So this story follows on fairly promptly after the events we reflected on last week. And as the opening of the story says, things are indeed not looking good for God’s people. The city of Jerusalem has been destroyed. The house of the Lord and the king’s house have been burned down and the king and Jerusalem’s elites (of which Daniel was one) have been taken into exile leaving the poor in Jerusalem to fend for themselves in the destroyed land.
Many other countries and kingdoms disappeared altogether when similar disasters befell them. And many individuals too question faith when things are not going well. We tend to equate God’s presence with things going really great for us.
But the people of Judah did not. Somehow this tragedy didn’t lead them to abandon their faith and be consumed by their captors. Rather somehow they were able to find God in their devastation. Even as they wrestled and cried out “how long?” perhaps because they were able to do this, they found that his love and faithfulness remained steadfast. Or as the story put it, “God had not left his people. He was with them and looking after them.”
And as I said last week much of the Hebrew Scriptures were written, edited and compiled during this time, as the people wrestled with and tried to make sense of what was happening to them, including the book of Daniel. And I think this story of how Daniel, and some of his friends responded to Babylon and its ideology and values also offers us as 21st century Christians a way to respond to the ideology around us.
Last week, drawing on Brueggemann I said the exiles had three ways to respond to their captors.
Firstly, they could assimilate. There were those in Babylon who found Jewishness simply too demanding, and they joined dominant Babylonian values and identity. Daniel did not do this. He, and some friends, who were unfortunately left out of the version we watched today, refused to do this. I think when these friends are left out we do not have all the story we need, because when resisting the dominant narrative we need to do it with others. At great inconvenience and risk to themselves they chose not to eat the king’s food, they would not worship the golden statue of the king nor would they stop praying to God. In other words they would not give into idolatry.
Idolatry, is another one of those very loaded words. But a definition I read this week defines, idolatry as worshipping things not worthy of our worship. Someone whose name I can’t remember, once said a good way to work out what you worship is what you give your time to and what you give your money to. I wonder how many of us give much of our time and money to things not worthy of it.
David Foster Wallace says, “there is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing god or a spiritual type thing to worship. . . . is that pretty much everything else will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough. Worship your body and beauty you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing (and they will), you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
It seems to me Daniel and his friends knew that food and gold were not worthy of their worship. They knew what they worshipped mattered because what we spend our time and money on will eventually shape us. We will eventually look like our idols. So like them, we should probably make sure that what we worship is something or someone we really want to end up like.
Secondly, they could respond in despair, fear and anger. They could have chosen to isolate themselves from the people around them. But they did not do this either. It seems to me they chose the route that Jeremiah urged,
“Build houses and dwell in them; plant gardens and eat their fruit. Take wives and beget sons and daughters; — that you may be increased there, and not diminished. And seek the peace of the city where I have caused you to be carried away, and pray to the Lord for it; for in its peace you will have peace.”
And finally, the people of Judah in exile could recover their traditions, their practises of formation, their liturgies and stories and recast them in terms appropriate to the new situation of faith.
Before the exile it seems the Hebrew people and their kings had forgotten these things. In exile, Daniel, and his friends and others as well rediscovered them. They discovered that even in exile practises of spiritual formation result in personal as well as political reformation.
I think this too is a good way for the church today. I think we do need to resist the market ideology of our culture that tells us the goal of life is to produce more and consume more so we can be richer and more powerful and more well thought of.
I think we do need to recover our traditions and practises like Daniel practised that keep us in tune with the mysterious reality of God. Practises that remind us of our rather odd identity and baptism and that there are ways of structuring economic life that are fairer and more just. That the world and everything in it is in fact sacred and we are to care for it. That we are not to be takers but givers. Our value (and the earth’s) comes not from what we can produce and consume but because we are created in the image of triune God and loved by him. That the goal of life is not wealth and fame but to be generous, to live together in welcoming communities of hospitality and grace.
However, this does not mean we should not reject the world and the people in it.
We should not isolate ourselves from others but seek to find what we have common.
It is indeed good to participate in democracies and do all we can in our work and in our families and in our neighbourhoods and with our vote to seek the common good. It is good to participate in community events and share joy and wonder with humanity. Or as Jeremiah puts it, seek the peace of the city and pray to the Lord for it.”
It is hard to do this, when we become like the so called “other helpers” in this story. Perhaps, like me, you recognised in them your own envy, the ways you too get caught up in playing status games that make it really hard to see others in their full humanity.
Elizabeth Oldfield whose podcast the sacred I am really into at the moment, suggests, these games are dehumanising for both the winners and losers. And let’s be honest, almost all of us if we live long enough will be both. These games make shared status a premise for friendship in a way that I suspect subtly undermines it. It becomes conditional, vulnerable to a change in status.
Daniel’s competitors became so consumed by their envy, they were willing to have him eaten by lions. Perhaps we are not at risk of going that far. None the less I think that envy has ways of seriously harming us all.
I believe part of the problem here is that we are looking for affirmation in the wrong place, hoping a human gaze can satisfy a need designed to be met by something else.
And so again we need to be intentional about practices that actively subvert these games. We need to come regularly to places that tell another story because status anxiety is in the air we breathe.
This table here, the table of Jesus, is a table in which status has no meaning at all. It is a table we share with people around the world and across the ages. Unlike the kings table that Daniel refused to eat at and most of our tables, my own included, those who sit at it are not just people like me.
The version of the story of Daniel we heard today points us to the gospel that is in this story. That is the good news within it, that even in exile God is sovereign and faithful. Kings come and go, kingdoms rise and fall, yet God remains, as do God those who wait on Him, who follow his ways even in the dark places.