SERMON 68 - SUNDAY 22 NOVEMBER 2015

Sermon delivered at Whaddon Roman Catholic Chapel, Whaddon, Wiltshire – Sunday 22nd November 2015

May I speak in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and may these words be a blessing to all who hear them.  Amen

I announced that I was preparing this sermon on the social media website, Facebook, in the hope that somebody might give me some inspiration on whether I should preach on the first or second reading and, in having decided that I would like us to reflect on the first reading, I wrote “Preparing my sermon for Sunday on Daniel”. One of my contacts wrote back “Oh, when I saw you were writing about Daniel I immediately thought about Daniel Craig and the latest Bond movie “Spectre”!  Such is the modern world – so many have forgotten about some of the most interesting and moving books in the bible and especially the richness contained within the Old Testament.  But our reading this evening could be so easily subtitled Daniel and the Spectre – the hand that writes on the wall.

Daniel is a most wonderful book because it spans, in my view, the theology of Moses and the Jews right across to our modern Christian theology of the gospels and epistles of the New Testament. It is apocryphal – a book full of prophesies and messages for us today in our modern world.

I love the book of Daniel – it is a good and relatively easy read - which I like.  You will recall that after besieging Judah and in particular the capital of Jerusalem, the Babylonians sacked the Temple and took away into captivity in Babylon not only the valuable vessels from the Temple but also the good and great of Jewish society including administrators and scholars like Daniel.  You will recall how Daniel came to the notice of the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, when he was able to interpret a number of dreams which the king had (just as Joseph had done for the Egyptian pharaoh) and warn him of calamities ahead, prophesying his future.  

You will also recall how Daniel’s colleagues, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah were given Babylonian ones (Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego) and after refusing to bow down to the golden image of the king they were flung into the fiery furnace only to be saved by a fourth entity seen in the furnace dancing around with the other three.  Hananiah and his two colleagues came out with not a hair singed in contrast to the king’s guards who were killed instantly by the heat when the door was opened I have no doubt that the fourth entity seen was a manifestation of the Holy Spirit which acted as God’s protection to those who truly believe that God, Yahweh, Jehovah, is the only true and living God and that all others are false.  Later on, Daniel himself is thrown into the Den of Lions for his openness in praying to God in contravention of an order of the conquering King Darius of Persia that no one is to worship any God or anything other than Darius himself.  Again, God intervenes and tames the lions so they do not hurt Daniel.

It is amazing that after all these manifestations both to the Baylonian kings and later those from Persia that they continue to worship other idols and defile or disrespect the Jewish belief in Yahweh.

In the passage we heard this evening, Nebuchadnezzar has, as prophesised by Daniel in the interpretation of the dream of the tree was stripped of his kingdom and driven away from his kingdom to live as a wild man – homeless and destitute and we read having lost his sanity eating grass like the cattle.  Having prayed to Daniel’s God, he was later restored but it should have been a salutary lesson to him and all his successors not to mess with God.

   

Now we see his son, King Belshazzar, despite the fact that he would have known well the stories from his predecessor’s reign of great and wondrous miracles and the fate of Nebuchadnezzar, indulging in a great banquet for his nobles, asking for the holy gold and silver vessels from the sacked Temple to be brought out and used for this orgy of greed and debauchery – we can well imagine the type of scene it probably was with the King and his wife and concubines and the nobles with their wives and concubines getting steadily drunker and more raucous. Belshazzar would also have known the significance of the Temple’s sacred vessels and their importance to his Jewish subjects. But worse still, as they drank from these vessels they worshipped the gods of gold, silver and bronze – the materials they were made from and not the God for whom they were made.

The Book of Daniel gives us two well-known phrases which we frequently use in our modern day speech – and I suspect the majority of people using them do not know of their origin or significance.  The first is “to enter the lion’s den” meaning to face a dangerous or uncomfortable situation and the second is “the writing’s on the wall” meaning that the end, usually a bad ending, is inevitable and in sight. The second of these comes directly from tonight’s passage.

So here is Daniel’s spectre!  A human hand suddenly appears and starts writing word which nobody can understand or read – in a language unknown to the onlookers.  After calling the enchanters, soothsayers, astrologers and other wise people, who cannot shed any light either on the meaning of the words, the queen remembers that Daniel had often been called upon by Nebuchadnezzar to interpret dreams and portents. He is called and sets about giving Belshazzar the interpretation of the words written which we are told are Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin meaning:

God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end; you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting, your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.

The narrative then goes on to say that Belshazzar’s life is taken that very night and that Darius, a foreign monarch, takes over the Babylonian kingdom.

Beshazzar’s crimes against God are threefold – first, He sinned not through ignorance (he already knew from the history of his father’s reign that God was all powerful and was the one and only true God) but sinned through pride and disobedience thinking that he could place himself above God; secondly, he defied God by desecrating the holy vessels and thirdly, he praised the idols of the materials from which they were made and did not honour God himself. He bore the consequences of those crimes in a similar manner to the greedy farmer (or sometimes called the rich fool -0 see Luke 12:13-21) in the later parable who built bigger and better barns to store up his crop from a motivation of greed and taking life easy rather than a desire to help and share with the people, and died that very night.  Jesus, no doubt, would have known Daniel’s story when he composed his parable and the parallels are clear. 

So how do we fair?  Do we fear the writing on the wall?  Next Sunday is advent – a time of waiting for the coming of Christ at Christmas and this Sunday we celebrate Christ as King – hence the hymns we are singing this evening. Christ taught us to love God and to love each other – the two great commandments – a theme I repeatedly labour in my sermons as being the fundamentals of our Christian faith – whatever denomination we may follow.  We are told that the coming of Christ for a second time is imminent – but we do not know precisely when.  We must always be ready and when he comes we must not be found wanting in our belief and faith.  Both Belshazzar and the Rich Fool were indulging in their own desires – putting themselves and their hedonism before God.  For both the writing was on the wall – in Belshazzar’s case literally.

Today we see many instances of people thinking first and foremost about themselves – indulging in their hedonistic fantasies and desires.  Worshipping the idols of our modern world – whether they be people or material things. Denying and defying God. 

As Christians it is our duty to life our lives knowing that the love of God is the first and the greatest love we can have – everything comes from him and we should honour and respect him.  We are not perfect, that’s why we have to acknowledge and confess our wrongdoings weekly if not daily; but if we fundamentally worship him, praise him and acknowledge him to be our creator and our savour then we can be assured that we should not suffer the spectre of the writing on the wall.

Amen

MFB/68