Hello my friends it's Matt this is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast and yesterday we talked

about themes and our ability, whether we use fancy words to articulate it or not, our ability that we all have to interpret stuff.

Stuff means stuff and over the course of a lifetime or even part of a lifetime, we without even trying sharpen our skills to notice those patterns and see what stuff means.

So we pick up on themes like themes and emotions

and stuff that we carry with us

from really well-crafted cultural texts.

And right now we're thinking through the list of most obvious, most pronounced themes in the

Book of Esther.

Yesterday we started by talking about humor and humor against the backdrop of dark stuff, seemingly out of control stuff,

humor against the backdrop of perceptions of fate versus the reality of the

providence of God. How the humor has a wise old big perspective kind of old

woman old man feel to it as opposed to a witty zippy

sarcastic biting youthful feel to it and I think one of the places where you see the

humor thing play out the most in the book of Esther is in this oft discussed in this podcast second theme which is the Clown King Motif. I know I use that hyphenated phrase a lot. It is a phrase

that I made up some time ago because to me it expresses how the haughty leaders of the Bible always come off and

none more so than Xerxes and Hayman. In all of these Clown King situations, including Pharaoh or Herod or any of the Herod's in the New Testament,

there's this imagined belief they have that they are somehow divinity incarnate and that somehow what they bind on earth is bound in heaven and that somehow they are the true makers of reality.

But it kind of reminds me that stuff when the Prophet was looking for the voice of God

and the voice of God wasn't in the fire or the earthquake. God spoke in a still

small voice like someone who isn't insecure but the kings are always loud and brash and insecure and they bluster and yell and

rattle sabers and they've got all kinds of titles and they're all dressed up in

their fancies to always remind people,

...