Foundry United
Rev.
“Life in the Lion’s Den: Sermons about Daniel”
Sunday, January 9,
2011
Rev.
Excelling in Exile
Daniel 1:17-21
Here’s a question: How many of you heard the story of Daniel in the lion’s den when you were a child? How many heard the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace?
Both of these stories come from the Book of Daniel in the Hebrew scriptures. I thought it might be interesting for us to take a grown up look at the Book of Daniel and the story of Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.
The Book of Daniel was written about 200 years before Christ during a time when Judaism was being severely persecuted. In fact it was probably written during the persecution that is commemorated in the Jewish Festival of Hanukkah.
The story is set in a time 400 years earlier when Judah had been conquered and captured by the powerful and violent King Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Chaldean empire with his capitol and palace in Babylon.
The message of the Book of Daniel is that where God wants God’s people to be is in the lion’s den and in the fiery furnace. And if we are in the lion’s den and in the fiery furnace, God will be there with us, and the lions won’t open their mouths and the flames of the fiery furnace will not burn us and there will be a fourth person in the furnace with us.
The story of Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego is a story about how people with godly values survive in a world where the gods those around them worship seem to be power and wealth.
How does someone who believes in sharing and everybody having enough survive in the midst of a society that worships greed?
How does someone who believes in justice survive in an institution whose goal is to preserve privilege?
How does someone who believes in peace survive in a culture that assumes war?
How does someone who is committed to inclusion survive in a setting that legalizes exclusion?
I don’t think these are hypothetical questions. Some of them may even be relevant to life in Washington DC. To life in the United Methodist Church. To life in the university. To life in the NGO.
The Book of Daniel presents a particular viewpoint about how people who believe in God and who want to live godly lives are meant to live in the real world of power, inequality, privilege, and exclusion.
The argument of the Book of Daniel is that God wants God’s people in positions of influence in the palace.
In the Book of Daniel, God arranged for Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to be brought from backwater Judah to join the palace staff of King Nebuchadnezzar, the very same king who had conquered their nation, stolen the riches of their temple, and made their nation a vassal nation.
God wanted Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the palace.
This is the Book of Daniel’s answer to a hard question. Where does God want me to be? Does God want me in a little Christian commune in a poor neighborhood in some city living in voluntary poverty? Does God want me in a monastery devoted to prayer and simple living? Does God want me in a nonprofit committed to the same values of justice and the same goal of making the world a better place that I am committed to?
Daniel’s answer is: God wants me in the very heart of the power that stands against things I believe in most deeply. Daniels answer is: God wants me and my friends Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the king’s palace where an idol repugnant to us is worshipped and power, wealth, ruthlessness, violence, privilege and injustice are glorified.
This may not be the only answer to the question, but it is Daniel’s answer. Daniel’s answer is that God wants us in the lion’s den. God wants us in the fiery furnace.
After King Nebuchadnezzar’s armies defeated Judah, Nebuchadnezzar sent his chief of staff Ashpenaz to bring the brightest and most competent and best looking young Israelites back to Babylon to become part of the palace staff. Ashpenaz’s title in Daniel 1:3 is “sar” of the” sareen,” which the King James Bible translates “prince of the eunuchs.”
Some scholars have argues since that the Hebrew word “sareen” may not actually mean physical eunuch. That the word “eunuch” may over time have become the term for those who were part of the palace staff whether they were physically made eunuchs or not.
Sorta like the hill staffer who said to me once that if you worked for a certain congressperson; you may as well have been a eunuch.
We don’t know for sure whether Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were literally eunuchs. The Jewish first century history Josephus said they were.
The point was that if you worked in the palace, you were expected to have no permanent intimate relationships that might get in the way of your service to the king. You were expected not to be fully human, with normal loves and commitments because the palace was a place where the loftier human emotions of commitment and caring were not supposed to get in the way of power, privilege and wealth. Everything was politics in the palace.
And Daniel believed that God wanted him and his friends in the very heart of this lion’s den, in the very heart of this fiery furnace.
More than this, Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego believed that God wanted them to succeed in the palace. The Book of Daniel says that Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were ten times better that the king’s other advisors and analysts. The king considered them ten times better his other magicians and enchanters, his other advisors and analysts.
Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego did not believe they were there to undermine the palace’s operation, to be secret agents to create confusion or disarray in the palace or to bring down the king.
If God wanted them in the palace, Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego believed that God wanted them to excel there. They believed that God expected more than mediocrity from them in the palace. Because there is no credibility in mediocrity. The king will not trust and value mediocrity. Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego believe that God expected excellence of them.
You know, I sort of consider Foundry part of the palace of mainline Christianity and the United Methodist Church. We have more power and prestige within the United Methodist Church and mainline Christianity than we like to admit. Bishop Robinson told us that this past summer when he spoke here.
A lot of our credibility comes from doing things well. Someone told me the other day that we are known in a certain department of the national offices of the denomination not so much because of our stand on inclusion, but because we are a downtown church that is considered a model of how to do vital city ministry. We are a city congregation in the Northeast that is growing.
We are known for more than our stand on inclusion. We are known for excellent music. We are known for ground-breaking mission. People are watching our Sunday school grow in the heart of the city and are amazed. We are known for our effective governance. We are known for our pre-Cana program, and I predict that in a year people will be paying attention to our small groups.
Part of the reason Foundry has credibility in our stand on inclusion is because we do some things pretty well in the midst of a mainline church movement where too often mediocrity has become the norm.
If God has put you in the palace, God expects you to excel.
I don’t mean for us to be self-congratulatory. There are lots of areas where we are behind the curve, like technology. Some other ministries we need to strengthen. Sometimes we look better on the surface than the substance actually is.
All I am saying is that it is amazing to me how many churches that believe in inclusion, act as though they can do ministry in a sort of mediocre way and then expect people to take their commitment to inclusion seriously.
I think that if God has put us in the center of the struggle, God expects us to excel.
I want to say one more thing about Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, especially Daniel. Daniel served four kings, according to the Book of Daniel: Nebuchadnezzar, Darius the Mede, Belshazzar, and briefly King Cyrus.
Daniel loved the kings he served and they came to love him. Daniel loved the king even when the king had him thrown into the lion’s den. The king loved Daniel so much he stayed up all night and prayed to Daniel’s God to save him from the lions.
Daniel would not serve the king’s gods, but he loved the king.
Here’s another challenge from the Book of Daniel. How do you love and serve kings who worship other goals and values without worshipping their gods?
This may be the most important challenge in the Book of Daniel.
We tend to love and want to serve only kings we agree with. So when a president who represents another party and another ideology gets into the White House, some of us drop out for four or eight years. I mean whether we literally drop out or lay low or go through the motions, we have a tendency to only want to love and serve kings we agree with.
But Daniel’s power and witness was that he loved kings whose gods he would not worship. Here is the question for us; how do we love people whose gods we will not worship?
I want to start loving every president who makes it into the White House. I want to start loving every bishop who gets elected as bishop in the United Methodist Church, not just the ones I agree with. I don’t want to bow down to some of the things they stand for, but I want to love and serve them.
One of the things baptism teaches us is that God doesn’t love and include us because of our philosophical, theological, doctrinal correctness. Only Baptists believe that, and they are wrong – not about everything, just that particular thing.
God loves us and includes us if we never get it right.
I want to love people even if I disagree with them vehemently. I want to love the pope. I want to love the president of the Mormon Church. I want to love Pat Robinson. I want to love the United Methodist Judicial Council. I don’t want to worship the same understanding of God they worship, but I want to love them.
This is what Daniel teaches us; that we can be instruments of grace to people who worship gods we don’t worship, if we are willing to love them.
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