I wonder if you feel like an exception, where the inside, part of you says, “I’m different.”
I had an 85 year-old look into my eyes after hearing he had lung cancer, and that those 60 plus years of smoking Pall Mall unfiltered had caught up with him. I remember his words: “Jim,” he said, “I think that we all feel a little special that bad things may happen to others but somehow we are special and they won’t get us.” He looked at me and said “not true.”
A commencement speaker was addressing seminary grads saying what a Great Day of New beginnings. But one student said to herself, don’t tell anyone, but I actually can’t find a job. Don’t let on, but I’m in a denomination that doesn’t seem to know what to do with someone who looks or believes or loves like me. Another said: Don’t make a big deal of it, but I don’t actually feel any call to serve a church. There’s been such a huge row in my family in the last day or two that I can’t even concentrate sitting here in the service right now.”
I wonder if one of those is you, this morning. I wonder if everyone thinks that they are an exception. If so, we’re in good company. The Bible’s full of exceptions. If you’re a minority, imagine being in Babylon during the Jewish Exile.
If you’re feeling like God’s forgotten you and you’ve been written out of the salvation’s script, try being transported a thousand miles and living without land, king and temple – all the signs of God’s presence. The book of Daniel’s about obscure people, faraway people, exceptions, those who don’t fit the script.
And yet they trust. It’s a story about a people who lost their home, lost their hope, lost their security, lost their families, lost their heritage, lost their land, lost their story... and found God. Could that be you? Let’s find out.
Nebuchadnezzar is God. That’s what we’re supposed to think. That’s why he has prefects, governors, counselors, treasurers, justices, magistrates, and on and on.
He’s just got so many staff and he is so up on himself that he makes an enormous golden statue, where everyone has to bow down and worship it when he blows his horn, plays his pipe, lyre, harp and drum. Anyone who doesn’t is thrown into the blazing fire. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are having none of it. Their story shows us what salvation means.
What salvation doesn’t mean is freedom from care, anxiety, fear, pain or threat. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego don’t avoid the fiery furnace. Christians don’t believe they’re immune from suffering, sealed off from worry, aloof from conflict, inoculated against panic, exempt from grief.
What salvation does mean is one of two things. This story shows us both of them.
When Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are thrown bound in the fire, God is with them. There aren’t three figures walking in the flames; there are four.
My guess is every single person here has seen a picture of footprints walking across a beach and an inscription that explains that for a stretch there was only one set of footprints because for that part of the journey Jesus carried you.
It’s a pious sentiment, but I’m not sure it’s what Christians call salvation. What Christians call salvation is what we see in this story.
Jesus is with us in the fire. The destiny of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego is settled not before they reach the fire by some stunt that makes them avoid the flames; nor is there any dramatic rescue from the flames. Their salvation takes place in the flames, as they discover Emmanuel: God is with them in the flames.
Scholars suggest that in this story the fire represents Babylon, specifically exile. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego aren’t spared from the fire, nor rescued from the fire; they find God with them in the fire. Somehow the fire is a fire not just for them, but for also for God. The same is true for Israel in Babylon. Israel isn’t spared exile. Israel isn’t rescued from exile. Israel finds in exile that God’s there too.
The appearance of the fourth figure in the fire sums up the experience of exile for Israel. God is with us, Emmanuel God with us. And we see the same in Jesus. Jesus has his own fire, which we call the cross. Jesus isn’t spared the cross. Jesus isn’t rescued from the cross. Jesus is with God on the cross.
The bonds of the Trinity are stretched to the limit; but not broken. When we see the cross we see that God is with us, however, whatever, wherever, forever.
But of course that’s not all that salvation means. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego do emerge from the fire. But look how it happens. They’re called out by Nebuchadnezzar! See how God works.
We want the dramatic intervention miracle, but what we get is change instead. This embodiment of pride and cruelty, the Babylonian king, becomes the one who calls Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego from the flames.
There’s no Christianity without change. Salvation often works through changed people. Nebuchadnezzar was the agent of imprisonment, punishment and trauma, and he becomes the agent of deliverance, transformation and restoration. That’s how this text spells change. Why does Nebuchadnezzar change?
Nebuchadnezzar sees Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, he sees that God is with them; and because God is with them they feel the force of the flames but the fire has no final power to distort them, or destroy them.
As people of faith we also feel the force of suffering, we’re stricken down by the killing of and wasting of human life, but, because God is with us, suffering has no final power ultimately to damage or distort us. That might be your ministry. That might be your witness.
I wonder if you know who Nebuchadnezzar really is. I wonder if there’s such a person or power in your life, dominating, oppressing, threatening and hurting you. I wonder what it’s like to go into the flames. Here God is with you, and there’s nothing Nebuchadnezzar can do to damage or distort you.
Researchers have found that there is with many victims of abuse, a part of our brains that regardless of what’s happened it remembers that we are cherished and joyed over. That’s why Sunday school is so important. This word of life needs to get said to everyone.
I wonder what it means to imagine Nebuchadnezzar’s conversion and the hope that all your grief and suffering and exile will one day be redeemed, and become part of your story.
The center of the story is what Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego say to Nebuchadnezzar. Let’s hear these words fresh.
“If our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire and out of your hand, O king, let him deliver us. But if not, be it known to you, O king that we will not serve your gods and we will not worship the golden statue that you have set up.”
Hear those words echoing down your brain, down your spinal cord to every nook and cranny of your life, but if not.
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are speaking to a skeptical king. You’re going to meet a lot of skeptics. Skeptics say things like, “Jesus expected the imminent end of the world. But it didn’t come. So why should we believe the rest of the things he said?”
You know that if the end of the world had come the church wouldn’t have written the New Testament, and if it wasn’t for the New Testament, we wouldn’t know anything about what Jesus did or didn’t think or say or do. “The end of the world may yet come. But even if it does not, we will trust the incarnation and ministry and death and resurrection of Jesus as the foundation stone of everything that we know.”
Skeptics say things like, “If Christianity’s true why doesn’t it make better people?
Why are Christians so mean and greedy and bigoted?” You know Jesus saves us from our sins. We never pretended that we don’t have them. The gospel is about forgiveness, not about never getting things wrong. You say “Christianity may make us better people. But even if it does not, we will trust that God in Christ has come among us as the truth and has made it possible to see and know the truth today.”
But of course you’ll be less concerned with skeptics than you’ll be with people you’ve come to love who’re facing agonizing suffering or distress and who turn and look at you and say, “Where is God now?” Some of you may visit people who are ill, where you might overhear a frightened relative share in hushed whispers of fear; things are going to be better, your strong you can beat this.
And this sick person looks to you as the only one who has the courage and the faith to tell them the truth. And they say to you, “Am I going to die today?” And you’ll say, “Your doctors hope you might get over this setback.
But even if not, God is with you in your last breath and God will not let even death destroy you. Neither death nor life can separate you from the love of God, dear one.”
Or maybe you’re sitting down over a drink or a coffee in Downers or Darien or wherever, and your companion says, “Do you think she’ll ever come back? Do you think she has any idea how much I love her? Do you think there’s anything I can do to get through to her?”
And you see the drink on the table in front of you tremble, and you realize it’s because your companion’s gripping it for dear life because there’s nothing else in the world to hold on to. And you say, “I hope she’ll come back. But even if not, know that God will never leave her alone; and God will never leave you alone. Even in the fire, where you are right now, God is making something beautiful out of your lonely, broken heart.”
Or maybe you’re sitting here thinking, “My faith is fragile, whose prayer life is a bombsite, my lifestyle is unrecognizable as Christian, I just can’t seem to find God anywhere. I feel like the ultimate exception.” Well if so, you’re a gift to this community, because there isn’t anyone here who at some moment or in the past 40 years or in the next 40 years won’t be sitting where you’re sitting.
To go through life without the fire (or the refrigerator) of doubt may sound like being a Christian; but it doesn’t sound much like being a human being.
I say unto you, “Maybe you’ll know God’s presence every hour, every breath, every touch. But even if not, know that God is with you and God is for you in every moment forever. You may believe and trust in the living God. But even if not, the living God lives for you.”
The poignancy of what Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego say to Nebuchadnezzar is finally not just what we say to a skeptic, or to a person in pain, or to ourselves, but what the members of the Trinity say to one another. When Jesus goes to the fire, when Jesus hangs on the cross, what does he say to God?
Is it so different from the words of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego? “If your will is to deliver me from the cross, O God, then take this cup away from me.
But even if not, be it known to you, O God, that my love for you will hang on forever, and that those who somehow find that they have lost you, can hang onto me.” Isn’t that what makes Jesus’ final words so wondrous? Jesus loves us so much that he goes to the cross even if there’s no certainty of anything. Jesus isn’t just keeping his side of the bargain. Jesus is loving even if not. That’s the definition of love.
We’ve come face to face with God. We’ve come to the foot of the cross, the heart of Jesus. We’ve come to the definition of love. It lies in those four little words: “But even if not.” Those words are the heart of God. Make them the heart of your life. Make them the heart of your faith. Make them the heart of your love. Make them the whole of your vocation. In them you will find God. But even if not, in them, God will find you.