Daniel answered the king: “Keep your gifts. Give the rewards to someone else. But I will still read the writing to the king and interpret it for him. 18 Listen, Your Majesty: The Most High God gave kingship, power, glory, and majesty to your father Nebuchadnezzar. 19 Because of the power God gave Nebuchadnezzar, all peoples, nations, and languages were terrified of him. He did whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted: killing or sparing, exalting or humbling. 20 But when he became arrogant, acting in stubborn pride, he was pulled off his royal throne and the glory was taken from him. 21 He was driven away from other humans, and his mind became like an animal’s. He lived with wild donkeys, he ate grass like cattle, and dew from heaven washed his body until he realized that the Most High God dominates human kingship and sets over it anyone he wants.
22 “But you who are his son, Belshazzar, you haven’t submitted, even though you’ve known all this. 23 Instead, you’ve set yourself up against the Lord of heaven! The equipment of God’s house was brought to you; and you, your princes, your consorts, and your secondary wives drank wine out of it, all the while praising the gods of silver, gold, bronze, iron, wood, and stone—gods who can’t see, hear, or know anything. But you didn’t glorify the true God who holds your very breath in his hand and who owns every road you take. (Common English Bible)
“The
Writing on the Wall: Daniel & King Belshazzar, Week Three
The Nobel Prizes.
If you were to ask people, like on Family Feud,
what the most highly regarded honor in the world is, the Nobel Prizes in peace,
literature, medicine, physics, and chemistry (plus the related prize in
economics) would pretty much have to make the shortlist. Some truly great, larger-than-life souls are
Nobel laureates, from Nelson Mandela to Malala Yousafzai, from Desmond Tutu to
Elie Wiesel.
But it almost didn’t end up being that way—the
Nobel Prize almost didn’t exist. It was
created by its namesake, Alfred Nobel, only after several newspapers mistakenly
ran an obituary for him—while he was still very much among the living—instead
of his recently deceased brother, Ludvig.
And one of the French headlines for Alfred’s
mistaken obituary read, le marchand de la
mort est mort. In English, that
translates to, the merchant of death is
dead.
Why would the papers say this about him? Because Alfred Nobel was also the inventor of
an effective, yet highly loathed, weapon in his time: dynamite.
This 19th-century warmonger then,
being presented with the stark evidence that he had been weighed, measured, and
found wanting, dedicated himself anew to a pursuit that would celebrate
humanity, not kill it en masse. And from
that desire came his action to dedicate nearly his entire fortune after he died
to the establishment of the Nobel Prizes.
All because one man, like Belshazzar, saw the writing
on the wall—or the front page—but crucially, unlike Belshazzar, realized that
he had been found wanting and strove to tip the scales once more.
This is a new sermon series based on a need and a
desire that I know has been around here for a while now—last autumn, we read
verse-by-verse through the first half of the book of Daniel in our Tuesday
morning Bible study. Why the first
half? It’s not because the sequel always
sucks, it’s simply that Daniel really is two books masquerading as one—the first
half of the book deals with Daniel’s story and biography, while the second half
deal with his prophecies. We had decided
on trying to gain an in-depth understanding of Daniel the man’s circumstances
and context, so we spent a couple of months on those first six chapters of the
book which bears his name. The study was
so enjoyable and enriching that eventually, this sermon series was born out of
it.
The fifth of these six chapters conveys a story
from which we get one of our most common English idioms: “the writing on the
wall.” We’ve all used that saying at
some point, right? We all know what it
means: that we can see the fate of something or someone before it comes about. Well, this story is the source of that idiom,
and we’ll be going through it verse-by-verse over the course of four weeks,
beginning two weeks ago with verses one through nine, which gave us the
exposition of the story and King Belshazzar’s attempts to remedy his fright
over the writing on the wall that has just appeared. Last week, in verse ten through sixteen, the
missus, Belshazzar’s queen, appears and suggests for the king and his entourage
of stupefied magicians the proper prescription: call upon Daniel. Belshazzar promptly does so, calls for
Daniel, and then lays out the problem at hand, which brings us to
today—Daniel’s response to Belshazzar up to the exact translation of the
writing on the wall, a response that takes us through verses seventeen to
twenty-three.
And Daniel’s response to Belshazzar’s seemingly
generous offer of power and gold and fine robes takes some serious courage
because, just like last week with Belshazzar’s queen when she told the king
what to do in front of God and everybody, Belshazzar could simply have decided
to have Daniel killed on the spot for his defiance in the face of such royal
munificence.
That is the sort of bravery that speaking truth
to power sometimes—maybe oftentimes—requires, though. Daniel certainly is not lacking in that
quality, but he has managed to balance it out with surviving, as he details
here, an even madder and more insane monarch in Belshazzar’s forebear
Nebuchadnezzar, so we cannot treat this or dismiss this as a story of a fool
with a death wish.
No, this is a passage that is about a
man—Belshazzar—who, after God only knows how many years of living in a palatial
cocoon of his own making, is finally forced to confront the truth about
himself, and to confront it from one of the most humble sources available to
him: an exiled Israelite, a citizen of the nation his ancestor Nebuchadnezzar
trampled over like a boot. Daniel is
literally a nobody to Belshazzar—the king didn’t even think to call on him
until the queen flat-out told him to.
But oftentimes, that is what we need for
ourselves to be humbled—we need to humbled not always by a king or a wielder of
power, but by a nobody, someone who is out of sight and out of mind to us until
they are called upon, until they become visible, until they make their presence
known to us.
Yet hear them Belshazzar will, and hear them Belshazzar
must. As too, must we. I keep reminding you of this, but it remains
true, up until the story ends with his murder, but Belshazzar represents us in
this story. He is the closest we get to
an audience proxy, someone with whom the audience is defined by and defined
with. And what Daniel has to say to him,
he has to say to us as well.
Can we say, with all honesty and authenticity,
that we always, in Daniel’s words, glorify the true God who holds our very
breath in God’s hand and who owns every road that we take? Can we say that we have never been as
Belshazzar, denying glory to God because we think ourselves in our mere mortal
shells superior to the divine? We may
have disapproved, back in the first week of this sermon series, of Belshazzar
drunkenly calling for the dishes plundered from the Jerusalem temple in order
to express his perceived superiority over God, but have we not all at some
point, intoxicated on our own vanity and self-glory, acted as though we knew
better than God?
We do it all the time, in a wide variety of
ways. We make Jesus into our image, with
all of our same political views and thoughts on people who aren’t like us, we
make the church into our image by wanting it to do things exactly same way we
have always done them for decades while ignoring what the church could be doing
that is new for today as opposed to new for yesterday, and we take a set of
tweezers to the Bible, lifting delicately and carefully the verses we like out
of context, ignoring the stories and passages from whence they came.
In short, we make our faith in God fit us, rather
than trying to drive ourselves to fit our faith. And do we really do that elsewhere in our
lives? We wait for red lights to turn
green, but we cannot abide actually having to wait on God to speak a word into
our ears. We try to lose weight in order
to fit into our clothes, but with faith, we don’t bother—our faith becomes
exactly as elastic as we want it to be.
We adjust ourselves more to our traffic lights and our wardrobes than to
our faith.
Which begs the question: what on earth is a faith
like that even good for?
I would even go one step further and suggest that—and
I know this will be a controversial notion—that a faith that is so centered on
our own selves does more harm than good.
To us, to God, to the world, all of it.
It is a madness of a faith, a madness that can drive us, just like
Belshazzar’s ancestor Nebuchadnezzar, far, far away from God. It is a madness because it is a delusion,
just as Nebuchadnezzar deluded himself into thinking he was a wild animal and
living like a wild animal, we delude ourselves into thinking
And for this delusion of ours, we have been
weighed. We have been measured. And we have indeed been found wanting. Jesus says in John 12 that the Word that He
has spoken acts on the last day as our judge, and by the standard of His words,
we have indeed been found wanting, for we do not in fact love God with all our
heart, soul, and mind, we do not love our neighbors as ourselves, and we do not
do for others what we want them to do for us.
Jesus says the first two of those three are upon which the entirety of
the Law and the Prophets—that is, much of the Old Testament, including Daniel,
as one of the prophets—are hung.
It was true for the Pharisees whom Jesus was
responding to, it was true for the Babylonian king whom Daniel is responding
to, and it is true for each of us as the Bible responds to our own sins and
iniquities, our own inabilities and flaws, our own unwillingness to be
Christian as opposed to saying that we are Christian, our own reticence to live
our faith as opposed to saying we have faith.
Do we really think that someone as brave as
Daniel, as selfless as Jesus Christ, or as loving as God Almighty, would do so
much of what we say we do in their names?
Do we really think that they actually approve of our superimposing their
names upon our agendas of selfishness, exclusion, and prejudice? Have we actually deluded ourselves into
thinking that slamming the door of the kingdom of God shut in a person’s face
is in fact a part of what being a Christian today entails?
If we do, then we are no better than Belshazzar
in the heaviest of his drunken stupors, and no more sane than Nebuchadnezzar in
the deepest throes of his madness.
But we can undo that me-first mentality that has
led to so many of our sins; at least, going forward, we can. And in doing so, the balance of our lives, of
how we are remembered as people and as a church, and of the message we send,
the legacy we create, the kingdom we help build, all of it can create an entirely
different fate. One man who was known
only for being an established ironmonger who invented newer and more efficient
ways to kill enemies of the state, he realized how he had been found wanting,
and going forward, he successfully sought to change the balance of his life,
and in so doing, genuinely changed the world.
And that—precisely that outcome—is why we ought
not to be afraid of being found wanting.
Indeed, we must embrace it, because by being made aware of it, we
actually know what needs fixing. It’s
the first step of the twelve—in order to fix a problem, you have to admit that
there is one.
We can at long last admit that we have been found
wanting. We have been given that
permission. And now, may God choose to work in us, then, something wonderfully
and amazingly new. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
Longview, Washington
August 9, 2015
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