2011-05-01pm Sermon Daniel 6
|
110501pm Daniel 6 Mark 16 The story of Daniel in the lions' den is so familiar that it has almost become tamed, almost a children's Sunday school story. Really it's a story of utter horror, transformed by an utterly miraculous deliverance – that's why we read it now, as it throws light on the Resurrection of Jesus: Jesus, like Daniel, the innocent Jew condemned to death by a brutal pagan regime, sealed in a cave with a huge stone, then the stone rolled away and he has overcome death. The difference is that of course Jesus was condemned by his own people the Jews, and was really dead, and was raised, and rather than leaving the old kingdom in place has opened up the kingdom of God. My Easter reading is The Shape of Living by David Ford, prof at Cambridge. He begins by asking what it is that we find overwhelming. This made me think of the lions: let's think about them for a moment. Have you ever seen lions? Most of us will only see them on TV or in captivity. These lions in Daniel are an instrument of terror, a terrifying and humiliating means of execution. Hundreds of years later, the Romans used lions and other wild animals in the arena, either to fight each other or to kill condemned prisoners, and Christians were killed in horrible ways. To be fair, the lions themselves in Daniel are victims of abuse. The sorriest lion I ever saw was outside Madrid where I stopped at a ramshackle service station and there was a young lion in a tiny cage for the amusement of the public. It's not what they were designed for, kept in prison, presumably underfed to be used as a weapon – just as the principalities and powers are not doing what they were designed for. But even in captivity lions are impressive – I always imagine how I would feel if the fence wasn't there. There are no lions in Biblical lands now, but in Bible times they were seen as a threat, a dangerous predator, particularly a risk to livestock and those looking after them. The young David says that when a lion or a bear attacked the flock he went after it and fought it and rescued the sheep from its mouth. In Isaiah's vision of God's rule, the taming of the lion is a symbol of peace: the wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together, and a little child will lead them (Isa 11:6). And they are symbolic. The lion is a symbol of the tribe of Judah: you are a lion's cub O Judah... like a lion he crouches down, like a lioness - who dares to rouse him? (Gen 49:9). So in the NT the lion becomes a symbol of both Satan and Jesus. Peter says Be self controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith... (1 Peter 5:8f). Paul speaks about the favourable outcome of one of his trials: At my first defence no one came to my support, but everyone deserted me... but the Lord stood at my side and gave me strength, so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might hear it. And I was delivered from the lion's mouth. The Lord will rescue me from every evil attack... (2 Tim 4:16ff). The lion here is what is opposing the spreading of the gospel. But in Rev 5:5 it is the risen Lord Jesus Christ who is the lion: as John weeps because no one is worthy to unroll the scroll and let God's plan to save the world take its course, one of the elders said to me, Do not weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, has triumphed. He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals. Jesus was born of the tribe of Judah, as was David his ancestor, but Jesus is also the root of David because he is the Son of God from before Creation. But this lion of Judah has not overcome our enemy by using the devil's own tactics. John is told, look at the Lion of Judah who as triumphed, and the next verse says Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing in the centre of the thone... The Lion is a slaughtered Lamb: Jesus triumphed by his death on the cross. Now the point of all this is to get us to think, what are the 'lions' in our lives? What is it that is much more powerful, much bigger and stronger than us? To go back to David Ford, what do we find most overwhelming? We can be overwhelmed in bad ways, but also in good ways. In bad ways it might be things that are dangerous, frightening, unpredictable, threatening to our sense of well being; or things that just seem to big, beyond our control. Ford says, 'Of all the sources of overwhelming, people are the most significant. Our most powerful feelings relate to them, feelings such as love, anger, jealousy, hatred, rivalry, gratitude, hero worship, status seeking and the urge to dominate. A big part of our inner life is taken up with people, and they loom large in our memories, fantasies and hopes.' They can be the people who inhabit our hearts all the time, who may be living or dead, or even fictional, and as well as our inner circle we are constantly inundated by strangers, groups, communities, people we hear about through the media. This ties in with the big issues and forces that shape the world. We might be overwhelmed by global resources, oil, water, the environment, CO2, global warming; or by wars and reports of wars, or by poverty. And our innermost desires are constantly manipulated and orchestrated by the culture we live in, by the entertainment industry, advertising and mass politics. [Having been fasting from TV during Lent, I can testify how heartily sick of advertising and commentary I am when I now put it back on.] We can be overwhelmed by our own desires, appetites and compulsions. The three big enemies that our baptism service names are the world, the flesh and the devil. We constantly face being overwhelmed by sin – we know that when we wound others we inflict wounds on our own hearts; by Satan – who is like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour; and ultimately by death – which threatens to destroy the whole meaning of our life. But we can also be overwhelmed in good ways, by beauty, truth, intellectual understanding, by love and passion and joy and all the wonderful experiences life can give us. And how often are these good overwhelmings are tied up with the bad ones in complicated ways. Often it's through suffering that love flourishes, it's through danger that courage is refined, it's through struggle that character is formed. And in this way, we can be overwhelmed by God. If the lions in the den are the forces that threaten our life, the Lion of Judah who has triumphed over death is the force of love and life that overwhelms us with God's goodness and grace. We can see the 'lions', the people and situations that threaten our well being and our hearts, but we don't want to become too defensive: we don't want to shut ourselves off and shut life out. Jesus lay in the tomb: he wasn't saved from death, like Daniel, but saved through death. The lions got him: the forces of sin (our sin) of Satan and of death really killed him. But he shut their mouths. He overwhelmed sin by his forgiveness, he overwhelmed Satan by his love, he overwhelmed death by the indestructible life of God. The hymn 'Ye choirs of new Jerusalem' celebrates 'How Judah’s lion burst his chains/ and crushed the serpent’s head;/ and brought with him, from death’s domains,/ the long-imprisoned dead.' There's a theme in theology called 'the harrowing of hell', which tries to imagine what Jesus was doing when he was dead. It pictures him going through hell and opening the prison doors, much as the stone was rolled away from the tomb. The Easter message is that Christ truly has conquered, and although the lions still roam around, sooner or later they are finished. My last quote from Ford is this: 'Joy may be a greater scandal than evil, suffering and death. Some people have a realism that can come to terms with the darker side but cannot cope with something that seems too good to be true.' We may be tempted just to get used to a world full of lions, cynical, defensive, stingy, closed off. At the end of the Daniel story we squeamishly omitted 6:24. The lions were still lions and Darius was still a tyrant. But the resurrection of Christ invades us with something greater, the power of his love and life. And that really is overwhelming. As I get to Easter I can't wait to preach about Pentecost! The overwhelming gift of Baptism in the Spirit, the abundant joyful love of God poured out on us.
|