Feet to the Fire (1st Sunday of Advent; Daniel 3:1, 8-30; December 3, 2017)

Feet to the Fire

1st Sunday of Advent
Daniel 3:1, 8-30
December 3, 2017

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

While the book of Daniel is set during the exile, it was written quite a bit later and in a time that we don't know much about. But we'll have to if we are to understand what the book of Daniel is trying to do, how the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego works, and why we should care about it all, especially on "Stewardship Sunday."

The story starts with Alexander the Great. Alexander was an almost-Greek who hailed from Macedon. Macedonians were esteemed by the Greeks in the same way that proper Bostonians esteem those they might call rednecks. Alexander loved and envied Greek culture in the way that only an outsider can. When his father King Phillip II of Macedon died and left him king, he set about not only to unite Greece (by conquering it) but also to unite the Greek and Persian cultures by bringing the good news of Greek-ness to them along with his conquering army.

In just ten years, Alexander conquered the countries that are now called Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Cleveland, Pakistan, and part of India. And then he died.

Quite inconsiderately, he failed to name a successor, so his family members and generals sat down and worked out a peacefully negotiated a power-sharing arrangement that lasted for centuries. No, of course they didn't. Everyone grabbed what they could and for the next twenty years or so fought each other to hold on to what they had. Eventually, Alexander's empire became four kingdoms under four of his former generals: Greece and Macedonia under Cassander; Parts of present-day Turkey under Lysimachus; Egypt and Palestine under Ptolemy; and, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and parts of Central Asia under Seleucis. By the way,
Seleucis was the first European to discover that, while it is possible to conquer Afghanistan, it is not possible to hold it. It's the mountains, you see.

Now the Jewish people had been living in the semi-independent Persian province of Yehud, roughly where the kingdom of Judah had been. After Alexander, the province of Yehud fell under the control of the Ptolemies of Egypt. The Ptolemies followed the Persian policy of letting the Jews govern their own affairs as long as they paid their taxes.

All was relatively well for the Jews until an ambitious and successful king of the Seleucid kingdom rose and among other things conquered Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside. Their king—whose name was Antiochus IV—was determined to unite his kingdom by imposing Greek cultural and religious practices everywhere, including Jerusalem. Antiochus modestly called himself "Epiphanes (God made manifest)" and believed himself to be divinely appointed to make Greeks out of Jews. He built a gymnasium in Jerusalem. The gymnasium was where men could engage in physical training and sports. The word comes from the Greek word, gymnos, which means "naked" because Greeks admired human bodies and athletes trained and competed naked. This did not sit well with many of the Jews.

When Antiochus set up a statue of Zeus in the Temple, forced Jews to place their offerings at the feet of a statue of himself, and required that Jewish men undergo surgery to reverse their circumcision, Judea erupted in rebellion. A man named Judas quickly emerged as the leader in a guerrilla war. Judas was amazingly successful and was nicknamed "The Hammer" or "Maccabeus" as it appears in Handel's oratorio Judas Maccabeus.

Judas liberated most of Jerusalem, including the Temple, which he reconsecrated. Perhaps you know the story. There was only enough oil to light the Lamp of Presence for one day, but miraculously, the oil lasted for the entire eight days needed to complete the process. This miracle has been remembered by Jews ever since in the festival of Hanukkah. A Jewish kingdom was founded that retained its independence for the next century, until the Romans took over.

But all this good news came later. The Book of Daniel was written before Judas' successes. It was written in the time when things looked really bad for the Jews. Judas had only a few hundred fighters. Antiochus had some seventy thousand soldiers who were well-quipped and even boasted a regiment of elephants. How in the world would Judah succeed against such odds when even God had seemed to turn the other way? Worse yet, many Jews saw no real problem with taking on a few Greek customs. Much that Greek culture had to offer was well worth considering. And besides, of what use were ancient rituals and absurd rules in the face of such military, economic, and cultural strength?

For Jews who were committed to the values of the ancient covenant, Jews whose allegiance was firmly given to the God of that covenant, Jews who were prepared to be strange and odd in order to embody God's dream in the world these were very dark days.

What do people do when the days are dark and they cannot imagine a way forward? If they are Methodists, I suppose they form commissions and task forces and they invite the input of paid consultants who come with ideas that are neither new nor particularly brilliant but which are re-packaged and labeled with a new set of jargon. But that isn't what Jews under Antiochus did. To find their way forward, they looked back. They looked for another time when days were dark and the news was dire. They looked back to the exile to the stories of a few faithful young men who held out for Jewishness against the mightiest empire they had ever seen, far more powerful than the Seleucid kingdom could ever dream to be.

They looked back to the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Maybe the story got a few "improvements" as they retold it for a new situation, maybe not. As it comes to us, it bears remarkable and certainly not accidental resemblances to their own story some four hundred years later.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were strange, we are told earlier in the book. The meat they were offered had been offered to idols, so they weren't about to eat it. The wine was suspect. So they insisted on living on water and vegetables. In spite of this unhealthy diet, they thrived, which might have been a sign for them, an assurance that if they held fast to their Jewishness, things would work out.

But then came the real test. Some people who resented and hated the Jews proposed that the king set up an idol that must be worshiped at set times and that whoever refused would be thrown into a holocaust, a furnace that would consume anything put in it. Well, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego politely but firmly refused. They were seized and the furnace was superheated, even to the point of burning up the guards who threw the three into it. And yet, they were unharmed. The king saw them and another whom he described as a "messenger," that is, an angel walking around and having a great old time as if they were in a sauna instead of a blast furnace.

The king called them out. Not only weren't they burned, they didn't even smell scorched. The king, while not converted exactly, was mightily impressed and decreed that no one should bad mouth the God of the Jews. Not only had their Jewishness not caused them harm, even though they were pretty scared at times, in the end they did very well indeed.

And this was the point of the story for the readers of Daniel. Even in a time when the value of Jewishness was being questioned by their own people, in a time when it was dangerous to be a Jew, especially a committed and practicing Jew, in a time when it was tempting to go into hiding or simply conform, God would still watch over them as God had watched over Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. They would be delivered from harm. The covenant promises were not broken, nor was the God of the covenant dead. The dream lived on.

That, I think, is pretty good use of an old story, refashioned and reshaped for a new day as it may have been. So this is the time for asking, "So what? What does that have to do with us?" But I suspect you might already have a hint of an answer to that question.

In case you haven't noticed these are not the brightest of days and I'm not referring to the shortening days, although they certainly aren't helping. Never that we can remember have we been more divided politically, socially, and financially. The gap between the rich and the poor has grown into a chasm, almost a "great gulf fixed." Some of us might be able to ignore all that as mere "politics," but there are deep chasms among Christian folks, too. There are two different versions of Christianity out there. One is powerful, intolerant, and fully domesticated. The other hasn't exactly found its voice yet, but is expressed by folks like Rev. William Barber when he says, "I’m worried by the way faith is cynically used by some to serve hate, fear, racism and greed." He anchors a new vision--which is really God's ancient dream--in a moral rather than political foundation. He says, "There are certain things that are not left, right, but they are the center of authentic moral values—like love, like justice, like mercy, like caring for the least of these."¹

In the course of history there are points at which when there is a parting of the ways, a crisis of identity, that brings with it the necessity to decide who we are. Much of the time we can muddle along taking a piece from here and piece from there, mixing it together, and calling it good enough. But this isn't one of those times. Young people believe that the Christian church is judgmental and intolerant, that it rejects science and the use of reason, and that it serves the interests of the political right. That is a very broad-brush conclusion, but it is largely correct. The religion of Jesus the agitator, the speaker of truth to power, the bringer of good news to the poor, is not at all popular even, or rather especially, among those who claim the loudest to be his supporters.

This is one of those times when it is not possible to be a private follower of Jesus. Like those long ago who would not bring their offerings to a Temple in which the god Zeus was displayed and who would not allow the signs of their Jewishness to be erased, and like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego long before them who would not worship an object made by human hands in place of the living God, we are called to acts of affirmation and refusal, to public acts of solidarity with those whom God loves, and to equally public rejection of all the allegiances that call on us to break faith and deny who we are called to be.

And this has everything to do with stewardship. (You were waiting for that, weren't you? Or had you forgotten?) It has everything to do with stewardship because stewardship is everything that we do after we realize that God loves us and after we have said yes to that love, however hesitantly. To be loved by God is to know that our identity is anchored in that love. For our identity to be rooted in God's love is to be committed to extend that love by every means at our disposal. I'm not talking here about convincing other people that our way of being God's people is right and theirs is wrong. I'm talking about loving the people whom God loves in the way that God loves them. That's a far stretch, I know, but we don't have to be able to do it fully to do it a little and then a little more. Stewardship understood in this way is all about growing in generosity: generosity with our time, generosity with our presence, generosity with our thought and prayer, and, certainly, our generosity with our money and other material resources. These are the things that God has to work with, they are the way in which we can become a part of the work that God is doing, they are the raw materials of God's dream.

That is why I have no reluctance to invite you to give, to give boldly, to give unstintingly. It's not the only way we respond to God's love at work in us and in the world, but it is certainly one of the most important ways that we become the people that God wants us to be for our own sake, that God needs us to be for the sake of the world, and that God dreams for us to be for the sake of God's dream.

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1 Dani McClain, “The Rev. William Barber Is Bringing MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign Back to Life,” The Nation, May 19, 2017, https://www.thenation.com/article/rev-william-barber-is-bringing-mlks-poor-peoples-campaign-back-to-life/.