Some of Tim's Sermons

A few years ago I went down to London with Liz to see a show. Having a few hours to kill in the afternoon, we went to visit the British Museum. In one of the galleries there is a pair of three and a half metre tall statues. They show a winged lion with a human head. They stood at the gates of the throne room of the North West palace of Ashurnasirpal in Nimrud, which is in Assyria, one of the Mesopotamian kingdoms, just north of Babylonia. Also in that hall is the “Black Obelisk” which shows an Assyrian king, receiving tribute from Israel.

These objects predate Daniel by a few decades, but they would likely have been in place when he was in Babylon, and given the status he reached within the kingdom, it’s not unlikely that he would have visited the places where these were originally, and seen them, maybe even touched them. As I stood looking at them, I was struck by a sense of connection with a real person who lived centuries ago. I was also struck by how these objects represent the pressures and limitations on Daniel’s life. He was in a foreign land, with a strange religion, a language he didn’t know, ruled by a King to whom his people had had to pay tribute, and despite that had been invaded and defeated by.
Over the last few months in our evening services we have been exploring some of the great stories of Scripture, and how they might shape our lives and our sense of God’s mission and our mission in the world. We’ve talked about creation, vocation, liberation, and formation. We’ve discovered that we have been created, called, freed, and shaped. This month we are thinking about stories of limitation – of what times of exile and constraint might have to teach us about God’s work in our lives and the world.

So, let’s begin our deep dive by making sure we understand the context of Daniel’s life, the situation that he was in. We find the detail of this in the first few verses of the Daniel, just before the bit that we read this evening. In around 605 BC Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, had invaded Judah, besieged and defeated and plundered Jerusalem. A fuller account of this is found in 2 Kings 24 and 2 Chronicles 36. These accounts describe the way that Jerusalem limped on for a few more years, with vassal Kings, until a few years later King Zedekiah rebelled against Nebuchadnezzar, who sent an army to reduce Jerusalem to rubble.

In 2 Kings 25:9 we read:

“He set fire to the temple of the Lord, the royal palace and all the houses of Jerusalem. Every important building he burned down.”

This was, in human terms, the tragic end of the royal house of David. The great project of the nation descended from Abraham, focussed on the worship of God in Jerusalem seemed to be over. God had promised this place to Abraham, had made a covenant that Abraham’s descendants would become a great nation. He had rescued them from slavery in Egypt, and had formed them through worship into his people. Through the exodus God had brought them into the spacious place of the promised land.

Under the great kings David and Solomon all had been well. A great nation had grown up – centred on the worship of God. But then things had started to go wrong. Solomon allowed the worship of other gods to infect the land. Two of his sons fought over the succession and the Kingdom was split. The Northern kingdom of Israel quickly abandoned the worship of God, and was the first to fall to an invading force.
The southern kingdom of Judah had some better rulers, and had times of faithfulness to God, but in the end also succumbed to unfaithfulness and so fell.

It was a bitter and tragic time for the people of God.

This is the wider background and context for the story of Daniel. But what about his personal story? Who was he?

We don’t know very much but there are some things we know. In Daniel 1:3-4 we read:
“Then the king ordered Ashpenaz, chief of his court officials, to bring into the king’s service some of the Israelites of royal family and the nobility – young men without any physical defect, handsome, showing aptitude for every kind of learning, well informed, quick to understand, and qualified to serve in the king’s palace.”

Daniel was one of these. When he first meet him he is a young man, probably in his teens, maybe early twenties. He would have had a privileged upbringing in the royal court of Jerusalem, educated and well off.

A modern day equivalent would be someone like Arthur Chatto, grand nephew of the late Queen, 20 something in line to throne. As he grew up, it is likely that there would have been some anxiety around court about the power and imperial ambitions of surrounding countries, but not this. Daniel would have expected to have a life of influence, power, comfort, as a man of importance and influence in the Jerusalem court. He inherited a position of immense privilege and was set up for life.

It wasn’t to be. Not in the way that he expected. Before he could see the fruit of any of it, his home was invaded, his city defeated, his King and his friends put in chains and dragged off to Babylon. To a strange place, far from home, a place where his future and options were seriously limited by the exile he found himself in.

This is the situation that is set up and described in the first few verses of Daniel. A very short paragraph to capture a background of deep pain and trauma, both national and personal. And this is where we pick up the story.

Daniel and his friends are in Babylon, and are being trained in the language of the country they are in and the protocols of court. They are being well fed and looked after. This is a deliberate strategy of the Babylonian empire building, to assimilate the ruling classes of conquered nations into the Babylonian culture. Symbolic of this assimilation is the changing of their names. Daniel means “God is my judge” – and this is erased by a Babylonian name.

There is some suggestion that the new name given to him may include a reference to one of the Babylonian gods, but this is far from certain. Whether or not this is the case, a renaming is definitely an act of power and control, of trying to reshape someone’s identity.

In the face of all this, Daniel takes a stand on one thing – on the issue of food. He did not feel it was right for him to eat and drink from the king’s table. He felt it would defile him in some way. Why might this have been? There are two main options.

The first is that he was concerned that the food would not have been kosher. It may have included types of meat that God’s people were not permitted to eat, such as pork.
Even if the meat itself was permitted, beef for instance, it may not have been slaughtered or prepared in a way that was consistent with the Jewish dietary laws.

The second option is that Daniel was concerned that some of the food might have come from the sacrifices to the Babylonian gods. Meat used in “sacrifices” was often then sold in the markets, and could have ended up on his plate.

Either way, eating it would have defiled Daniel, creating in his mind yet another barrier between him and God. He had so little control over much that had disrupted his life, but he saw a possibility for retaining control over a small part, and sought to use his influence to do what he could.

So, he approached the chief official and asked for permission not to eat the meat and drink the wine, but to have vegetables and water instead. After some back and forth, the official agreed to a trial period – an experiment to see how it went, to see how the lads did on it. They thrived – in fact they were seen to be in better health than those who did eat the “good stuff.”
Sometimes I wonder how the others reacted when they lost their access to the choice meat and wines and were put on the veg and water diet!

As we read on through the first seven chapters of Daniel, we find him and his friends flourishing in the Babylonian court. They have engaged with the culture, learned the language, and so grown in influence. They are still far from home, but they are doing what they can, where they can. Daniel interprets a dream for the king, and is promoted even further. Daniel’s friends resist the king’s order to bow down and worship a golden statue of the king. They are thrown into a furnace, but survive. My favourite verse from that story is Daniel 3:17-18

“If the God we serve is able to deliver us, then he will deliver us from the blazing furnace and from your Majesty’s hand. But even if he does not, we want you to know, Your Majesty, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.”

It’s an astonishing act of courage and declaration of faith. Having spent, by now, years in the Babylonian court, having gone through the “assimilation” process, they have not lost their faith in the God that they continue to worship, even in this strange land. And whatever happens to them, they will hold onto this faith.

In the end, God does rescue them, but not only that, another appears in the fire with them – walking with them in the flames. There’s a song that we sing sometimes in the morning service, that draws on this imagery very powerfully:

“There’s a grace when the heart is under fire
Another way, when the walls are closing in
And when I look at the space between
Where I used to be and this reckoning
I know I will never be alone

There was another in the fire
Standing next to me
There was another in the waters
Holding back the seas
And should I ever need reminding
Of how I’ve been set free
There is a cross that bears the burden
Where another died for me
There is another in the fire”

As we read on Daniel continues in his position of influence, even as the years pass, and the throne changes hands as the Medes invade Babylon, and Darius, king of the Medes and Persians takes over. In old age we find Daniel, threatened by jealous courtiers who see a vulnerability in his faithful prayer life, and trap the King into sentencing the elderly man into being thrown into a cave of lions. But, again, God meets him in this strangest of places, and closes the mouths of the lions, rescuing him.

And so, the first half of the book of Daniel, his biography, draws to a close at the end of chapter 6. He is still in exile, and his life has not turned out the way that it thought it would, but he has stayed faithful to God, and he has seen God do amazing things and meet him in amazing ways in places he would never have chosen to be.

The second half of the book of Daniel, chapters 7-12, are made up of various visions that Daniel had at different times in his life, and the reactions they provoked in him.

At the beginning of chapter 8 we get the details of a vision that Daniel received in the third year of Belshazzar’s reign. This was before Darius had invaded Babylon. The vision a fight between a ram and a goat, both with unusual numbers of horns. Their conflict had ended with the desolation of the sanctuary of the people of God. We picked up the reading with Gabriel, the messenger of God, bringing an explanation to Daniel. He learns that in the distant future there will be great conflict between the kingdom of Persia and the kingdom of Greece, and the corrupt kingdoms that will come out of the conflict.

I’m not going to focus on the detail of where the commentators have seen the possible fulfilment of this vision, though the consensus is that the “great horn” refers to Alexander the Great, and the little horn to “Antiochus Epiphanes IV” who desecrated the rebuilt temple in Jerusalem in 168BC.

What I would like us to focus on is verse 27:

“I, Daniel, was worn out. I lay exhausted for several days. Then I got up and went about the King’s business. I was appalled by the vision; it was beyond understanding.”
Daniel is in a really bad place. He was in exile, in a place foreign to him. He might still have been nurturing hopes that one day everything would be OK, that the people of God would return to the promised land, that Jerusalem would be restored. And then God gives him this vision of even more disaster and catastrophe for God’s people in the future. Implicit in the vision is that the sanctuary will be rebuilt – which could have been great news, apart from the fact that he’s only told this in the context of it being desecrated again.

Is it any wonder that he was appalled to the depths of his being, that he couldn’t get out of bed. God had spoken to him, and what God said broke him. We know, from the biography section, that this did not destroy his faith, he kept on keeping on, but it does sound like it was hard going for at least a time.

So. We’ve looked at various ways that Daniel faced limitations in his life, and how we lived through them faithfully. What insights might we gain from this, when our lives aren’t as we would wish them to be, as we live out our faith in a hostile culture and sometimes less than ideal circumstances?

In the “Seven Stories” book that this sermon series draws on, Gerard Kelly makes a few suggestions that we might want to consider:

Daniel refuses a “ghetto mentality” in exile. He engages with the alien culture, studying it, and taking a responsible job in it. In this place, he is concerned to maintain his personal integrity. Engaging with culture doesn’t mean being absorbed by it. Daniel was conciliatory, non-confrontational with the officials. He found creative ways to achieve his ends. What would it look like for us to do that in our work places, our families, our friendships, when we feel out of place, or overwhelmed by the culture?

One of the things that Daniel did to help with this was to maintain a disciplined life. We know of two examples of this – what he ate and how he prayed. The exact form of this is likely to be different for us, the dietary laws no longer apply, and the habit of praying towards Jerusalem no longer makes sense. However, the general principle holds. We are currently in Lent, a traditional time of exercising and developing spiritual disciplines that can sustain our faith in difficult times, but there is no reason why we should only focus on these things in Lent. Developing patterns of disciplined prayer, Bible study, and making choices about what we take into ourselves, whether that be food and drink, or music, TV, or what we read – these are year round things.

The final thing that I want to focus on is that Daniel accepted and engaged with his second choice life. We don’t get any sense that he spent a lot of time looking back or engaging in “what if” or “if only” scenarios. He got on with what was in front of him. It seems to me that one of the most damaging aspects of our modern culture is its emphasis on people living their “best lives”. This is often used as an excuse for deeply selfish behaviour, and also sets people up for despair and disappointment, as so very few people get to live what they believe is their best life. For the vast majority of people, we are in some sense or another living our second, or third, or fourth choice life. And that’s OK.

It’s not about living our best life. It’s about living our second choice life well. If you’re interested in exploring this idea further, you might like to read Viv Thomas’ book “Second Choice, Living Life as it is”

I’d like to draw this all together by inviting us to see this in Jesus’ life. In Philippians 2, Paul writes,

“Jesus, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant.”

Jesus’ time on earth was a time of exile from his home, from his Father, from much of himself. He made himself nothing, he emptied himself. He accepted limitation and constraint, firstly in his incarnation, which we will be exploring in more depth next month, and then in his capture, trial, and crucifixion. He even accepted the deepest and final limitation – that of death. In the end, it could not hold him – he was raised to life again – he burst through all those limitations on our behalf. But he could not have done that if he had not submitted to them in the first place.

In all our limitations, in the constraints we feel, in any sense of exile, we are only following in the footsteps of Jesus. He walks with us, by the Holy Spirit, and will sustain us through these times, even when we are exhausted and feel appalled at what we see God allowing to happen. Because Jesus has walked this path before us we can trust in the hope of resurrection, restoration, and return.

“There’s a grace when the heart is under fire
Another way, when the walls are closing in
And when I look at the space between
Where I used to be and this reckoning
I know I will never be alone

There was another in the fire
Standing next to me
There was another in the waters
Holding back the seas
And should I ever need reminding
Of how I’ve been set free
There is a cross that bears the burden
Where another died for me
There is another in the fire”