. A single flower passing quietly from one character to another carried emotional weight because the camera chose to linger on it. These visual connections reinforced the musical's themes of memory, hope, and the way stories are handed from one person to the next.

Patrick Page's Hades offered another reminder that live theater is always an act of adaptation. Performing with his heel in a cast, he adjusted several stage movements, yet the production integrated those changes so naturally that they rarely distracted from the performance. Instead, they became another example of seasoned professionals shaping the show around present realities without sacrificing its dramatic power.

Amber Gray's Persephone felt especially moving. Knowing this reunion was a one-time gathering of the original company added an unmistakable emotional layer to her performance. There were moments when she seemed visibly affected, not in a way that broke character, but in a way that enriched it. Persephone's longing, weariness, and love all seemed informed by Gray's own awareness that this was likely a final opportunity to tell this story alongside this cast.

Her characterization also evolved in intriguing ways. "Our Lady of the Underground" leaned much more heavily into Persephone's sensuality, while also emphasizing her intoxication. The performance became simultaneously more playful and more tragic. The camera heightened this interpretation by following her into the stage pit during the number, placing viewers inside spaces that a theater audience can never fully enter.

One unexpected consequence of watching the pro-shot was that I could not do what I often do with recordings: skip ahead to favorite songs or scenes. Instead, I experienced Hadestown as a complete dramatic arc. That turned out to be a gift. Transitional scenes, quieter conversations, and songs I had previously regarded as bridges between highlights demanding my attention. The musical's architecture became clearer, and I gained a deeper appreciation for how carefully Anaïs Mitchell constructed the entire journey rather than merely a collection of standout number.

I remember a moment in  Flowers: 

"I remember someone / someone by my side, turned his face to mine / And I turned away into the shade. 

You the one I left behind / If you ever walk this way / Come and find me lying in the bed I made"

I hadn't made the emotional connection that lyric in Hadestown, her moment of remembering Orpheus, is of his first turning his face to her.. A lovely, haunting moment 

Perhaps the greatest revelation came in the ending. Every performance of Hadestown reminds us that tragedy repeats itself, that Orpheus will always turn, and that the story must be told again anyway. Yet this production struck me as noticeably more hopeful than the live performances I had previously seen.

After Eurydice quietly asks, "Anyone got a match?", the camera eventually cuts to a close-up of the candle. That cinematic choice transforms the moment. Rather than ending with loss alone, the image becomes an invitation. The story will begin again because someone is willing to carry the flame forward.

That visual emphasis also deepened the emotional impact of the closing encore reprise of "We Raise Our Cups." The song no longer felt simply like a farewell to the audience. Instead, it became a celebration of memory, community, and the fragile persistence of hope. Even after heartbreak, the light remains. Even after the ending, someone lights the next candle.

In the end, the Hadestown pro-shot succeeds because it does not attempt to replace the experience of live theater. Instead, it reveals another dimension of it. The cameras become storytellers themselves, uncovering choreography, symbolism, facial expressions, and visual motifs that can easily be missed from a theater seat. Combined with performances that have matured rather than merely been preserved, the result is not a museum piece but a living work of art. It was weird being in the film audience, watching the Lyric Theatre audience participate while internally clapping and singing while maintaining silence.

Anyway, as Hermes reminds us, it's an old song. But every time it's sung well, we hear something we hadn't heard before.

With tears in my eyes,

Gary

May 10, 2026 Acts 17: 22-31 Babble or Inspiration?

In this week's scripture, Paul walks through Athens, listening to Epicurean and Stoic philosophers as they proclaim divinities. As I said last week, I have recently been immersed in Greek mythology, exploring a musical called Hadestown, based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. It informs my reading this week, as well.

Oddly, each story meditates on a question that is top of my mind lately: What should we do when we inherit a world already formed by forces beyond us? We are dealing right now with extraordinary disagreements on politics, culture, the economy, and even religious assumptions.

Paul’s response offers a path in Athens that is neither withdrawal nor domination.

First, he pays attention. He walks the city. He observes. He listens in the marketplace and the synagogue. Before he speaks, he understands. This matters. It’s tempting to either reject the world outright or accept it uncritically, but Paul does neither. He refuses to be blind to either the beauty or the brokenness.

Next, he finds points of connection. Standing at the Areopagus, he doesn’t begin by condemning the Athenians’ beliefs. Instead, he names their longing: “I see how religious you are.” He even quotes their own poets. Most strikingly, he points to an altar “to an unknown god” and says: What you are already reaching for, I will name.

This is crucial. When living in a world shaped by powers we didn’t choose, the answer is not simply to tear everything down. There are fragments of truth, echoes of longing, signs of God for those who look. The task is to discern and call them out without confusion. We can also look for those fragments in Greek myths.

What Pastor Emillie preached so eloquently about the importance of music and spirituality the week before last finds a surprising resonance in Hadestown. In it, Orpheus sings of a world as it could be, a world of beauty, reciprocity, and trust. His song rises in defiance of Hades, whose realm is built on fear, scarcity, and control. The tragedy is not only that Eurydice is lost, but that the world itself has been structured so that such loss feels inevitable.

In Acts 17, Paul walks into a different kind of underworld. Not beneath the earth, but embedded in culture itself. He sees a city “full of idols,” a landscape of competing loyalties, partial truths, and spiritual confusion. Yet instead of condemning it outright, Paul listens. He observes. He honors their longing: “I see how extremely religious you are in every way.” Then he points to that altar inscribed “To an unknown god” and says, in essence: You are reaching for something real, even if you don’t yet know its name.

Both stories recognize something unsettling: humans build systems to manage our fears. And once we build them, those systems shape us.

In Hadestown, the workers forget the sky. They sing, but not in hope. Their labor becomes identity; their captivity becomes normal. Orpheus sings a different song that he sees as true. His song resists a world that insists, “This is just how things are.”

Paul does something similar in Athens. He does not simply tear down their worldview; he reorients it. He speaks of a God who is not confined to temples made by human hands, who is not served as though in need, and who gives life and breath to all. This God is not another idol to add to the shelf, but the One in whom “we live and move and have our being.” Do we believe this is babble or inspiration?

And here, both stories reach their turning point: a reliance on trust.

For Orpheus, trust is tested in the long ascent out of the underworld. He walks ahead of Eurydice, forbidden to look back. Trust becomes the fragile thread stretched between love and fear. And we know how it ends. He turns. Not because he is uniquely flawed, but because he is profoundly human. The world Hades built trains him to doubt. In one moment, that doubt undoes everything.

Paul, too, calls for a turning and calls it repentance. No shame, but reorientation. A willingness to rethink everything we assumed about God and reality. He points to resurrection and to a God who has already stepped into death and undone its finality.

And yet, like the whispering Fates in Hadestown, the world continues to teach us doubt.

We discussed last week the truth about how the world often feels: systems of fear are powerful, trust is fragile and love may falter under pressure.

But Acts 17 dares to proclaim a deeper truth: the God who made the world is not trapped within it. These "underworlds" we build are not ultimate. There is a reality beyond them, alive and active, calling us toward something new.

We may ask if hope is an act of resistance or of human wishfulness? Maybe it is both. Or maybe it is something stronger: a response to a voice that is calling us.

Because even as humans doubt, like Orpheus, we are still called to sing the song. To imagine a better world even when the evidence is thin. To resist is a kind of defiant, creative hope that always carries the echo of something holy.

Paul’s message pushes us further still. Not just to hope, but to root that hope in something beyond ourselves. The “unknown God” is not distant or hidden, but near, closer than breath to holding the whole story, even when we can barely name it.

So in the end, the question lingers: will we fearfully live in some unchangeable underworld? Or will we dare to trust that another reality is already breaking in, calling us to turn, to hope, and to live as if resurrection is not just possible, but already underway?

 

May 3, 2026 Matthew 6:24–34 Serving Mammon / Hadestown

In Matthew 6:24–34, Jesus names a tension that feels both ancient and immediate: you cannot serve two masters. You cannot give your heart to both God and the anxious pursuit of security. This is what he calls “mammon.” He turns, almost tenderly, to the human condition: Do not worry about your life… Look at the birds. Consider the lilies. Your life is more than what you can secure.

What will make this tension alive for me today? I have recently been immersed in reading Greek mythology, to explore a musical I was introduced to several weeks ago called Hadestown, based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice (follow the underlined link to see a plot synopsis and performances).

Pastor Emillie preached eloquently last Sunday about the importance of music in relation to our spirituality. Oddly, this "mammon", "two-masters tension" hums beneath the story of Anaïs Mitchell's folk opera.

At its core, Hadestown is a world shaped by fear of scarcity. As king of the underworld, Hades builds a kingdom on the promise of safety. The underworld, with its walls, the work routine, and Hades' order, provides protection from the chaos above. However, the cost is high. Workers trade their freedom for the illusion of security. They sing in rhythm, not because they are free, but because they are bound. It is a world where anxiety has become the organizing principle.

This is precisely the world Jesus warns against. “Do not worry about your life…” is not just naïve optimism. It is a refusal to let fear become lord. Worry, in Jesus’ telling, is not just an emotion; it is a kind of allegiance. 

When anxiety rules, it dictates our choices. Our relationships are affected, and our vision of what is possible narrows. We begin to believe there is never enough; never enough love, never enough time, never enough provision. Through grasping and hoarding, we build our own little Hadestowns, stone by stone. 

Eurydice embodies this tension. She is not foolish or faithless. She acts from hunger. She is cold and afraid. When she chooses to go to Hadestown, it is not because she desires wealth or power, but because she fears not having enough to survive. Her decision is deeply human. It is the logic of worry made visible: I must secure my life, even if it costs me my soul. The two Greek myths on which the story is based provide the drama that sears whenever we take Jesus's words to heart. It is hard not to be anxious.  

And then there is Orpheus. Orpheus lives by the logic Jesus gestures toward. He trusts in a song not yet finished, a provision not yet visible. He seeks first something beyond survival: beauty, love, harmony. “Seek first the kingdom…” Jesus says, “and all these things will be added to you.” Orpheus embodies that seeking, even when it looks impractical. For Eurydice, who is focused on survival in the moment, Orpheus's quest looks superfluous and foolish.

The tragedy of Hadestown is that even Orpheus is not immune to anxiety. In the final moments, as he leads Eurydice out of the underworld, he is given one command: do not look back. Trust. Keep walking.

And he cannot. He turns.

That turn is small, understandable, and devastating. It is the moment worry reclaims him. The question creeps in: What if she’s not there? What if this promise fails? What if I lose everything? And in that moment, anxiety becomes master again. The very thing Jesus warns about, this inability to trust in what cannot yet be seen, undoes the redemption and Eurydice being brought back from death

Matthew 6 does not promise that life will be free of hunger or hardship. Eurydice’s fear is real. The world is harsh. Jesus insists that worry cannot save us from that reality; it only binds us more tightly to it. It turns us inward. It narrows our vision. It makes us build kingdoms like Hades’, where control masquerades as peace.

“Consider the lilies…” There is a song called "Flowers" that Eurydice sings, where "lily white" is mentioned and remembered.

In Hadestown, Persephone carries the memory of another world. She remembers a world of seasons, abundance, wine, and sunlight. She is a living reminder that the earth was not meant to be ruled by scarcity. Her presence is like the lilies Jesus points to: signs that there is a deeper order, a generosity woven into creation itself.

The invitation of Matthew 6, then, is not to deny reality but to reorient within it. To live as if God, not fear, is the truest master. To trust that life is more than what we can secure. To walk forward without looking back, not because we are certain, but because we refuse to let anxiety dictate the story... if not constantly at least for a time.

Hadestown ends with a question: Is it a sad song? The answer is yes, and no. Because they sing it again. They try again. They hope again.

And maybe that is where the Gospel meets the myth.

Each day, we stand at the crossroads between trust and worry, between God and mammon, between the open fields of the lilies and the walled city of fear. And each day, we are invited to choose, not perfectly, not without trembling, but faithfully.

Are we fated to live out our tragedies or do we try again to keep walking and not look back? 

Sermon 

 

Hadestown - A Folk Opera of Love, Trust and Power

Hadestown is a folk-inspired musical that weaves together two Greek myths of Orpheus and Eurydice; and Hades and Persephone into a story about love, trust, and power.

The musical is narrated by Hermes, who guides the audience through a world that feels both ancient and eerily modern.

At the heart of the story is Orpheus, an idealistic musician who believes he can write a song powerful enough to restore balance to the world. He falls in love with Eurydice, who is practical and wary, shaped by hunger and hardship. When she is driven by desperation to make a deal with Hades, the ruler of an industrial, underground factory called Hadestown, she descends into his realm, trading freedom for security.

Orpheus, devastated, journeys to the underworld to bring her back. Meanwhile, the relationship between Hades and Persephone mirrors and contrasts theirs: Persephone is torn between the warmth of the surface world and the cold control of Hades’ domain, revealing a strained marriage shaped by power and distance.

In the underworld, Orpheus uses his music to soften Hades’ heart, persuading him to allow Eurydice to return but with one condition: as they travel back to the surface, Orpheus must not look back at her until they are both safely above ground.

At the final moment, doubt overtakes him. He turns and loses Eurydice forever.

The story ends not with triumph, but with repetition. This mirrors the understanding of myths as they explain the cyclic repetition of the change of the seasons. Hermes invites the audience to remember that this is a tale that keeps being told, because even in failure of what we would see as a happy ending, the act of loving, hoping, and trying again still matters.

It’s a tragic love story, but also a meditation on faith and whether we can trust what we cannot see. Is hope is still worthwhile in a fragile, uncertain world?

Performances:

Way Down In Hadestown                         Why Do We Build The Wall