All Saints’, Dorval
November 17, 2024
Briton Riviere, “Daniel’s answer to the King”
“If our God chooses to save us, we will be saved, even from your fiery furnace. But even if our God chooses not to save us, we will not bow down and worship your idol.”
At the 10:00 service, after the brief first reading from Daniel, I will tell the parallel stories from the book of the prophet Daniel: the three young men in the fiery furnace, and Daniel himself in the lions’ den.
These are two stories that mirror each other in almost every detail. A self-important king makes up a silly law requiring everyone to worship a particular way, and promulgates it in windy, bombastic language; the faithful Hebrew exiles refuse to comply; as a result, they are subjected to a comically exaggerated punishment (being thrown into a fiery furnace, being locked into a den of lions); God saves them from the punishment, and the king is terrified and praises God. Neither of the kings seems to learn any kind of lasting lesson, though, about what powers are worthy of our worship and what are not.
“If our God chooses to save us, we will be saved, even from your fiery furnace. But even if our God chooses not to save us, we will not bow down and worship your idol.”
These are the words in the script for the felt board story, what Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego say to King Nebuchadnezzar as they refuse to worship his golden idol.
The word “worship” comes from the old English and is related to worth and worthy; roughly, it means “to ascribe worth to something, to declare it worthy.” When we use it today, of course, we mean not only to declare that worthiness, but specifically to treat something as the most important, the most worthy. What we worship is the thing that comes first, the thing that, when push comes to shove, we will choose above anything else.
There’s a saying, ascribed in its various forms to numerous people from Ralph Waldo Emerson to David Foster Wallace, that says, more or less, “Not worshiping anything isn’t an option; everyone worships something. The only choice is to decide what we worship.”
The kings in the stories in the book of Daniel want themselves to be the objects of worship: whether directly, as when King Darius throws Daniel into a den of lions because he will not worship the king, or indirectly, as when Nebuchadnezzar throws Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego into a fiery furnace because they will not bow down to the hundred-foot-tall golden idol that he has had made.
In today’s world, the temptation to worship is often more subtle (though lately I’m starting to wonder, given some of the cults of personality that are having an outsize effect on the fate of the world). Many people, whether consciously or not, worship money – or a grim entity called The Economy, which called upon us to sacrifice the lives of the elderly and disabled during the COVID pandemic. Some worship power, or fame, or weight loss, or alcohol, or a particular race, country, or other in-group.
Worshiping any of these things, sooner or later, brings heartbreak and death. Because worshiping anything other than God – again, whether consciously or not – throws everything else out of whack.
By this token, you can worship God without necessarily believing in God – you can genuinely seek the common good, the service of something outside yourself, the welfare of your fellow humans, the beauty of art, the need to protect nature, and come close enough to avoid the pitfalls of worshiping money or power. But it certainly helps to have an understanding of how all those things – service, beauty, creation, the common good – connect, and that they are all rooted in the God who made everything.
Today’s reading from Mark’s Gospel is a glimpse into what happens when worship goes awry. The passage is only a brief snippet of an extensive description and prediction of the end times, called the “Markan Apocalypse” by scholars. It’s one of those parts of scripture that has inspired cranks and false prophets throughout the centuries, even as it warns against those cranks and false prophets. With its reference to “wars and rumors of wars,” it has made people in every era think that the end of the world was imminent, even as it rings freshly true in 2024 in the shadows of the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza.
“Beware that no one leads you astray,” says Jesus. “Many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray.”
This is one more exhortation to be very, very careful what we worship – and whom we allow to tell us what to worship. Not everything done in Jesus’ name is of God.
And once we have determined what it is we worship, that is when we learn from the three young men.
“If our God chooses to save us, we will be saved, even from your fiery furnace. But even if our God chooses not to save us, we will not bow down and worship your idol.”
These are words that we need to be prepared to say, when we are asked to put anything – family, party, livelihood, conscience, loyalty, even life itself – above our allegiance to the God who made the universe. Few of us have been called upon to make such drastic choices in the past eighty years or so. Our lives have mostly been pretty easy and comfortable.
But you never know when the sign will come that all these things are about to be accomplished. You never know when a delusional, self-important tyrant will take power and start ordering people to bow down to golden statues. Like Daniel and his friends in Babylon, we need to be prepared, to read our Bibles and say our prayers and think about our priorities, and know what it means that we have made promises to God and God has made promises to us.
“If our God chooses to save us, we will be saved, even from your fiery furnace. But even if our God chooses not to save us, we will not bow down and worship your idol.”
Amen.
Leave a Reply