A widow, shortly after her husband’s death, was going through his papers. She found a couple of old certificates, yellowed with age and crumbling into dust. They had been made out to her husband more than fifty years ago, and seemed to be some kind of promissory notes. Some sort of company had written out these certificates and they seemed to indicate that her husband had invested five thousand dollars with these people, way back before they married.
Well, she read them over a couple of times, didn’t really understand all the legal gobbledygook, took another look at their age, thought about the fact that they were buried at the bottom of his desk drawer and that he had never said anything about them. She decided that they were worthless. Just worthless paper, and she threw them into the garbage.
A couple of weeks later she had a call from her lawyer, asking her if there were any other assets to be dealt with in the estate. The lawyer asked, "Did your husband have any investments? Did he lend any money to anyone?" She told the lawyer about the papers. Guess what?! With accumulated interest over fifty years, she had pitched into the trash well over$30,000! Finders keepers, losers weepers, because when you don’t know the value of something and you destroy it, sooner or later you are going to discover how valuable it was. You are going to regret having destroyed it, because it is your loss.
When you destroy something whose value you don’t understand, and you come to learn that it was indeed quite valuable: finders keepers, losers weepers.
That’s especially true if what you throw away is a human being. If there is a person you don’t care for, or you don’t understand, you feel you just don’t need to be around him and you’d like for that person just to get out of your life, you may discover, once he is gone, that he brought great value to you, and you regret having discarded him. Even with human beings, it may be finders keepers, losers weepers.
You’re a supervisor in an office. There is this secretary who just bugs the life out of you. Much of the time you don’t understand what she is doing; most of the time you cannot fathom her work style. And absolutely all of the time you feel she is at a distance from you, she has no respect for you, she is just too much trouble to deal with. So you let her go. Walking papers, pink slip, riffed, fired.
The next week the janitors are up in arms; the grounds keepers don’t even show up for work; the clients are on your case constantly about their services. Your life is in chaos! She really was getting the work done, but you just never saw it. You didn’t understand it. She was not like you are, she was different, and you thought she was worthless. You threw her away. But now you know you damaged yourself. Now you know that, as much as she was hurt by being fired, you also hurt yourself when you threw her away. Finders keepers, losers weepers!
There is a story in the Bible that is just like that. And that story goes one step farther. It suggests that if you get involved in destroying not just a person, but a whole people, you are going to be a major loser. If you, even blindly, allow yourself to think of a whole group of people as worthless, you will end up being profoundly impoverished yourself.
The story is the story of Esther. Esther, you may remember, was a young Jewish girl who had caught the eye of the Persian emperor during that time in the history of the Jews when they were second-class citizens, far away from their homeland. They had been taken into slavery by the Babylonians; then the Babylonians had been conquered by the Persians, and the Persians had more or less inherited this large ethnic minority, the Jews.
But one Jewish girl, Esther, had become queen, the wife of the great emperor Ahasuerus. In this empire an officer named Haman decided so to manipulate the law of the land that he could gain the power to destroy the Jewish people. By carefully shading the truth and concealing his real intent, Haman got the king to decree death for all of the Jews, an entire race of people.
When Queen Esther learned what was about to happen to her people, she planned a great banquet and invited her husband. When the moment was right, this is what happened:
Esther 7:1-4
"We have been sold, I and my people, to be destroyed … but no enemy can compensate for this damage to the King."
King Ahasuerus, if you let the Jewish people die, the pain to them, of course, will be great; but do you know how great the cost will be to you? Do you realize the damage to you? No one, nothing, could ever compensate for this damage to the king.
When you hate or destroy a whole people, simply because you do not understand what they are worth, you have lost something enormously valuable. You have damaged yourself beyond repair.
We are being incredibly naive if we believe that racism has gone away. Racism and destruction are all a part of the scene in the twentieth century. But the Scripture gives us some insights which will help us deal with that reality.
I
First, the Bible makes us remember that there really are persons, even today, who are evil enough to plan for the annihilation of a whole people. There really are persons like Haman of ancient Persia who are depraved enough to want the downfall of an entire race of people.
Don’t be fooled on this one. The Bible will take away our naïveté. Racism is real. Don’t be naïve. Racism is real.
You see, sometimes we see only the reality we want to see. Sometimes we so wish it were true that there were no more prejudice, that we think it really is true. We so much want to believe in the goodness of others that we overlook reality; and the reality is that there are Hamans out there who are all too ready to write off whole groups and put down entire races of people.
So the first issue is to acknowledge that there is a problem. Some of us this afternoon will be going to the Holocaust Memorial museum to review the story of what happened to the Jewish people, not under Haman but under Hitler; not in Persia six centuries before Christ but in Germany twenty centuries after Christ. But did you know that there are people who actually suggest that the Holocaust never happened? Are you aware that there are some folk who claim that the story of six million slaughtered Jews is nothing more than a hoax, nothing but elaborate propaganda? You see, we are so afraid for it to be true that we deny it and hope it will go away.
No, friends, no! The terrible and ugly truth is that there always have been Hamans. Haman and his henchmen have always been out there, cynically plotting the enslavement and the destruction of people whom they consider to be worthless. In one time and place Haman may be Hitler, planning the destruction of the Jews because, he claims, they own too much wealth. But in another time and place Haman may be running the slave market on the West African coast or running cocaine into a project in Southeast Washington. In one time and place Haman may be a Serbian, called a Christian, shooting a Bosnian just because he is a Muslim. In another time and place Haman lives on as a general in the Haitian army, willing to starve the peasants in the countryside in order to maintain himself in lordly splendor. Haman is still with us!
What makes Hamans? Choosing not to understand someone else. Fearing those who are different. Learn to be vigilant for Haman. Learn to watch for active racism. For we cannot afford to lose what any people, any race, or any group have to give us all. Finders keepers, losers weepers.
II
Now the next thing that we learn from the story of Esther is that racism thrives because good people, otherwise decent and upright people, allow themselves to be drawn into the web of racism, never even understanding what is happening. Racism and prejudice, hatred and class warfare, exist not only because there are people like Haman, who knowingly plan it. They exist also because there are scores of us who just let it happen, and do not challenge it.
You see, in the story, right along side Haman, who is actively plotting the destruction of the Jews, there is Ahasuerus, a person of power and of influence, who is duped into going along with the plot. He doesn’t even know the consequences of what is being done. He is guilty not so much of outright racism as he is of just letting it happen without understanding what he is doing. Haman, the schemer, got King Ahasuerus to sign on the dotted line without the King’s ever realizing what he had done. As the story tells it, when Esther speaks of the death of the Jews, the King wants to Know what she’s talking about; who planned such a thing and where did it all come from?! He doesn’t even understand what he has done!
You see, you don’t have to be a hatemonger to perpetuate racism. All you have to do is let it happen without challenging it. You don’t have to wear the robes of the Klan in order to incarnate racial hatred; all you have to do is insulate yourself in a one-race neighborhood, keep your children from associating with people you don’t trust and, when Sunday comes, find a church where the favorite Scripture is the one about the fields being “white unto harvest"!
Nor do you have to wear the colors of separatist militancy in order to foster distrust among peoples; all you have to do is to decide that you will not patronize an Asian merchant, that you won’t hire a Puerto Rican laborer. All you have to do is insulate yourself from others. Just close your ears to the beat of someone else’s music, just refuse to learn someone else’s language, just sneer at his art. Racism is throwing away as worthless the symbols of someone else’s culture. That is passive racism … passive racism.
Racism, you see, is perpetuated passively as well as actively. Racism is kept alive not only by Haman, who schemes to exploit, but also by Ahasuerus, the king, mind you, with plenty of authority and ample influence, who just lets himself be lulled to sleep.
Listen to the prophetic words of Queen Esther. "No [one], [nothing] can compensate for this damage to the king." If you let racism happen, just by standing aside and doing nothing, you may never recognize until it is too late how much you have lost! You may never know how impoverished you will be. For someone like me never to have read the poetry of Langston Hughes or Paul Laurence Dunbar; for someone like many of you to turn off the music of a Mozart or a Bach; for a great nation to write its foreign policy so that it ignores the daily deaths of innocent children in a land whose politics we cannot fathom ... all of it is racism, passive racism. And who are the losers? We are! We are damaged, every bit as much as those whose cultures we ignore. Finders keepers, losers weepers.
As I look out over this congregation, I see people with influence ... maybe not as much as King Ahasuerus, but influence just the same! I see people who could make phone calls and write letters, I see persons who could raise their voices whenever there is a human issue in this city.
You know the saying that all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing. It’s not far different from the witness of Scripture, that for us to let people be destroyed is for us to suffer loss.
Finders keepers, losers weepers. "[Nothing] can compensate for this damage to the King."
III
All right. Now we have seen that there is still such a reality as active racism, there is still vicious prejudice. Haman still stalks the streets of our cities.
And we have seen that some of us are guilty of passive racism. Some of us have been manipulated into allowing policies that detract from other people and their value. Some of have been like Ahasuerus, standing idly by. And we’ve seen that whether racism is active or passive, we are all the losers for it. Whether it is Haman dripping blood or Ahasuerus dripping honey, it is still a loss whose magnitude we scarcely even know.
But there is good news. There is a third possibility. There is another way. That way is that men and women of good will, who do not want to see the destruction of anyone, must cross over into the other person’s world and must put a face on suffering.
Let me say that again. If you want to make a difference in this racially divided city and in this troubled world, you must first cross over into the other person’s world and then you must put a human face on suffering.
To the side of the king came Esther, the little Jewish girl. She had had to enter the strange and alien world of the Persian court. She knew that she and her people had to live alongside the Persians. Some of you know very well that separate but equal always has meant, in reality, separate and unequal. But Esther was not afraid to cross over. Esther was not afraid to pass. She went, unafraid, into the other person’s world.
When she got there, her strategy was to identify herself with the suffering people. What she did was to personalize the issue. You see, poor old Ahasuerus had signed the order for the final solution, but he didn’t think about it affecting real people. It was just an order to him. It was just a policy, just a piece of paper. As the Nazi soldiers said, just following orders. He never thought about it affecting real people, people that he knew and cared about. And he certainly never added it up that an order to destroy the Jews would include the destruction of his queen.
When Esther approached him, then, she put a face on suffering. She made him confront her as a real person. "Let my life be given me and the lives of my people." Once you know people as persons, it’s much harder to write off a whole race or a whole group. Once suffering has a face, you see how much you are losing.
People of God, the answer to prejudice is personal relationship. The antidote to racism is fellowship, it is being brought together and led to value one another as persons, as persons with differing cultures. But valued, loved. Fellowship.
The answer to racism is fellowship. And how do we gain fellowship? Where does community come from?
The ultimate answer to prejudice is personal relationship brought about by Christ. The most authentic answer to racism is that there is one, Himself a despised Jew, who puts a face on all men’s faces. There is one who went to the cross a victim of race hatred, but who on that cross, shedding His blood, worked a work of reconciliation for us. For all of us. Finders keepers, and no ’more losers.
For in Him and finally in Him alone, "there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." Black and white, Jamaican, Panamanian, Canadian, English, Cameroonian, Italian, Nigerian ... names and faces which, were they to be lost, “[Nothing] can compensate for this damage to [us]." Finders keepers, losers weepers.
