Faithful in Babylon | Spiritual Authority

Well, good morning. 1st. I want to say that it is a joy

and an honor to worship with you this morning and to be back here

in Boston. Boston feels like home to me and

my family. We really kind of developed our

rhythms as a family here in Boston and grew to love the

city. We were here for an entire

decade from 2005 to 2015, and I just missed it a lot.

So I'm, I'm glad to be back. Also to give a big thanks to

Pastor Josh for the invitation and for trusting me with the

with the pulpit as a church planner.

I know that takes a little bit of a little bit of faith.

So thank you for that and thank you for all making me feel so

welcome. You guys are a really friendly

church. Can we do something?

Can we, can you do something for me?

I liked when in the New Testament when the Apostle Paul

was writing letters to churches, he would say, I've been praying

for you. Can we agree to pray for each

other's churches? My church back in St.

Paul, MN roots Moravian Church, we are just like you.

We are a community of misfits on a mission together, finding our

identity in Jesus. And I just feel this like

kindredship with you all. And so next time I see you, I

want to say I've been praying for you.

It's also a great joy to be joining this particular teaching

series in the book of Daniel. Again, I feel like our churches

are kind of In Sync, tapped into the same spirit 'cause we just

finished a, a series on the Book of Revelation.

And I think we're both kind of picking up on the Spirit and

what the Spirit is doing and making these passages, making

these books of the Scriptures relevant to us in these times.

So I had a chance to listen to both Pastor Mandy and Pastor

Josh's messages in this series. And you guys are blessed to have

some really good teachers. So, you know, be grateful.

This morning, I'm picking up where Pastor Josh left off last

week. And this is one of my favorite

stories in all of the Bible. It's the story of Daniel

interpreting the dream of King Nebuchadnezzar, the king of

Babylon, and I find this story to be incredibly timely right

now as we wrestle together with questions that are as old as the

exile itself. What happens when the faith that

we love gets recruited into the service of national identity and

political power? What happens then when it gets

distorted at the very level of our imaginations, where we begin

to dream the dreams of empire instead of the dreams of God?

Those are the questions that we have in this text this morning.

But before we dive in deeper, would you, would you pray with

me? Holy Spirit, we don't just need

more information this morning, we need divine illumination.

Would you do what only you can do, take these ancient words and

make them living and active in US?

Would you sideline whatever is competing for our attention this

morning? And would you forge us into a

new people with a new imagination so that we can

embody your Kingdom through our lives in Jesus name?

All God's people said Amen. OK, so have you ever woken up in

the middle of the night and you can't get back to sleep?

Not because of something that has already happened, but

because of something that could happen, something in the future.

Your mind is racing. You're running through every

possible scenario, every possible outcome, trying to get

ahead of whatever it is that you're afraid of.

And then it hits you. So much of your life is built on

things you actually can't control.

It's a it's a quite unnerving realization, and yet strangely,

at the same time, it contains a kind of clarity that gives you

an odd sense of freedom. Because so much of our lives, we

build them on assumptions of what life is supposed to be

about, the way our lives are supposed to go, assumptions on

the amount of control that we have in our lives, right?

For example, we build our educations, we build our

careers, we even build our families.

We build our own identities on things like success, stability,

on even being seen a certain kind of way by others.

We build those lives and then we depend on them.

They're carefully constructed and they present a carefully

curated version of ourselves to the world.

They're the things that we can point to and say, that's who I

am. These monumental lives of ours,

they're like statues. Maybe they're not golden

statues, but they're statues all the same.

And statues have to be held together by something.

Their structural integrity has to be maintained.

Otherwise, they will eventually deteriorate, crumble, and fall.

So we lie awake in the middle of the night, dreading the

possibility that our statues might someday come down.

And this is precisely the feeling that opens Daniel

Daniel 2 · chapter mention

chapter 2. The most powerful man in the

world, the king of Babylon, is up in the middle of the night.

He can't sleep because he could feel it deep in his bones that

the things he's built his life on might not be as secure as he

believed. His Kingdom is fragile and it

could fall at any moment. And we see this theme throughout

the Scriptures that time and time again, human beings build

our kingdoms and then we think we run the world.

We could call this, we could call this empire thinking.

We lose sight of our role in God's story, our function, and

God's economy. We end up fighting each other,

or worse, trying to conquer each other and attempt to secure our

place, a place that we've already been given by God.

And in the end, we're even worse off than when we started.

Battered, broken, divided, dejected.

This theme works both on a personal level and a societal

level. King Nebuchadnezzar is is

possessed by this empire, thinking this way of life, this

way of life that is fueled by a diseased imagination.

It's a fixation on security and protection.

It's defensive and it's insecure.

And if left unchecked, it can grow callous and even violent

because it's it's obsessed with things like power and winning,

and it views every negotiation as a 0 sum game.

I must win, you must lose. That's why the story says that

King Nebuchadnezzar was troubled in his spirit and his sleep left

him because Babylon had conquered Judah and dragged away

all its people into exile. Pastor Mandy's series

introduction, She did a fantastic job describing the

horrors of exile, what it means to lose that sense of home.

The Judaites who were in exile in Babylon were traumatized and

oppressed, and King Nebuchadnezzar had his boot on

their necks, and he was afraid of what could happen if he let

it up. So he commands all of Babylon's

magicians and enchanters and sorcerers to tell him the the

dream that he has had, which is more like a nightmare.

He summons them, and he demands that not only they tell him the

interpretation of the dream, but they tell him the dream itself.

That's a tall task, but it's also a safeguard against

manipulation, if you think about it.

Because if you think about it, everybody could give you an

interpretation of the dream that just tickles your ears, right?

They could ingratiate themselves to the king by telling him what

he wants to hear, or they could tell him an interpretation that

would benefit them. So by telling them that he wants

not only the interpretation, but the dream itself, he's proof.

He's proofed, he's proofing. That dream was proofing that

interpretation against manipulation.

But the magicians, the enchanters, and the sorcerer's,

they got nothing. So they beg and they plead with

the king. Tell us the dream and then we'll

tell you the interpretation. But the King won't fall for it.

He wants a true revelation. He wants a word from elsewhere.

And this is honestly where a lot of us find ourselves today.

If you think about it, many of us have built our lives on

assumptions about how our lives were supposed to go or how our

faith was supposed to look, who we should be placing our trust

in, and even about America itself.

And all of those things seem to be crumbling and falling to the

ground all at the same time. There's a lot of talk these days

about deconstruction as if it's always a neat process that you

intentionally enter into. That's not how it happened for

me. That's not how it happened for a

lot of us. For a lot of us, deconstruction

wasn't an intentional process that we entered into.

It was when our faith hit a wall and started to crumble, or you

feel like the floor beneath your feet suddenly opened up and

you're falling. This isn't just about religious

faith either. This also is happening to people

when it comes to their trust in what should be true about

America. People are rethinking their

beliefs in all kinds of areas, democratic institutions, our

military, our role in the world. I was listening to a radio show

on the on drive to work the other day.

It was a call in show about politics.

And a caller called in and said, I just trust that the government

knows more than I do and wouldn't be sending us to war

unless it was absolutely necessary.

And then the very next caller called in and said the opposite.

She said, I think we're being lied to.

I don't think we're fighting this war because of any imminent

threat at all. I think this is someone else's

fight that we've been dragged into, and I want out.

This is a common theme that I'm hearing everywhere I turn.

Just about everyone I meet and talk to, they're rethinking

something. They may not put it like this,

but they're thinking and asking what is my life really built on?

What is solid ground? That same nightmare of empire

that possessed King Nebuchadnezzar is all around us.

It feels fragile and insecure. It infuses our lives with

anxiety, and we end up running around looking for our own

versions of magicians and enchanters and sorcerers to tell

us what it's all about. But none of our modern,

technologically advanced interpreters, none of them know

the dream itself. They just want to give us the

interpretation, to tell us what we want to hear or to benefit

themselves. None of them have a revelation

from God. And here's where the story takes

a dark turn. When the wise men confess that

they got nothing, they don't know the dream, so they can't

give an interpretation. They have no word from

elsewhere. Nebuchadnezzar doesn't dismiss

them quietly and say, OK, you may go.

He orders them all, executed, every last one of them.

And because Daniel and his friends have been conscripted by

force into Babylon's wisdom class, they're on the list.

This is empire thinking, mask off.

Because what started as anxiety has devolved into rage.

What began as insecurity has now metastasized into violence.

And this is what the diseased imagination of empire thinking

does. When it reaches the end of its

resources, it gets violent. It doesn't humble itself and ask

for help. It tightens its grip and it

lashes out at a scapegoat. It imagines that destroying some

innocent person or some innocent group of people will alleviate

its pain, will satiate its wrath.

But it never does. And this is precisely what we

need to examine a little bit more closely today, because that

diseased imagination, it doesn't just live in Babylon thousands

of years ago. It has travelled, it has

adapted, it has found new hosts. And one of the places that it

has found a home in one of the places where theologian Willie

James Jennings has been courageous, courageous enough to

name, is inside the ideology of nationalism.

Here's what Doctor Jennings says.

Nationalism always engenders 0 sum calculations, where we win

by controlling our borders and by controlling our identities,

or we lose by being overrun with aliens who confuse our

identities and resist assimilation.

Nationalist vision is weakness and fear masquerading as

strength and courage because it beckons the world's peoples to

postures of protectionism and it leans towards xenophobia.

Nationalism remains a powerful way of imagining our life

together because it is actually a theological vision that mimics

the desire of God for our full communion with each other.

It is a communion without God or with God simply as a slogan.

This is why nationalism for us moderns is the first idolatry

because it places another God before God.

Nationalism is not what doesn't just want our respect, it wants

our desire and constantly presses respect towards desire

because secretly it wants our worship.

This hits at a theme that has been running throughout this

series so far. The theme is, how are we being

formed? In Pastor Mandy's sermon from

the introduction, she talked about how God's people were

malformed by the trauma and the alienation of exile and are

being formed towards our longing for another Kingdom, the Kingdom

of God, our true home. And then in Pastor Josh's sermon

last week, we saw how we are being formed by the practices in

which we participate, those secular liturgies, as James KA

Smith puts it, these, these liturgies, these rhythms, they

form us and they inculcate values within us.

Today, our passage in Chapter 2 in this story, we can see

another way that we are being formed.

We're being formed in our imaginations, especially our

social imaginations. If our social imagination is

held captive to a nationalistic vision, we will see immigrants

as invaders and threats to the social fabric of America.

If our social imagination is held captive to a nationalistic

vision, then we'll see our neighbors as enemies with an

agenda to take over our lives and force us to change.

If our social imaginations are held captive to a nationalistic

vision, then we will see war as not a necessary last resort, but

a divinely sanctioned crusade against ungodly foreigners like

King Nebuchadnezzar and his rage filled decree.

The nightmare of empire always gives birth to a social

imagination of death. But this is where the story

takes a cinematic turn. Like a movie, it moves from the

halls of the royal palace where the king has been crashing out

to a small group of exiles huddled together in their rooms.

When Daniel finds out that he's been marked for death because

the king is throwing a temper tantrum, he does what he's been

formed to do. He meets with his spiritual

siblings and they seek God together.

Notice how? Notice how his response is a

spiritual response. Notice how his response is a

communal response. Beloved, let's take a moment and

interrogate our own instincts for just a second.

When we're pressed, and I mean we're really pressed, is our

instinct to meet with our spiritual siblings and seek God

together? Or are we reaching for coping

strategies that are somewhere on the spectrum between moderately

unhealthy to very unhealthy? I'll be honest, I've been a

pastor for over 20 years, and when I feel particularly

pressed, my first instinct isn't always to gather with my

spiritual siblings and seek God together.

Sometimes I'm reaching for those coping strategies.

This is a growth edge that I think we should pay close

attention to because empire thinking is constantly trying to

isolate us. It's constantly trying to pit US

against each other and tell us that we're all alone.

It forms us to feel desperate and to grasp for power and to

try to save ourselves. But when Daniel and his friends

hold this impromptu prayer meeting, what do they pray for?

Do they pray for enough money and wealth to buy their way out

of the situation? Do they pray for enough power to

overthrow the king? No, the story says that they

prayed for God's mercy. This tells us everything about

the posture of Daniel and his friends, the way that they've

been formed. Their posture stands in direct

contrast to the magicians and the sorcerers and the

enchanters. Those men were trying to

leverage the situation, trying to manufacture an answer, to say

whatever they needed to say, to save themselves.

But Daniel and his friends, they didn't seek a strategy.

They sought the truth. They didn't try to produce a

revelation in their own wisdom. They asked God for one.

And the reason why is simple. God gives what empire cannot.

Listen to how Daniel responds when the revelation comes.

He doesn't immediately turn to the king.

He stops and he worships God. He says blessed be the name of

God from age to age, for wisdom and power are his.

God changes times and seasons, deposes kings and sets us up

others. He gives wisdom to the wise and

knowledge to those who have understanding.

God reveals deep and hidden things.

He knows what is in the darkness, and light dwells with

him. That sequence is important.

The revelation comes, and before Daniel does anything with it, he

worships. That's not incidental, that's

his formation. That's what it looks like to be

formed by Kingdom imagination, not empire thinking.

When Daniel goes before the king, he does something that

requires extraordinary courage. He tells the king not only the

interpretation of the dream, but the dream itself.

The king has dreamt of a tower, a towering statue.

Head of gold, chest and arms of silver, midsection and and

thighs of bronze, legs of iron and feet of iron mixed with

clay. And then a stone cut by no human

hand crashes into the feet of the statue and reduces the whole

thing to dust, and that stone grows into a mountain that fills

the entire earth. Here's the interpretation.

Each part of the statue represents a Kingdom built by

human hands. Powerful, maybe even impressive,

but temporary. Until the day when the the God

of heaven establishes a Kingdom that will never be destroyed,

that will be, that will supersede every human empire and

will stand forever. Imagine the courage it takes to

say that to the king of Babylon. Not just not just that your

telling him the interpretation, the dream, but you're telling

him that his power has an expiration date.

But here's the thing for us, when we when we turn this

passage towards us, what was bad news for Nebuchadnezzar is the

best possible news for us. This is precisely what Jesus

called the gospel. Jesus went around proclaiming

that the Kingdom of God had arrived and then he embodied it

through his life. He fed the hungry, he healed the

sick, he gave sight to the blind, he set free those who are

in spiritual bondage, and he gathered around himself a

community of the unlikely and the overlooked, and he called

those misfits God's family. In in Jesus Kingdom, no one went

hungry, no one was alone. Everyone was cared for and

everyone belonged. That's a dream from elsewhere.

And that's what Daniel and his friends were oriented towards,

even in the middle of Babylon, even as exiles far from home,

even under a death decree. Daniel and his friends, they

show us what it looks like to be formed by a different dream than

empires, the dream of God's Shalom.

Just like the Scriptures are filled with stories about human

beings building their own kingdoms and thinking that they

run the world, the Scriptures are also filled with revelations

of God's dream for the world. A world that functions the way

God intended it to. A world where human beings care

for the earth and the earth provides everything that humans

need. A world where human beings live

in harmony with one another, both on an individual level and

on a societal level. A world characterized by mutual

interdependence and collective flourishing.

God's dream of Shalom for the world is a dream of abundance.

That's Kingdom thinking. But to see the vision of God's

Kingdom, we have to return to the stone cut by no human hands.

Not only does the stone destroy the statue, but it says that it

grew into a mountain that filled the entire earth.

This is an expansive, inclusive vision of life together.

It's a vision of God's Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven,

God's glory filling the entire earth.

Willie's doctor, Willie James Dennings, is instructive for us

again on this part of the vision.

He says the Holy Spirit will break open whatever we want

closed and shatter our strategies of protectionism for

the sake of a saving God who will give back to us precisely

what we cannot hold on to with our own efforts and power, the

continuities of our stories, our legacies, our hopes and dreams

for a good future and a thriving life.

God, who will be All in all, desires to bring all into all,

the many into the many, just as the one is now in and with the

many. Nationalism gives us.

It gives energy to a false belief that only through its

single effort can a people sustain its story, its hope, and

its life. But such belief is unbelief for

Christians because we know that God offers a new way, found in a

new life, a joining that brings stories and hopes and life into

a shared work. Work of knowing, remembering and

testifying. So Daniel and his friends, they

demonstrate something for us. They demonstrate exilic

formation under empire. Even though they were marked for

death, they didn't panic. They were a non anxious presence

and Daniel gathers with his spiritual siblings and he seeks

God to hear a word from elsewhere.

He's formed by this Kingdom imagination that empowers him to

speak truth to power and to form an alternative community that

worships the God of Heaven, not the King of Babylon.

Today, beloved, we, you and I are bombarded every day with the

siren song of empire thinking. We're told that if we place our

trust in a nationalistic vision of America, that we could be

assured of security, belonging, and flourishing.

But can you feel the falseness of that?

Those messages? They ring hollow.

We can feel deep within our bones that we belong to a

different Kingdom that we were made for.

A Kingdom that cannot be destroyed, that wasn't built by

human hands, and it can't be taken away by bombs or tanks and

can't be divided by political ads on TV.

We were made for an everlasting Kingdom by the God who unifies

us in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

This is why I believe that the letter of First Peter says this.

It says you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy

nation, God's special possession.

First, Peter was talking to believers scattered throughout

the Roman Empire, and he says this live as exiles.

Don't let the empire's imagination become yours.

Don't assimilate to its zero sum logic, its borders, its fear.

Instead, it says, love one another deeply, show

hospitality, and use whatever gifts God has given you to serve

one another. Let the fruit of the Spirit

Lovejoy peace, patience, kindness, goodness,

faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

Let that be the curriculum of our common life together.

And this is what Doctor Willie James Jennings calls a mutual

unfolding, the Spirit drawing us into one another, into our

stories, across every line that empire uses to divide us.

It's not a merger where all of our differences disappear.

It's not a nationalistic vision where we're all supposed to look

the same and sound the same. But it's a genuine communion

where your story is bound up in my story, and your flourishing

is inseparable from my flourishing.

This is what we see in Daniel and his friends who are

genuinely formed by this vision of the Kingdom and beloved.

That's what this community is for.

That's what my community is for. That's what this community is

for, not just for gathering weekly and singing songs and

then leaving, but to practice together this imagination of the

Kingdom and to to practice it until it becomes more real to us

than the empire's lies. Because the empire's statues

will fall. They always do.

Whether they're made of gold or silver or iron or clay, it

doesn't matter. They're not cut by they're,

they're cut by human hands. And that means that they're not

the Kingdom of God. So beloved, let me leave you

with this exhortation. Press into community here and

use whatever gift you have, whatever gift God is giving you

to serve one another and practice that Kingdom

imagination so that we become a microcosm of the Kingdom of God

and we become a little, a little seedling that grows like that

mountain filling the whole earth.

That is how the Kingdom of God grows.

It grows right here in the midst of our relationships.

Amen. Amen.