Introduction
Well it had to come sooner or later. I’ve tried to avoid it as long as possible. But I seem to be left with no choice, today I have to face it. Yes it’s time to look at the Bible story that’s all about eating your vegetables, or is it? I guess those of you that know my life style choices when it comes to food recognise that I probably don’t go with that interpretation of this passage. I can almost see me going the other way. OK, King how about you give me nothing but meat and Irn Bru and see how I do. Ironically enough for a modern era, the way the story is told it is almost as if the health and well being of Daniel and his friends while living on Vegetables and water is due to the direct intervention of God in a miraculous manner. It is certainly not about the health value of a vegetarian diet. It’s about not compromising on God’s standards even when it could cost you dearly. It’s about choosing whether your going to sell out or be sold out for God.
We have almost come to the end of our series on John, there will be one more sermon tonight on the last chapter of John and then we have our dramatic reading of John probably in a few weeks time, which I really encourage you to attend. There is something powerful about just reading Scripture, especially a whole a book at once and if we do it well it should really be a memorable event. Anyway as we reach the end of one series I was considering and praying about what to do for the next series. One of the ideas I had was to look at the will of God and I still intend to do this but not at the moment. As I was reading through some books searching for a book or a topic to cover, I was reading about Daniel. However, on Thursday and Friday, there were two news stories on TV that convinced me I had found the right topic. They both use the correct interpretation of the story we are looking at this morning, but one applies it correctly and one almost misses the point altogether.
The first was Jeremy Paxman’s interview with J K Rowling on BBC 2 on Thursday. If you’ve spent the last few weeks on Mars and didn’t know what this is all about. The 5th Harry Potter novel, The Order of the Phoenix, was realised on Saturday. The book is a landmark not only in Children’s fiction but in publishing. It was the biggest book launch in the world ever with more copies being printed in the first run than any other book. It is also probably the longest children’s novel ever at over 750 pages. In fact as Jeremy Paxman pointed out, it is actually longer than the New Testament. To which J K Rowling replied rather bitterly that fundamentalist Christians would probably use that as the latest reason why the series was the work of the devil. Some Christian’s reactions to Harry Potter showcases the wrong use of the story of Daniel, I think.
The other piece that caught my eye and caused me to glance away from my computer and give my full attention to BBC News 24 which I usually have on in the background when I work, was the news about the appointment of a homosexual bishop in the Church of England, or rather the Evangelical reaction to this appointment. A group of clergy from Oxford where the new Bishop will hold office had signed a petition against the appointment and were having a meeting with the appointing Bishop to see if they could change his mind. Much to the news readers utter astonishment and you could tell they were completely caught unaware by this and were shocked, no compromise had been reached. You could tell and they came out later and said that they expected there to be some sort of compromise reached to allow the Bishop to take his position with at least the appearance of support from all. The representative of the evangelicals gave a statement in which he said that the Bishop had not reversed his decision but that neither were they backing down. That the decision could split the church and they would consider bringing in outside spiritual leadership for them and their churches. They were not going to compromise.
This is what a lot of the stories from the book of Daniel, this one in particular are about not compromising. Standing firm and sticking to your guns no matter what. But before we get into it all and ask questions like, when do you defend an issue to the death and when do you gracefully agree to disagree lets look at the background to Daniel.
Background to Daniel and series
Daniel is a fascinating and controversial book. To some of you that may be surprising if all you remember are some of the stories, Daniel in the Lions Den, Shadrach, Meschak and Abednego and the fiery furnace, The King’s bad dream and the story we read today. However, this is only half of Daniel, the other half consists of dreams, visions and angelic visitations and interpretations. Here opinion is divided is Daniel talking about events in our past or future. Some see Daniel as charting world history from his time until the end of time. Others see Daniel as referring only to his future but our past, culminating in the Maccabean revolution or the coming of Christ. The fact remains that on the stuff we can all agree about what it points to, Daniel is so accurate that most liberal and even some more conservative scholars regard Daniel as history rather than prophecy, saying it must have been written after the fact. To be fair, Daniel is unique in how specific his prophecies are, there is nothing almost nothing else like them in the Bible. But I don’t think this means we have to throw away the idea that they are prophecy. If you want to learn more about what these prophecies say, what relevance if any they have for us and the end times, come to the Bible study, in our Sunday services we’re going to be sticking to the nice simple stories. I have had at least one request to do a Bible study series on Revelation. Well, I’m not ready to tackle that one yet, but perhaps Daniel will give you a flavour of how such books should be interpreted and maybe a few years time we’ll get to revelation.
The Story
So back to the story today. Daniel is a young teenager from the ruling class of Judah. Nebuchadnezzer is the son of the King of Babylon and is in charge of the Babylonian army on a mission to Egypt. On their way through they invade Judah and take prisoners from the ruling classes who are healthy and without flaws. While he is out with the army, he gets the command to return home, where he finds that his father has died and he ascends the throne. He orders that the captives he has taken should be trained in the Babylonian language and customs and that after 3 years they should then enter his service. He sets aside food and wine from his own table for their consumption, a great honour, but this is where the problem comes for Daniel and his friends. They refuse to eat the meat provided for them.
As we have already said, this is not because Daniel and his friends were vegetarian or objected to eating meat in general. The problem was not the meat itself but what had happened to it. To start with the meat was probably not kosher, killed according to the method laid down by God. But also in the ancient world, you didn’t just kill an animal and eat it, at least not big animals like cows or sheep. A sacrifice was made to a god and then the meat was sold for people to eat. This would certainly be the case for meat served at the King’s table. This was the problem. The meat had been offered and dedicated to a false god. This was completely unacceptable to Daniel and his friends as it went against the teaching of God. If they were to remain faithful to the God they still believed in, even though many of the other Jews must have felt that God had abandoned them, they would not eat the meat or drink the wine, which was also likely to have been offered to a pagan god.
They refused to comprise there beliefs or actions, even in the face of direct command from a King who held the power of life and death over them. They would not compromise. This is the great theme that ties together all the Daniel stories, do not compromise.
We are called to do the same
The message we are called to take away is the same. We must not compromise. When it comes to the law and the demands of God we must not compromise. If we are to remain the pure people that God wants us to be then we must not compromise. To put it another way, we must not sell out. Either for gain or to avoid loss, pain or death. In his life Daniel faced all three but he refused to sell out.
However, this still leaves us with many some problems. What exactly do we mean by don’t compromise. Do we mean that we should never flinch from even the most trivial detail, fighting and dying for every inch of ground no matter how insignificant. Or are there some occasions where its ok to compromise. Where do we draw our battle lines. There are some within the church who are prepared to die defending the most trivial ideas. They would die to protect the idea that the book of Jonah is history and not a parable. The world and universe and everything had to be created in 6 days. Even if you do believe these ideas, neither are that important.
One of my Christian teachers and mentors as I was growing up said that true wisdom was in categorising truth. There are some truths that were worth dying for, there are some truths worth fighting for and there are some truths where you can agree to disagree. The trick s knowing the difference. Now I would probably draw the lines somewhat differently to how he draws them but the principal is a good one.
The question is where do we draw the line. We will be looking in the coming weeks at some of the issues that Daniel thinks are worth drawing the line for. Things in which he and his friends are not prepared to give in on. But I think we can also gain from looking at some of things that they were prepared to give in on, without compromising their faith. They were prepared to serve a foreign ruler faithfully. They were prepared to learn the philosophy and learning of a pagan nation. They learnt the language of a Pagan nation. But they refused to compromise their personal purity their holiness.
This is the first thing we learn from Daniel that we are not to compromise, our holiness. In Daniel’s time this was accomplished through rituals and outwards signs that pointed to God and his holiness. In our time, this is accomplished through submission to the Holy Spirit, love of God and neighbour and following Christian ethics. The message of this first story from the book of Daniel, is that this is one of those issues where we are not to compromise were we are not to sell out. No matter what the cost, we are to maintain our holiness, our love of God and humanity. It’s not a matter of saying, ah but you don’t know my situation, I’m expected to lie, if I don’t trample on someone else then I’m not going to get the job I deserve or I’ll get the sack, my business will go under, others will think less of me, I’ll loose my friends. Daniel says even if its your life on the line, maintain your holiness. Jesus became human and died to enable and allow you to fulfil the law, to make you holy. And you are willing to give it up? For what?
The prefect example of what not to do can be found in the person of Brian Souter. Now some of you will have heard this name, others of you might not. He owns Stagecoach, the bus and train company. He is also a Christian, in fact he goes to Perth Church of the Nazarene. Many Christians are familiar with him due to his public stand against the repeal of the law that forbade the promotion of homosexuality in schools. He even appeared on Question Time on BBC TV on the issue. In Scotland he was very much the public face of the Keep the Clause campaign. I don’t object to this. However, in Scotland Brian Souter is famous for more than this, he has also been the subject of TV documentaries and investigations for his business practices. While he has never broken the law, he does practice some very ruthless and unchristian business practices. The classic one that got the most attention on Scottish TV was the oft repeated practice of finding bus routes that were run by companies smaller than his and running his buses to arrive just before his competitors and cheaper. Then when his competitors were forced to give up the bus route and often folded, he got rid of the route because it was not profitable and left the people with not bus service at all. In fact he is on record as saying that the teaching of Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount in particular have no place in business life and if he tried to run his business by it, he would be out of business.
This is completely the wrong attitude, he misses the point of Daniel. It would be easy for Daniel and his friends to separate out their personal lives from their public or work lives and agree to compromise because it was required to be successful or even to survive. But they refused. There is no work life, personal life and church life. Only life and God demands holiness in it all. Maybe it is inconvenient or makes life harder or more dangerous. But that doesn’t relieve us from the responsibility. Christian ethics are universal, they apply to all your life. They may be inconvenient in certain areas of your life but that doesn’t mean they don’t apply. It wasn’t convenient for Jesus to die, it certainly was easy. But he did it anyway.
In our story our heroes come out alright, in fact they come out on top. God is with them, this is recognised and they are rewarded. For us this will sometimes be the case. Other times it will not. You might loose your job, you might not get that promotion you deserve because your opponents resort to underhand tactics, your business might fold. Jesus did promise that things would always go your way. The world isn’t fair. But he does ask us to examine our priorities and demands that we put him at the top.
Conclusion
The message of Daniel, don’t compromise. The message of chapter 1, don’t compromise of holiness. There will be many things where we can be prepared to give in a little to get along, to agree to disagree but work together anyway. Holiness is not one them. We are called to be holy, to love God with everything and our neighbour as our selves, and on this we cannot compromise.
