sermons

For a Time Such As This

For Such a Time as This

Steve Watson

Feb 22, 2026

This year’s Lent was inspired by Hanna Reichel, who wrote the new book For Such a Time as This: An Emergency Devotional.

Their introduction begins like this:

As a scholar, I have closely studied this nation. It prided itself in its influence in the world, its intellectual leadership, its technological innovation, its economic prowess. But as global orders shifted, its social and political system, built for simpler times, crumbled. Political and economic crises damaged trust in the government, Polarization increased and made coalition building ever less feasible. Widening gaps led to social unrest, economic instability, and even violence in the streets. 

The nation was overwhelmed and disoriented. Betrayal by political opponents explained any defeats. Perceived humiliation turned into resentment, feeding a desire to “be great again.” Political rhetoric shifted into ever more belligerent registers as enemies abroad and minorities at home were scapegoated. A muscular strength was projected out of swagger, false claims, and ever more overblown claims to greatness. Special leaders – claiming for themselves special powers – rode waves of public disgruntlement against immigrants, intellectuals, and those visibly “other.” Democratic processes were manipulated, checks and balances hollowed out. Executive overreach became the order of the day.

It sounds familiar, doesn’t it? It sounds like us. 

Two years ago the Century Foundation rated the health of American democracy as 79 out of 100. A C+ ,what they called a mediocre score. Last year they gave us a 57. That’s bad.

The nonpartisan organization Protect Democracy rates democratic nations on a 1 to 5 scale – 1 being healthy democracy and 5 being total dictatorship. The US comes in right now at a 3.4 – the only other democratic nation with a similarly low rating is India, which has religious nationalism and corruption problems of its own, just like us.

But Reichel wasn’t talking about us – at least, not mostly. They write:

“The nation I am talking about is Germany, roughly a century ago.”

During the run up to the Nazi regime. They write:

We have been here before. And you won’t like what happens next.

Rather than writing our own devotional guide to this season, we’re utilizing Reichel’s work, that draws upon the wisdom of the confessing church that resisted the Nazi regime in the 1930’s and 1940’s. They call it an “emergency devotional,” for extreme and troubling times. 

We do not have to agree together on the details of our political and cultural analysis. Just how and why our nation is sick, whether we’re at risk for Nazi-style tyranny or not, what most threatens our democracy and how much in jeopardy it is. What troubles and difficulties we most experience and what troubles of our neighbors most call out to our hearts – there’s room for questions and disagreement on these things. 

I would ask that you not make this season an excuse to try to convince your neighbors at church of all your political analyses and opinions.

We don’t all need to think alike after all.

• What we do need, though, is to abound in the fruit of the spirit.
• We need more love, joy, and peace.
• We need more kindness and compassion.
• And we need strength and courage and help keeping the faith. 

Late last year, in praying for this upcoming season of Lent, and in praying for our year as a whole as a church, three things came deeply and repeatedly to my heart, mind, and spirit. I’ll share two of them today. 

God made it clear to me that we should do everything we can to become more resilient together. And I also felt in my spirit, that we’re called in these hard times, with whatever highs and lows of our religious and spiritual pasts, to keeping the faith. We need God and the good news of Jesus more than ever, and we need people and communities that can practice and pass on a more beautiful Christian faith than the garbage that is practiced so much in this nation. 

I feel like resilience and keeping the faith are a big part of our call and promise this year, and I feel like we have way more help that maybe we’ve yet accessed to get there. I think that in God, in each other, and in the wisdom of our ancestors we have all that we need. All that we need to face this moment. 

Who knows? Perhaps we too are here for such a time as this.

That phrase “for such a time as this” is drawn from the fourth chapter of the book of Esther, an old story about a time – real or imagined – when the ancient Jewish people were under genocidal threat from a wicked turn in the governance of Persia, where they lived. 

Last week, we heard a short version of the book of Esther, told through Godly play for our children. And I talked about faith in the face of enemies. This week, we’ll read an excerpt from the fourth chapter. This is where Esther, a Jewish queen in the court of Persia is keenly aware that there is huge trouble. Her nation’s democratic rankings are tanking, total tyranny issues are through the roof, and the king is coming for the harm of her people and her neighbors. She understandably feels compelled to act, but she is overwhelmed and paralyzed with fear. (Aren’t we all?)And then this is what her mentor and father figure Mordecai says, and this is what she does. 

Esther 4:12-17 (Common English Bible)

12 When they told Mordecai Esther’s words,

13 he had them respond to Esther: “Don’t think for one minute that, unlike all the other Jews, you’ll come out of this alive simply because you are in the palace.

14 In fact, if you don’t speak up at this very important time, relief and rescue will appear for the Jews from another place, but you and your family will die. But who knows? Maybe it was for a moment like this that you came to be part of the royal family.”

15 Esther sent back this word to Mordecai:

16 “Go, gather all the Jews who are in Susa and tell them to give up eating to help me be brave. They aren’t to eat or drink anything for three whole days, and I myself will do the same, along with my female servants. Then, even though it’s against the law, I will go to the king; and if I am to die, then die I will.”

17 So Mordecai left where he was and did exactly what Esther had ordered him.

Mordecai loves Esther enough to tell her the truth. He says that knowing what is wrong is not faithfulness. Having the proper analysis of the cultural and political threats isn’t resilient keeping of the faith. 

We’re a heady city, here in Cambridge and Greater Boston. There are a lot of advanced degrees in this room. And sometimes we can feel like reading the write analysis or being able to explain what’s wrong in the world is an arrival. But having the so-called right ideas isn’t an awakening. God is not impressed with our so-called right opinions. 

Esther had all the right opinions. Esther did not like the evil at work in her society. But Mordecai says that’s not good enough. God may not need you or me to save the world. God is patient, God is everywhere, and God can call upon many people and forces to make change. Change is in fact inevitable.

But we need ourselves. And our family and our neighbors need us too, and they don’t need our so-called right ideas, so much as they need our faith, and our voices, and our bodies.

Mordecai says:

Esther, speak up. Leave the security and the fear of your home and do something that can help. 

It may be that you are where you are for such a time as this.

Thirteen years ago, our church was in a funky space. I was too.

The Church was in a moment of big transition – in an argument about the future of LGBTQ inclusion, in an argument about our values and future really. Also in our church’s first ever really big leadership transition moment. We were shedding people. We were shedding money. It was kind of a sad and hard time for the church.

And some folks had asked me to consider being the next senior pastor. My first reaction was – hell, no. Until my friends and my spirit and a few folks in this community, and who knows maybe God, started changing my mind. That’s a long and really interesting story for me, and I almost wanted to retell the whole story today, but decided I didn’t need to. The one thing I’ll mention is that this big line in Esther spoke to me. 

This line when Mordecai says to Esther –

maybe it was for such a time as this that you are here!

And that verse made a wedge of openness in me – I didn’t want to change jobs. I didn’t really want to be a pastor either. But I loved this church, and I was curious about the story God was inviting me to be a part of here, and I thought – if I’m called for such a time as this, let’s stay open. Why not? 

And here we are, more than 13 years later, still exploring. It’s mostly been great. And I get why that phrase from Esther came to mind –

“for such a time as this.”

It was my way of being open to a surprising change in life that I hadn’t seen coming. 

And that’s a good thing.

Life is full of changes, many of which are surprising, and so openness, flexibility, and willingness to pivot are beautiful parts of being resilient in life.

And God’s unfolding call upon our life is also often surprising. When we can grow and adapt, we have a better chance of keeping the faith with God, and going to interesting and fruitful places with our lives too.

But I’m also a little uncomfortable with my use of this phrase from Esther, because when Mordecai says this, the stakes aren’t personal calling, they are the survival of a people and a way of life. American religion does this all the time – we privatize the big stories, make them all about God and me.

And that’s OK to do, as long as we know it’s just one little part of God’s big story and our big story together. The stakes of God’s big story aren’t one person keeping or losing a job or one person’s  change in career direction or one person’s anything else. The stakes in God’s big story are the flourishing of life, and the unfolding of a more creative, renewed, beautiful world and universe.

And in the Bible story, Mordecai has some sense of this. 

Say no to the call of God, he says, and God’s story will find a way, but somebody’s gonna die. Say no to the call of this moment, and maybe you’ll die. Maybe physically, literally. Or maybe your soul will die. Like you’ll look back on this moment and be like: wow, I was distracted and afraid when I could have made a difference. 

There are a lot of great examples of people rising to such a time as this in our history, amongst our ancestors. One I think of a lot, certainly here in Black history month, but really all the time, is the story of the Freedom Riders. One of our kids has the name he has because of them. 

I know a lot of you know this story, but I’m sure there are some folks in this room who don’t, so here we go. The Freedom Riders of the early 60’s were young adults in their late teens and twenties that rode the bus lines across the south in their vision to see into being a desegregated, free, and safe country for all people.

There was John Lewis, 21-year old college student leader who had grown up preaching to the chickens with his big heart and equally big speech impediment, in rural Alabama. There was Diane Nash, a 22-year old college student leader who when she got involved in student activism was told by her grandma that she had fallen in with the wrong crowd. 

Young Black leaders like them who grew up in the South or moved there for college knew the indignities of racial segregation and discrimination in their bodies. They knew the impact of white supremacy and race-based violence in the stories of the family’s pasts and in the clouds this country’s injustice and violence cast over their futures. 

And these brave, Black, well-trained, Southern leaders led the Freedom Rides and led the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee that organized them. But they weren’t alone. Hundreds more young adults joined them from throughout the country. People who had other ways of recognizing: my welfare is bound up with your welfare. 

One of them was a young Jewish man living in California. His parents had fled Vienna in the 30s, escaping the Nazis at the last moment. And their son, born in America, saw the first wave of Freedom Riders beaten by a racist mob in Alabama, and he said to his father: 

“This is what happened to you and us. I’m not going to stand by this time and let this happen. I’m not going to be a good German.”

And off to join the Freedom Riders he went, for such a time as this. 

Hundreds more joined him.

Two things:

1. YOUTH – bless them and all the generations
2. We tend to tell our great stories, including our great American stories of history, our great Black history stories as well, as the stories of individual heroes that shaped history. 

And fair enough. You tell the story of a leader like John Lewis or Diane Nash, and there is plenty that is heroic to say. But they didn’t do anything by themselves. Hundreds of young adults filled the buslines with them, and when trouble came, they filled the prisons. That was actually a tactic. What if hundreds of us are sent off to prison at once, and what if we refused bail, and what if we stayed in jail and sang joyfully together in those prisons? The world will pay attention, and the world will change.

It was a gutsy bet, a bold move of faith, and they were right. They did it. Not individual heroes, but people who listened to their conscience and thought: I’ve got to do something. Ordinary folks – folks who went on to be elementary school teachers and chaplains and artists and full-time parents and government workers and owners of McDonald franchises and hotel managers and all kinds of other things. But people who heard the call of their moment and kept the faith with their bodies, acting together because they came to care about each other.

Friends, this is what our moment needs as well. We don’t need a miracle. We don’t need a hero. We need lots of ordinary people like you and me who love themselves and love their neighbors and love this country enough to say we deserve better. And our future selves, and our kids and grandkids, they deserve better too. 

We need people who love God enough to believe that God is calling us to imagine and co-create a better world for one another. 

And we need people who say a first yes to God, and then another yes, and then another yes after that. One yes, one step at time toward freedom, joy, and justice. That’s the only way it happens.

Look at Esther. Her first yes was not to save the kingdom, to rescue the Jewish people. She was too scared, and she couldn’t do it by herself.

Her first yes was to ask some people to fast and to pray for her. Fasting tends to intensify our bodies and our prayers. It can get us a little more hungry, not just for the food we miss, but for what matters most. Esther asks for help – pray for me for three days. And she agrees to fast and pray as well. Trusting that the community of faith will find more courage together. And then she agrees, in three days, I’ll ask. I’ll take a first step.

I’ll ask. And it turns out that this one ask unleashes a virtuous cycle of truth telling, of the exposure of lies and corruption, of good deeds, that lead to the rescue of Esther and her people, and as the story goes, the moral and spiritual rescue of the whole nation. 

Friends, we’re at the start of our faith tradition’s annual dedicated season of fasting and prayer. 

And our hope is that like it was for Esther and the community, this can be a season of our growing faith, our strengthening of our connection to God and one another which gives us strength, and our resilience and resistance. 

I have some simple invitations for you to get started.

1. Get a copy of the little red book, For Such a Time as This, and just read the introduction this week and skim around a little. You’ll see it’s organized into four weeks of seven very short devotionals, each of which has some reflection questions and things to try that go with them in the back. This week, though, just get the book and read the introduction. We’ll encourage us to be in the four weeks of the heart of the book starting next Sunday.
2. Find a Lenten buddy. If you’re in a community group, check in with them – like make sure you’re gonna talk about this stuff together. That you’ll pray together. And if you’re not, find a friend, inside or outside of this church. Who’ll read the book with you prayerfully, with curiosity, about how God and how these times are speaking to you.
3. If you want to find a little more connection to this source material in Esther, maybe some more joy too, join me at the progressive synagogue Temple Beth Zion in Brookline a week from tomorrow for Purim celebrations. Wear a costume if you’re up for it! Details are in the church newsletter and on the back Lenten table. 
4. And four, make space in your soul. Our lives are so busy and distracted, that it can be hard to be anything but stressed out or worried in hard times. Resilience can feel out of reach. So here’s what I encourage:

• –Make space in your soul
• -Fast
• -Time of day
• -Pray