Guest Preacher: Tom Bryan, Daniel 5-6, August 4, 2019

                                                                                                            

So I’m sitting around the house one afternoon a few weeks ago and the phone rings. It’s Pastor Lori. She explains that she is going to a conference over the weekend of August 4^th and asks if I would be available to preach that day. I looked at the calendar: nothing going on.  She’s asked me so many times in the past and I have always had to say, “No”, because I was leading worship someplace else and I’m thinking, it really is something I should do. So I say, “Sure, no problem.”

No problem? What was I thinking? It only dawned on me toward the end of our conversation that this was not a regularly assigned text that I’ve preached on two dozen times over the years. No, August 4^th falls half way through this series on Daniel - so I calmly asked – “Are we still in Daniel that week?” and she said “yep, you’ve got chapters 5 and 6” to which I responded, “Oh-Kay”. That’s when she said thanks and hung up. And I thought to myself, yeah, no problem. What do I know about Daniel?

I immediately started looking through my library, found a commentary, and then on to my journals and there it was: an issue of one of my biblical interpretation journals devoted just to Daniel. I thought “A ha!” I thought, “God is Good.” So, I opened it up and the first article that my eye fell on was entitled, The Preacher in the Lion’s Den, and I felt a shiver of fear run down my spine.

As it turned out, it was great to get back to the primary texts and really study a book that I hadn’t paid much attention to for the past thirty years, and I found out I hadn’t forgotten as much as I thought I might have. Reading about who wrote it, and when, and all that stuff was fun -- although it doesn’t preach very well -- that is, until you get to the question of “Why?” Why did Daniel get written in the first place? And when the why became clear to me again, a world of possibilities opened up for this sermon.

Again, I thought, “God is good!” And, in a nut shell, that is really the point the book of Daniel is making: God is good.

Because even if you are convinced that God is punishing you for some reason, even if you believe that God has turned a cold shoulder towards you, even though you have lived through something that has been devastating in your life and you not only mourn the loss of that something but wonder what hope there is for the future… What Daniel tells his readers, just as Jesus told his friends centuries later, is that God will not forsake his people, God will not turn away from the world. But that God is faithful and that in the end God will redeem all of it.

But still we contend with loss and heartache and pain.

So, how do you face a time of overwhelming loss - a time in life when seemingly everything you hold dear is somehow wrenched away from you, perhaps even destroyed before your very eyes? I can think of situations in the lives of people in the congregations I have served, when they have felt that kind of devastation after experiencing the death of a child or spouse, or after a fire, or maybe a sudden summer storm that destroyed everything they had worked for over the years.

But I can think of a lot of other situations that I and most of the people I’ve known have never had to live through. We mourn with the people who are seemingly living through hell. Those situations that come before our eyes as we read the news or watch it on the tube... I’m thinking of the people of Texas and Ohio who mourn the loss of loved ones due to the senseless shootings they have just experienced.

I’m thinking about the people in Syria and Yemen and all kinds of other war-torn places on our globe where people have lost everything: families, villages; where whole communities have been destroyed with just a few left to tell about it.

It was to those few survivors that had faced the kind of destruction that is really unimaginable to us that Daniel was originally addressed. This book was written for people who were being displaced and discriminated against; in some situations persecuted by forces that were bent on the destruction of every last man, woman, or child, that called themselves Jews. Some had lost everything and for them there was no one to turn to.

So they turned to Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego and Daniel for some relief from their struggle. They turned to the tales of these wise and handsome and faithful brothers in faith for some assurance that God indeed was good. And even the tales themselves must have offered some relief from the fear, maybe even offered a moment to laugh in the face of overwhelming loss and threat to life that they faced every day. 

There they received a word of hope from a book that most scholars are sure is a book with fictional heroes. Their hope came through a story.

There is a word for the kind of story and also the visions that we encounter in Daniel, the kind of stories that give people hope: they are called apocalyptic writing or literature. One of the secrets to the success of this kind of writing was the way it appeared to be a story about an ancient time, when in fact King Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonian or King Darius the Mede (in the case of today’s story) are only front men for the creator of the current problem.

We know about this kind of writing, it’s still with us. I’m sure that most of you have heard some stories about what happened, “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” Star Wars and stories like it are written for people who are questioning, wondering, who have lost things dear to them. And we get the message, don’t we? The veil is pretty thin; that connection between the world we live in (at least, according to the writer) and the tale unfolding on the screen is pretty obvious, isn’t it? And don’t you feel just a bit of a tingle when the hero is successful in blowing up the death star or whatever it is that needs to be blown up in order to save “the Federation”?

How many of us can say we are unaffected when we hear such a tale? I know I always leave Star Wars movies just a bit lighter than when I came in. I’m at least a little more hopeful.

So it was for the readers and listeners to the tale of Daniel 160 years before Jesus. It was a breath of hope when they heard Daniel’s voice from inside the lion’s den, praising God for sending the angel to keep the mouths of those hungry beasts closed.

But it takes more than just a fanciful story for hope to be restored, doesn’t it? It takes faith in something or someone who has a track record of redeeming, of saving people from the pit -- either the pit of life that they are forced to endure or the pit of despair fallen into by those who observe the pain and struggle of others but feel helpless to do anything to relieve their suffering. It takes something or someone who can bolster faith that there is good in the world and one day that good will overcome.

So, it is no wonder that the story we’ve heard this morning about Daniel has been compared to another even more familiar story for Christians. The plot against an innocent and revered man of faith and wisdom, the unyielding courage of that person against the lies, the rigged system  that only come back with a verdict of guilty and finally a stone placed over the mouth of the Lion’s Den that was surely to be Daniel’s grave.

The similarities of Daniel’s story and the story of Jesus are remarkable, but there is one notable difference that gives all who read the story of Jesus even greater hope than the story of Daniel.

And that difference is the fact that Jesus was really dead when the stone sealed his grave. But on the morning of the third day they found the stone removed and the message that God had raised Jesus began to permeate the world.

If you listen to the stories of those who have endured in faith, you will hear the proclamation that resurrection is not only for the dead, but also for the living as they are given courage to face life -- and finally death -- in the sure and certain promise of the resurrection to eternal life made certain by the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord, Jesus Christ, who a long time ago in a land far, far away was raised to life by a Good God.  Amen