Text: Daniel 1

Theme: What’s My (Bottom) Line?

Prayer:

Lord God, we ask that your word be a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path. In the name of Jesus of Nazareth who is the Word and the Light. Amen.

Introduction:

The fate of Judah and its crown jewel, Jerusalem, the capital and temple city, was decided years before its eventual destruction when the King, Josiah at the time, was unable to root out the pagan practices from the religious life of the Israelites or stop the dissolution of the Assyrian buffer state to the north of the ascending power of Babylon. Although Judah would die a slow and drawn out death, the best and the brightest of Judah were taken to Babylon before the destruction of Jerusalem and placed in the palace as hostages and slaves to the service of the king.

Our text today describes the beginnings of the Israelite experience of exile and the ways in which the flower of Israel, its youth and its hope for the future, retained its integrity and remained faithful in the midst of destruction, hopelessness, and despair.

Daniel is a book for our time because we too are a people in exile. The Apostle Peter, in his first letter to the Christians in Asia Minor, addressed them as “the exiles of the Dispersion.” (1 Peter 1:1) and then says in 2:11, “…I urge you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the desires and flesh that wage war against the soul. Conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that though they malign you as evildoers, they may see your honorable deeds and glorify God when he comes to judge.”

As Christians we are called to live as aliens and exiles in our lands. That is, we are to refuse to give up our allegiance to the God who has called us to live in the Empire but not become of it because it seeks to co-opt us by exercising its power over us.

Today I ask the question: What is my bottom line? How do I remain faithful in a faithless world? How do I remain a person of integrity when everything around me is up for grabs or even worse, for sale?

To begin with, the story of Daniel and his three friends is a winsome story. Daniel, Hananaiah, Meshael, and Azariah are young men taken from the finest families of Judah and brought to the centre of power in the Babylonian empire, to be trained in the ways of the empire, to develop their skills and talents for the sake of the empire, and to be “turned” into loyal servants of the empire. Daniel, a prescient young man who has a skill and understanding of realities beyond his years, recognizes the dangers of being sucked into the world of privilege and status, gains the trust of his handlers, refuses to eat the food from the table of the king, and vindicates the moral stand that he and his friends have taken.

There are personal lessons to be learned from the stories of Daniel and his friends. First of all, they were lay people, not priests or prophets. They were simply young men caught up in very difficult circumstances. Their nation had chosen badly, the country was destroyed, the temple was smashed and its wealth was removed to another country, its vaunted covenant with its God Yahweh seemed to amount to nothing and most likely, the population was brutalized and sold into slavery. One could not expect these young men to retain any kind of loyalty or faithfulness to a nation with inept leadership or a God who seemed to have turned his back on his people. And yet they chose to let their light shine regardless.

Secondly, they answer the question of what really counts in the matter of refusing the king’s food. Who is going to notice? Certainly not the people back in the homeland. Certainly not the people who are going to help in career advancement. Certainly not the king who may feel slighted or offended by refusal to accept his hospitality. At least do something which creates some kind of notoriety or public visibility if you are going to put yourself in danger. But these young men took their stand here and in this way. It is the personal stance, a personal mindset.

Finally, these young men acknowledged and accepted the fact that they were not in Jerusalem any more. Most likely, they were not going back. For all intents and purposes, they were leaving home permanently. The old rules and customs did not apply. They could do as they wanted. And yet they chose to remember their roots and their identity. Most importantly, they chose to remember their God.

At a time in Western Civilization which has been called “A Secular Age” (Charles Taylor), we are again invited in the reading of this text to consider who we are and what that means in our lives.

Our Dilemma

The current situation in our Canadian context bears some analysis. Over the last number of years, we as Canadians have become wealthier, more secularized, more conservative, more acquisitive, and more private. We have also become more fragmented: regions and provinces, towns and cities, vie with one another for financial superiority. Cultures, peoples and customs compete with one another for legislative “fairness and rights.” Churches fall over themselves adapting new technologies, celebrities, and worship styles to attract newcomers. Even in Christian faith communities, power is sought to gain the influence on public policies or expenditures. The fundamentalist or evangelical Christians in Canada are held in the same category as the Moral Majority in the USA. Both are seen to have an inordinate amount of influence on the political scene in our respective countries. Those with a more activist or social viewpoint are considered socialist or liberal or both and currently out of favour. Christians are increasingly unable to talk across the polarities which have developed over time and dismissed as being out of step or out of touch with the times. And so many of us “quiet Christians” have taken to “hunkering down.” We don’t want to be noticed. We want to fit in. The onslaughts of the Christian despisers have reduced many of us to becoming closet Christians. On the outside we display a sophisticated cosmopolitan appearance; on the inside to try to maintain a level of faith which at least lets us sleep at night. For the most part, I would suggest, we have bought into the blandishments of the empire and are trying in some way to figure out a way to have our cake and eat it too. In other words, we are trying hard to be people of the empire and people of the kingdom at the same time.

Our Calling

I believe that one of the biggest issues we face at the present time is the language we speak. Our senses have been dulled so that we now speak the language of culture and empire rather than the language of Christian faith. Let me explain what I mean. We have learned to speak the language of wealth, power and privilege. Our Christian faith has become part of this language. For the most part it has been an unconscious absorption of an alien ideology. We learn to say words before we know what they mean. We learn about our society and culture in the same way, blending our words of empire with the words of the kingdom. For example, we have been told that processed foodstuffs are just “food” and so we eat chips and pop as meals. We have been told that watching the television news is educational and so we depend on news reports to shape our perspective on the world. We have been told that having at least half a million dollars in RRSPs and Pension Plans are the minimum one needs for retirement and so we try to get the good job with the big salary. We have been told that becoming a Christian is a matter of the heart and that it is the way to get to heaven and so we think our daily business practices are irrelevant. We have been told that we are wealthy because God has blessed us and so we come to expect to have it. Eventually we believe it all and adjust our lives accordingly.

Then when difficulties come:

• we eat unhealthy foods with too many additives and sugars and salts, get sick and wonder why we are feeling poorly;
• we watch salacious stories in the news, become fearful of poverty or crime around us and then build gated communities to keep the riff-raff out;
• we obsess about accumulating wealth, call it financial responsibility, and then worry almost frantically about the recession or the rate of our return;
• we go to church regularly, neglect the call of Jesus to follow him and then keep living like we always did ;
• we come to expect that with faith in Christ comes wealth and entitlement, we lose our business and then wonder what we are doing wrong.

Daniel (Belteshazzar), Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were prepared to say to the culture into which they were taken that while they could live in Babylon, they could never make it their home. The God they worshipped was much bigger then the culture in which they lived. They purposed in their hearts that they would not be colonized. As Michael Green put it in his little book Reflections from the Lions’ Den, locations are negotiable, convictions are not. They saw that their survival as God’s people depended on their personal convictions. They refused to eat the food of the court; they knew that this would place them in some kind of debt to the king. They could not go there. Daniel together with his friends resolved to serve the king as best they could but not as “the king’s men.” They were always going to be “God’s men” no matter what. We see later what this meant. They kept their religious practices intact, despite the possibility of death. They continued to worship the God of Israel, pray to the God of Israel, speak the truth whether it meant good news or bad news, serve the king with honor and dignity, and die if necessary for the sake of their own integrity.

What is our bottom line? What are our convictions?

Stanley Hauerwas recently addressed the graduates of Eastern Mennonite Seminary at which time he urged them to teach the congregants in their churches to learn to speak Christian.

He writes:

God knows what possesses anyone to enter the ministry in our day. The lack of clarity about what makes Christians Christian, what makes the church the church, and continuing ambiguity in our diverse denominations about ordination itself should surely make anyone think twice about becoming a minister. Moreover the lack of consensus about what it might mean for anyone to act with authority in our society and the church cannot help but make those of us who are not ministers wonder about the psychological health of those who tell us they are called to the ministry.

Too often I fear the ministry is understood by many Christians as well as many who become ministers, to be but one expression of the more general category of something called a “helping profession.” A minister is a social worker with “a difference.” “The difference” is thought to have something to do with God, but it is not clear exactly what difference that difference is to make for the performance of your office. ...You are called to be a teacher of language, of speaking Christian. I hope to convince you that if you so understand your task, you will discover that you have your work cut out for you. But that is very good news because you now clearly have something to do.

To learn to be a Christian, to learn the discipline of the faith, is not just similar to learning another language. It is learning another language.

To speak Christian is an exacting discipline. It has taken the church centuries to develop habits of speech that help us say no more than needs to be said. But I fear too often those of us charged with responsibility to teach those habits fail to do so in a manner that those in the ministry can make their own. For example, a prominent figure in my church was asked how she understood the Christian faith in Jesus in relation to other religious traditions. She responded by saying that Christians believe that Jesus is our way to God but other traditions have their way to God. It seems to have never occurred to her that Jesus is not our way to God because he is the Son of God. A generous interpretation of what she said might think she was trying to indicate how, given the essential union of Christ’s humanity and divinity, a union necessary for our salvation, Christ as the Incarnate Word is our way to God. But unfortunately she made no mention of the Incarnation.

Her response, of course, was the response required by the speech regimes of a liberal culture that before all else demands that we be tolerant. The acknowledgment that others have other ways to God—even though it is not at all clear who the god to whom they have a way to is—is a speech act necessarily learned by Christians to insure we are not identified as political reactionaries. Many Christians think being a Christian gives them all the problems they want. In particular they fear being associated with the Christian right. I am sympathetic with their desire not to be identified with the Christian right not because the Christian right is intolerant, but because the Christian right has lost the ability to speak Christian just to the extent they identify Christian speech with what Americans call “freedom.”

Let me suggest some areas where we again need to learn to talk Christian here in Canada.

1. We need to learn to speak about our journey of faith with others. Evangelism, testimony, salvation – these are all words we need to fit into our vocabulary again. I know we have had difficulty with our past and that some words are shibboleths, passwords to indicate whether you are Christian or not. But we need to share about what Jesus means to us and the way in which our belief in Jesus has changed our lives.
   
   
2. We need to understand that the world or empire in which we live our lives is
   trying to seduce us into uncritical thinking. Far too often we take at face value the nostrums of society as being Gospel. Tolerance is not the same as acceptance or dialogue. Christian stewardship of the environment is not the same as secular environmentalism. Justice and truth-telling are more important then ever in an age of ideology and spin. Finally, we need again to become people of prayer, peace and forgiveness.
   
   
3. We need to reclaim the language of prayer, peace and forgiveness. Learning to speak Christian means that what we say requires constant practice because the predominate speech habits that also shape our speech tempt us to not know what we say when we say “Jesus.” Such a faith—that is, a faith in the resurrection of Jesus—also means that to speak Christian does not mean such speech cannot be understood by others who do not speak Christian. It does mean, however, that like us they will need to undergo training to hear what is being said and hopefully thereby become more eloquent and confident speakers. Moreover if we are confident Christian speakers, we may well discover that there are other languages that have words and grammars we can use. After all, Christian speech has been and will continue to be forged from encounters that have resulted in Christian appropriation of other ways of speaking which help us be faithful to the Gospel.

Daniel and his friends understood very well the dangers of becoming overcome by the language and of the Babylonians. Until he understood it, they knew that they needed to be faithful to the God of Israel. And so they were. And so we are called to be. Amen.

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