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Monday, January 8, 2018

Who Names You? (Daniel 1)




Sunday, January 7, 2018

            Who gets to say who you are?  Who has the right and the power and the opportunity to write your story? Who dares to define you?
            “Names are not always what they seem.”  That’s Mark Twain.
            And here’s William Shakespeare.  “What’s in a name?  That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”[i]

            It was the 6th century BC.  The mighty Babylonian empire conquered the people of God, the kingdom of Judah.  The magnificent temple King Solomon had built centuries before was toppled, left a pile of ruin.  The Judean King was captured and forced to watch as his sons were murdered.  Then, so that the death of his children would be the last thing he ever saw, the Babylonians put his eyes out.  This king was shackled, now a blind slave, and forced to walk the nearly 700 miles to Babylon.
            All who stood before Babylon were fear-struck by her might.  You bow before Babylon or you are obliterated.  
            But it was not enough to destroy all that was left of Jewish sovereignty, the northern kingdom Israel having fallen to Assyria centuries earlier.  Before destroying the temple, the book of Daniel tells us all the gold cups and plates and fixtures were stripped and hauled back to Babylon.  In Solomon’s temple, these pieces were holy objects, designed to model the wilderness tabernacle used by Moses to worship God.  In this eyes of Babylon, this was a conqueror’s booty.
            But it was not enough to kill the king’s sons, mutilate the king’s face, rob Jehovah’s temple of all its priceless worth, and then destroy it completely.  No, to complete the humiliation, Babylon would take the best and the brightest of Israel’s people and turn them into Babylonians; Chaldeans.  Daniel 1:3 says, “The king commanded his palace master Ashpenaz to bring some of the Israelites of the royal family and of the nobility, young men without physical defect and handsome, versed in every branch of wisdom, endowed with knowledge and insight, and competent to serve in the king’s palace” (v.3-4).
            With the cities of Judah razed, the religion of Judah crushed, and the young leaders, the future of the Jewish people taken, the victory was complete.  These young Jews would have the Judaism, the love of Jehovah, scrubbed out of them.  They would forget Abraham and Moses, David and Solomon.  For three years, they would go through an intense education that would transform them.  They would learn the ways of Babylonian nobility and, presumably, they would assimilate, even coming to love Babylon.  They would become the very people who had killed their culture.
            Imagine the United States getting overrun, totally crushed in a war.  We would be so thoroughly defeated, we’d forget what it was to be American.  Then our new masters, those who humiliated us, would take from us those in the top of the class at West Point and the Naval Academy in Annapolis, as well Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and MIT.  Israel, with the fall of Judah in 586BC, lost everything.
            Included among that crop of talented young nobility taken off to Babylon were four friends, highly religious young men, people completely committed to their faith in God.  Their names were Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah.  Upon arrival in their new home, they were required to adjust to the new way of things. 
            It began with their names.  You will no longer be Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah.  Those names are dead just like Israel is dead.  You are now Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.  Daniel 1:7 says the palace master, the voice of Babylonian power, for all intents and purposes, the voice of god for these young men, gave them other names.  The unmaking of their souls began when he re-named them.
           
Who gets to say who you are?  Who has the right and the power and the opportunity to write your story? Who dares to define you?

Verse 8 says, “Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself with the royal rations of food and wine.”  We aren’t entirely clear as to what was in the royal Babylonian diet, but whatever it was, Daniel felt that to accept it was to go too far.  He could accept a new name, but not being unmade.  Something about this food was not kosher and Daniel would not turn his back on the traditions of his ancestors.  If God told Moses a certain food was not clean, Daniel wasn’t going to eat it. 
And truly, more than being about food, this struggle was about identity.  Even in a foreign land, knowing the temple had been destroyed, Daniel was set on staying faithful to God no matter the cost.  And then, God becomes an active player in the story, in the most subtle of ways.  “Now God allowed Daniel to receive favor and compassion from the palace master,” verse 9 says.  Though we cannot see God, and in fact many Jews felt that when the temple fell, it was a sign that God had given his people up, in fact, God was there the whole time.  God was there the whole time.  Even in our struggles, God is by our side. 
God influenced the situation as these young men dug in their heels and insisted upon staying faithful to him.  The palace master was scared.  Most bullies are.  He held power over those young Jewish nobles who had been taken, who he was assigned to train in the ways of Babylonian nobility, but if he failed, his head would literally be on the chopping block.  I want to help you Daniel, he said, but if this goes wrong, I am dead.  We see an uneasy collusion between a Babylonian underling and one of the prize Jewish recruits. 
Daniel, joined by Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, young men as stubbornly committed to God as himself, struck up a deal. For two weeks, those four would eat nothing but raw vegetables and drink only water.  The other Jewish conscripts literally ate like kings – meals only those in the Babylonian royalty could afford.  Rich meats and cheeses, wine and milk, delicious breads – they were eating large.  Daniel said his God would fortify him and so, the palace guard allowed his gambit.  For two weeks, the four God-followers ate only vegetables.
Have you heard of the “Daniel diet?” A few years ago, Saddleback church wrote a book about this, and other Christian nutritionists also wrote about it.  Essentially it was 21st century American Christians trying to eat the foods Daniel and his companions ate for the purpose of losing weight and focusing on God to help their spiritual morale.  They wanted encouragement from prayer instead getting it from ice cream Sundays.  I remember being quite skeptical of the whole idea at the time. 
I read up on it recently and found that there is much about the modern concept of the “Daniel diet,” that is positive.  It basically encourages prayer and healthy eating.  These are good things.
However, aside from the benefit of living in closer relationship to God, the modern concept of the “Daniel diet” misses the point of the story in Daniel chapter 1.  Verse 15 says, “At the end of 10 days is observed that [Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah] appeared better and fatter than all the young men who had been eating the royal rations.  By “fatter” I think the Bible means these four were fuller and healthier.  Eating vegetables alongside others who eat richer foods might help you lost weight, but Daniel’s goal wasn’t to lose weight.  He wanted to honor God.  The palace master’s goal was to fatten up these young, talented Jews.
That the raw vegetable diet produced the results that did was an act of God.  This was miraculous, a direct but subtle divine intervention into the story.  Daniel could not know God would intercede in this way.  He did not know what God was going to do, if anything.  Daniel and his friends knew how they needed to act to be faithful.  They did that trusting God, not knowing what would be next. 
God blessed them beyond expectation.  Verse 19 tells us that when they were presented before King Nebuchadnezzar, none of the other Jewish conscripts could compare with these four.  “In every manner of wisdom and understanding concerning which the king inquired of them, he found them 10 times better than all the magicians and enchanters in his whole kingdom” (v.20).  Daniel did not just outshine his peers.  He rose in stature above the experts of Babylon because God blessed him.  He lived in God’s blessing when he and his friends were faithful.
They were still exiles in a foreign land.  They still lived under the hand of Babylonian overlords who called them by their new, other names.  But they never ceased belonging to God.  For all that happened, they held onto their belief that God was the true power in the world, the true Lord of history.  God determined the circumstance.   The circumstance did not determine what they believed to be true about God.
When, in your life, have others tried to give you other names and to shape your identity? 
When I went through army infantry basic training, drill sergeants tried to tell me I was a killing machine who hated my enemies.  This was 1989 and the Iron Curtain had fallen, so they were uncertain as to who our enemies were, but still, they created an image of enemy, and then told me I hated them.  God told me to love my neighbor, love my enemies, and pray for those who persecuted me. 
Peers in ministry have, at times in my career, tried to tell me what a pastor should be.  Sometimes their definition didn’t fit what I thought God was telling me a pastor should be.   Would I change how I preached and led the church in order to gain acclaim and maybe even some favors from others?  Who named me and defined me?  What words and qualities name and define you? 
In Mark 1:23, in the synagogue on the Sabbath, Jesus confronts a demon possessed man.  “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?  … I know who you are, the Holy One of God,” the demons blurt out of the possessed man’s mouth.  Jesus immediately silenced those demons.  He referred to himself as “Son of Man.”  He was not yet ready to publicly walk under the moniker “Holy One of God.”  He was holy, but it wasn’t time to announce that yet, and the demons didn’t get to alter the story.  God was and is the teller of the story: Jesus’ story, Daniel’s story, and yours and mine. 
In God’s telling, you and I are named.  You are called “beloved.”  You are “chosen.”  You are reckoned as “invited” and “welcomed” by God.  You and I are named.  We called “son” or “daughter” by God.  No matter where we are, no matter what situation we are in, this is true.  We are children of God, God is with us, and is involved in the struggles we face. 
In your life, people will want to name you.  “Customer;” you give them your money.  “Follower;” you give them your allegiance.  “Sucker;” you fall for their schemes.  “Life giver;” you take on yourself their dysfunction.  In countless ways, the world around you will strive to make you, to shape your identity.
We live in the world, but not as pieces of clay to be shaped by the world.  We are clay in God’s hands.  In the world, we shine God’s light and speak God’s truth as messengers of the gospel.  The world cannot name us because God already has.  We step from this place into the world, not with a defensive posture keeping the world at bay, but with arms and hearts of love.  We step with stubborn commitment to the God who loves us. Only He gets to name us.  We step out proclaiming, living in his grace.
AMEN



[i] I got these quotes off the Goodreads site - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/names

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