10 Upon hearing the commotion coming from the king and his princes, the queen entered the banqueting hall and declared, “Long live the king! Don’t be so disturbed. Don’t be so frightened. 11 There is a man in your kingdom who has the breath of holy gods in him! When your father was alive, this man was shown to possess illumination, insight, and wisdom like the very wisdom of the gods. Your father King Nebuchadnezzar appointed this man as chief over the dream interpreters, enchanters, Chaldeans, and diviners. Yes, your father did this 12 because this man—Daniel, the one the king named Belteshazzar—possesses an extraordinary spirit, knowledge, and insight into the meaning of dreams. He can explain ambiguities and resolve mysteries. Now in light of all that, summon Daniel! He will explain the meaning of this thing.”
13 So Daniel was brought before the king. The king said to him, “So you are Daniel, the Daniel from the exiles that my father the king brought from Judah? 14 I have heard that the breath of the gods is in you and that you possess illumination, insight, and extraordinary wisdom. 15 Now, the sages and the dream interpreters were brought before me to read this writing and interpret it for me, but they couldn’t explain its meaning. 16 But I’ve heard that you can explain meanings and solve mysteries. So if you can read this writing and interpret it for me, you will wear royal robes, have a gold chain around your neck, and will rule the kingdom as third in command.” (Common English Bible)
“The
Writing on the Wall: Daniel & King Belshazzar,” Week Two
The Craigslist ad was an extraordinarily uncommon
one—and I say that as someone who has seen a for-sale ad on Craigslist
advertising a “slightly used Star Destroyer,” with an image from the trailer
for the upcoming The Force Awakens installment of the Star Wars franchise. (And no, George Lucas did not pay me to make
that plug. He wouldn’t have to. I’m shameless.)
No, this was an ad looking to rent rather than
sell. And in this case, it was to rent a
family.
You heard that right. A family.
18-year-old Natalie Carson wrote in her ad, in part:
I am
currently a young female college student looking to rent a family that I can
spend time with on my birthday in a few weeks.
I aged out of foster care, and since I was never adopted, I don’t have a
family to spend holidays or birthdays with.
I was placed in foster care after being severely abused by my parents,
so spending time with my biological parents is not an option…I just want one
day that I can feel important and special, and like I matter even if I really
don’t. I have never had a good birthday
so I figure why not this birthday. I am
NOT looking for any monetary support as I also work. I can pay $8 an hour.
That’s not what we usually think of when we’re
asked to think of how a family is formed, or of how our family got formed. I ask you who your family is, and you’re apt
to mention a parent or two, a sibling or three, probably some aunts and uncles
and cousins as well. But that is the
normal, within-the-lines, inside-the-box version of family. It’s the version of family that isn’t going
to come even close to a standard deviation.
So what about our folks who are at the edges of
that bell curve, though? What about our
folks on the outliers and outskirts, who are beyond the standard
deviation? How do we ask them to define
their lives and families, and then expect those answers to measure up to ours?
We can’t, and in all honesty, we shouldn’t. Which is the whole point of this second act
of Daniel 5, when someone on the far side of the bell curve gets suggested,
after all of the magicians and soothsayers who made up Plan A failed to measure
up.
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 last week 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, and now, 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.
It matters a great deal that the queen—who conspicuously
is unnamed by Daniel’s biographer—is the one who recommends him to King
Belshazzar in the first place. Being a queen
in an ancient Near East empire is not like being the Queen of England today,
where you are accorded near-universal respect and deference. Only a century or so later in Persia (the
soon-to-be conquerors of Babylon), King Xerxes will dismiss his queen, Vashti,
because of her any-reasonable-person-would-say-no-to-it refusal to parade
around naked for him and his drunken partygoers, wearing nothing but her royal
crown.
So what Belshazzar’s queen does here in Daniel 5
is not simply a case of helpful spousal input, it is not as though Belshazzar
simply can’t get the grill going quite right and his wife is saying, “Here,
honey, why don’t you use newspaper to light the charcoal.” There are very real, very serious
implications for the queen. If
Belshazzar—who, like Xerxes in Esther 1, is almost certainly sauced seven ways
to Sunday right now—decides that her attempts to help him are unwelcome, he
could dismiss her as easily as Xerxes did Vashti.
And she does it all for going to bat for an
Israelite—not a Babylonian. Yes, Daniel
has been given a Babylonian name, Belteshazzar, just like the millions of
slaves kidnapped from west Africa were given Spanish and English names over the
course of the transatlantic slave trade, but he is still Daniel, in every sense
of the term, for his name, in Hebrew, in fact means “My judge is God”—“Dan” is
a shortening of “dayan,” which means “judge,” and “el” is a shortening of “Elohim,”
which is one of the names for God throughout various parts of the Old
Testament. But we’ll get to Daniel
himself next week, for even though he has been summoned today, he has yet to
speak.
Instead, the rest of this passage represents King
Belshazzar’s first and only real attempt forward at trying to see what has just
happened in a different light than would first have been his instinct. He has first called for all of his pagan
magicians and sages, the step that fits entirely within the box for him, the
step that constitutes no deviation at all, that represents a coloring entirely
within the lines.
Also, remember what I said last week—that at
least initially in the story, Belshazzar is the closest thing we have to an
audience proxy. He is the person for
whom the words of Daniel will be intended, for whom the as-yet uninterpreted
words of God are intended. And this is
the closest he gets to any manner of redemption at all in this story; he is a
thoroughly despicable ruler and human being, but at least this once, when
pushed to measure up his situation and perspective from someone who he
otherwise might not take counsel from—his queen—Belshazzar actually does what
she says. For once—one time, the only
time in this story—he does the right thing.
But the right thing to do was not the predictable
thing to do. Belshazzar’s initial
impulse, to call on the sycophants and yes-men he usually would call on, did
him no good, it put him no closer to understanding the truth behind the writing
that has suddenly and miraculously appeared on the wall.
How often is that the case for us? Doing what we have always done, it doesn’t
get us any closer to where we need to be, but we still do it because that’s
what we know and what we’re used to doing.
We aren’t willing to measure our reality by the
extremes of that reality—we’d only rather measure it up by what is comfortable
to us, by what is known to us, by what we’ve always done.
Think about what that means for someone like
Natalie Carson, in a world full of people with families, what about the person
who has none? She is on the fringes and
goes to the fringes to try to find a family, because she doesn’t have the
luxury we do of starting from within the mainstream. She has had to redefine a mainstream
institution like the family to fit her differing circumstances.
Except they are not so differing after all. Natalie has used her fifteen minutes of fame
generated by the news stories about her to remind her interviewers that she is
by far not the only person to lack a family because they never got adopted and
aged out of the foster care system.
There are plenty, too many, other Natalie Carsons out there.
And we, as the church, are in the business of—and
I know this will sound scary to you—of redefining something as familiar and
foundational and fundamental as the idea of ‘family.’ The yes-men and head-nodders who follow
Belshazzar around in his court may fancy themselves part of his inner circle,
but it is the willingness to speak truth in love that I think defines family—it
is certainly why I think of this church as a family even though I’m not related
by blood to any of you.
But we also have to keep re-thinking what our
family is and how to keep making it grow.
Part of the church’s problem—a big part of it, in reality—is that we
became like Belshazzar, altogether too willing to simply do the same thing each
and every time: call upon the same yes-men, offer the same reward, do
everything exactly the same, even as a more marginalized voice pushed off to
the side is saying, with every justification, “Hey, why haven’t you tried doing
this instead?”
And so we began measuring our church families not
by the depth of spiritual energy, or the openness of the welcome extended to
strangers, or the effectiveness of our missions not by the impact we are having
upon others, or the relationships we are helping people form with God, but
rather, by whether we’re doing those things the same way everyone before us has
been doing them.
We expect people to do religion the way we have
always done it, as though that was how the original church in Acts of the
Apostles did it, when in reality, it is only how the church of the 20th
century has done it. The magicians and
tea leaf-readers Belshazzar originally calls for, that’s how it used to be
done. That’s how Belshazzar measured it
up. But it’s not how the translation
will ever get done.
Daniel, then, represents the way it could be
done, the way the words’ meaning could be measured, if Belshazzar were to open
his eyes to a new possibility, and to begin measuring himself, and his entire
notion of truth, by what God reveals to him instead of what he selfishly thinks
of himself.
So Belshazzar calls for Daniel. He calls for a new way of tackling this
dilemma that he has gotten himself into, and while it will not, in the end, be
enough to save him (I know, I know “spoiler alert” or somesuch), may it be, in
fact, just enough to see God’s church through to God’s return to earth.
May it be so.
Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
August 2, 2015
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