Daniel 1 "A Different Bread"(1) Scott Hoezee

Daniel was just fourteen when his world collapsed around him. For weeks the news went from bad to worse. Babylonian scouts had been seen on the distant ridges surrounding Jerusalem and elsewhere in Judah. Israelite reconnaissance then confirmed troop movements coming toward Judah from the east. But Daniel's parents assured him and the other children that all would be well. But the kids could smell the fear that was in the air over Jerusalem, and soon that fear became reality. The Babylonians attacked, and Jerusalem crumpled like an aluminum pop can in the hand of a strong man. Untold numbers were killed, and Daniel got hauled away as one refugee among thousands. All he had known vanished.

Yet somehow this young man, this teenager, found the resources within himself to resolve one thing; despite all that had changed, one thing would remain constant: he would continue to serve the Lord God Yahweh, about whom his parents had been teaching him his whole life. Little did Daniel know how much that resolve would be tested.

Oddly, though, the testing came not through further hardship in the refugee camp but through what most people would have regarded as a reversal of fortune, a turn for the better. For one day King Nebuchadnezzar came up with a new national initiative, a kind of ancient Ameri-Corps, or in this case Babel-Corps, program to raise up future leaders of the nation by providing them with education and service opportunities. So the king one day called in Chief-of-Staff Ashpenaz and ordered him to go among the refugees and select out the finest looking young men he could find. These lucky lads would then be treated to a top-flight liberal arts education, Babylonian-style. Literature, language, cultural studies, sociology, and civics would be taught to these young men by the finest teachers in all Babylon.

On top of all that, they'd be treated quite literally royally. This special school would have no ordinary mess hall or college cafeteria serving up things like Potato Chip Tuna Casserole or Tofu Vegetable Pizza. No, these students would eat out of the same kitchen as Nebuchadnezzar himself, feasting on strip-loin with wilted bok choy and sauteed shiitake mushrooms, sea bass in a carrot-leak emulsion, and a dizzying array of custards and creme brulees for dessert. And wine: lots of Cabernet and Chardonnay as well as some curious merlots with just a hint of sophisticated casualness to them.

It was a full-ride scholarship to the U of B--the kind of education that would make for such a scintillating C.V. that once a person graduated, it would be just a short hop, skip, and a jump to securing a post high up in the royal administration's equivalent of the West Wing. Happily for them, Daniel and his friends Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah were among the candidates hand-picked by the king's Chief-of-Staff.

So they get cleaned up, re-clothed, and brought to the university's palace campus. The first order of business in the matriculation process was some new names. "Hebrew names are hard on the Babylonian tongue," the Dean of Admissions assured the sea of bright faces he saw before him. So each got a new, Babylonian name. Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah became Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

And so gone were the refugee days of sleeping in tents with the tics and the scorpions. Gone were the days of eating thin potato soup and scooping up drinking water from mud puddles. Life had taken a decisive turn for the better. And Daniel was not pleased. He didn't care for his new name and decided that he would not eat the king's fancy fare nor drink his expensive libations. As some of his colleagues tucked into their gorgonzola-stuffed breast of squab at dinner, they noted Daniel wasn't eating, heard him say he preferred bread and raw turnips, and so concluded that Daniel was a few tomatoes short of a thick ragu!

The Resident Director of Daniel's dormitory was aghast as well but was also frankly fearful for his own life. "If you waste away to nothing, the king will have my head for messing up his program." Daniel does not want the man to get into trouble and so makes a deal. "Give my three friends and me a ten-day trial period." The R.D. likes Daniel, agrees, and of course you know the rest: the four thrive on their meager fare. While some of the other students got a little paunchy from all that rich butter and cream, Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah stayed GQ trim and healthy. That appears to have settled the matter--near as we can tell, nothing is ever again said about the diet of these four youths.

But why did Daniel make all this fuss in the first place? Why balk at fine food and drink? Because Daniel knew who he was. He also knew whose he was. And so Daniel's God-given insight let him see right through Nebuchadnezzar's plans. There's no such thing as a free lunch, they say, and Daniel knew that, too. Because in the long run what the king wanted was to make these Israelite youths, the future of the nation, forget Yahweh.

That's why they all got new names. In truth, it was no more difficult to say "Azariah" than "Abednego," and "Daniel" is a whale of a lot easier on the tongue than "Belteshazzar." But it wasn't a matter of semantics but theology. "Daniel" means "God is my judge." The names of the other three boys also all pointed to Yahweh. So they were re-monikered with handles that all pointed to the Babylonian god Marduk as well as Marduk's underling deities in the Babylonian pantheon. If you moved to some Middle Eastern country where the police suggested you change your name from Peter to Abdullah Mohammed, well, you'd figure out pretty quickly what was going on. Daniel did, too. But maybe you noticed the cleverness of the author of Daniel: despite the new names given to the lads in verse 7, the author sticks with their Hebrew names, as no doubt did Daniel and company. They would not be seduced to forget their real names or the true God to whom those names pointed.

And they would not be seduced at the king's dining table, either. Daniel and his friends declared themselves to be children of a different bread. It took courage. The most famous story surrounding Daniel is his encounter with the beast's in the lion's den. But it took no less courage to refuse the king's culinary offerings. Lions with sharp teeth and claws are an obvious threat to the body's well-being. But in the clinking of royal stemware and the clanking of royal silverware on bone china, Daniel perceived a threat to the well-being of his very soul. A larger battle was being fought here.

The Hebrew of verse 2 tells us that Daniel and company were carted off to Shinar. That is the ancient location of the Tower of Babel. In the Bible, Babel always stands for the complete anti-God power that has perennially been at work in history. Now Daniel finds himself in Shinar and, sure enough, he is in the cross-hairs of a battle between Babel's chaos of confusion and Yahweh's cosmos of order and shalom. Daniel knows who he is, whose he is, and where he is. And so he would not eat food that would in the end devour him! "We are children of a different bread," they all declared. And so whatever else happened to them in the king's pagan training program, at least three times a day, at each and every meal, Daniel and friends nodded their heads once again in the direction of their true King.

Tonight we come to this table, which is so very different from all other tables in our society and world. Tonight we eat this bread and drink this cup and so proclaim that we, too, are children of a different bread. We, too, will not mindlessly consume all that our consumerist culture dishes up for us. We, too, will discern that there are other agendas at work in our world and in our society, and most of them do not fit the Lord's agenda for us as citizens of his kingdom. During this Mission Emphasis time, we are reminded that God so loved the world that he sent first his only Son, but now sends also us as the Son's latter-day emissaries of peace. We are sent into the whole world to declare God's love for all people. And so tonight we join God's people from around the world and across the span of history as we eat this different bread and imbibe this different cup and so declare that we will not let blind patriotism or nationalism cause us to hate others while reserving our loyalty and love for only those who are already just like us.

We are children of a different bread and so although we very much want God to bless America, we want God to bless Iraq and France, Russia and China, Nigeria and the Philippines and all those places into which we beam the gospel any way we can. We are children of a different bread and so we won't let the cultural elite on Madison Avenue name our desires for us through advertising. We won't he co-opted into thinking that a Mitsubishi alone can make us happy, that the good life is found in fast food, or that beauty is all about age-defying creams and lotions and eye-liners. We are children of a different bread and so we won't swallow the pablum dished out by TV and the movies. We won't be co-opted into thinking that to be heroic is to be violent or that sexuality is about only personal preference.

We are children of a different bread and tonight by eating that bread that is Christ's flesh and by drinking that wine that is Christ's blood, we anchor ourselves to a hill far away and to a time long ago when the Son of God died to take away the sins of the world. It is not a new or novel thing we do tonight. This is from of old. This is not some cutting-edge ritual or spiritual innovation. This has been done for millennia now. If this sacrament that we celebrate this evening has any meaning at all, it is the exact same meaning that believers in Antioch found eons ago. "This is not your father's Oldsmobile" the TV ads re-assure people who these days wouldn't want to be caught dead doing anything or driving anything that smacked of old fashioned ways. But we are children of a different bread and so we declare that our deepest longings are met by the old, old story of Jesus and his love.

Daniel 1 concludes with an innocent-looking verse: "And Daniel continued until the first year of King Cyrus." "So what?" you may ask. Well, King Cyrus was the Persian leader who conquered Babylon some seventy years after Israel was first enslaved by Nebuchadnezzar. Daniel must have been pushing 90 by the time Cyrus came onto the scene and released the Israelites back to their homeland. So that last verse of Daniel 1 is God's last laugh. Daniel outlived Nebuchadnezzar. He outlived the whole nation of Babylon and all the chaos it wrought. He lived a long and healthy life eating his different bread.

Tonight we take the different spiritual bread of the gospel to ourselves once more. When this evening we say "Yes" to Jesus' table, we say "No" to the bread of many other cultural tables. But that is only right. Because this table will endure long after the kingdoms of this world have faded away. This table will be here still when the world is made new. For it is at this table where we will dine for all eternity at the wedding feast of the Lamb! Amen.

1. I acknowledge Walter Brueggemann, Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation (Fortress Press, 1989) pp.115-137, for many of the insights in this sermon.