Preached at Monkton Combe School, 26th April, 1998
Now, I'd like to start with a little survey. Could you all stand up please? If you agree with the following statement, could
you remain standing, and if you disagree could you sit down.
Alan Shearer is a hero.
OK, let's try it again. The same thing:
It's important to have heroes.
Last time:
My idea of the ultimate example of heroes for this
generation is...the Spice Girls.
Well, I had to get you all sitting down somehow,
didn't I?
You can tell a lot about people by asking who their
heroes are. Some of us don't even know
who we would call our heroes. But it's
actually important to have them - people we admire, respect, look up to, want
to be like. Heroes can give us ideas,
they can help us to believe in things which seem beyond us. They can give us strength to carry on with
what is the right thing, even when the going gets tough. So ask yourself today - who are your
heroes? Are they really worth your
attention? If you don't have people who
inspire you, why not?
Anyway, this book of Daniel, full of people in Lion's
Dens, blazing furnaces, mad kings and miracles is a great book of heroes. It was written thousands of years ago for a
people to read who were really going through the mill, and it was written to
tell them, "Here are some heroes
for you to believe in, here are people who knew God would not give up on them
no matter what, here are people who knew what was the right thing." The Israelites were really at the end of
their tether - they had been led from being slaves into their Promised Land,
where they thought God would make them the greatest nation on earth. They thought they were the ones whom every
other nation would come to to learn from.
But two and a half thousand years ago, they found themselves being
invaded, their buildings and temples destroyed, and the best of their young
people carried off to live in a place which was a bit like Soho in London, only
ten times more corrupt - Babylon. You
know that feeling when you have been doing well, you're pretty popular, you are
feeling confident about the way everything is going, and then suddenly it all
goes horribly wrong? You fail an exam,
you lose a friend, you disappoint someone you love. You end up feeling lonely, like you haven't got anything to offer
anymore, like you don't know what you are meant to be doing? That's how the people of Israel felt when
they found themselves and their country broken apart by a people who seemed to
stand for everything that God himself hated.
Where was the special relationship now?
Where was this sense of being loved by God? That he cared about them?
That he was bothered about what happened to them?
So if you are wondering whether this old, old story
with its miracles that sound like fairy tales has to say to you, then you can
know that it has been written for people who are asking the questions "So where is God in all of this? Has he left us alone? Does he care?" Haven't you asked those questions? Don't you ask them about your own life from
time to time?
Let's try and imagine what it must have been like for
Daniel and his friends, when they were led into Babylon as captives. I want to try and imagine a historical
parallel. It's 1946, Germany has
invaded England, and there are swastika flags flying from every important
building around. The authorities have
even told the school that they must fly a swastika from the roof of the
chapel. The teachers have been replaced
by members of the SS, and the prefects are all Gestapo agents who carry
guns. (Sound familiar?) You, as a high achieving youth, are selected
to go and work in Berlin in Hitler's palace.
You can't say goodbye to your family or your friends. You are taken there under armed guard. When you get there, like Daniel was, you are
given a new name, which means "I will serve the Fuhrer". Like Daniel was, you are told you are only
allowed to speak the Fuhrer's language, and you must study it. Like Daniel, you have to work in a city
where people's morals are the opposite of all those you have been brought up
with.
Are you getting the picture? This experience could have turned Daniel's world upside
down. He could have given up, believed that
God had completely left him, that there was no point in trying to follow him
anymore, or to try and do the right thing.
But what makes him a hero who could inspire the crushed people of
Israel, and can inspire us, is that he was canny enough to know that, despite
the terrible things going around him, God will win in the end. Daniel was canny enough to know that the
King who seemed to have power over him as a young man wouldn't win in the end -
God would. (He actually outlived that
king, and his son).
Canny people know what's really going on in the
world. They can sort out the truth even
when everyone else is shouting lies at them.
They can know what the right thing to do is even when everyone else in the
world seems to be doing wrong. And
canny people believe and trust that even when the world seems to be in a mess,
or when their own lives seem a complete failure, that God is working and that
God will win in the end.
So what made Daniel a hero was that he continued to
believe that God would win in the end, and he acted like he believed it. He was put in lots of situations where he
could have easily just gone along with the flow, where he could have let the
pressures of the situation make him compromise, make him let himself be
corrupted. But, because he knew in his
bones that God was really working and that God would win in the end,
this gave him the strength to know what was right and to do it. Which brings us to this rather strange story
about Daniel and his friends refusing to eat the king's food, and becoming
vegetarians. If Daniel and his friends
had looked weak and pale after ten days of spinach and water, as you might
expect, then the King would have noticed, would have found out they had been refusing
his tasty dishes, and would have had them executed. By a miracle, God enabled them to look stronger than the
rest. But what was the big deal about a
few Babylonian hamburgers in the first place?
Why did they have to risk their lives for the sake of a few steaks? Weren't they just being petty?
Let's go back to our German scenario. There you are in Hitler's palace. So far, you've gone along with
everything. But then you are asked to
do two things in front of your British friends. You are asked to wear a Swastika on your jacket, and you are
asked to sit at Hitler's table, and eat food with him. How do you feel? On one level, food is food and a Swastika is a symbol made up of
lines. But on another level to eat this
food and to wear the badge is to identify yourself with something in a real
way. And that's the kind of struggle Daniel and his friends had here. It would have been so easy for them to have
gone along with it. After all, most
people didn't think God was there, or that he cared much anymore, or that it
would matter, or a combination of these three.
But Daniel's story tells us that God is there, that he
is working, that he will win in the end, and that the things which seem to show
he is not are destined to end.
So be inspired by his example.
Be canny enough to know what is really going on, what is really
important, what God is really wanting to do in the world and in your life. Here we are on the first weekend of the last
term of the year. For some of you it's
your last term at this school. I don't
know about you, but my experience of school years is that by this stage of the
year things can get a bit stuck in a rut.
You know who your friends are and you know the people to avoid, that
sort of thing. Everyone starts looking
round! But what's more disturbing is
that we can have allowed some negative things to develop this year, and we've
now reached the stage when there doesn't seem much point in trying to put
things right. Maybe you've fallen out
with someone and just let the relationship get worse. Maybe you have been forced to do something you don't want to do,
or to be someone you don't want to be just because everyone has come to expect
it of you. Maybe you have tried to be a
Christian (whatever that means), and have just felt like it's too
difficult. Maybe you have allowed
someone in your corridor to be bullied, and done nothing about it, because it's
just too hard to do the right thing.
What God says to you through this story, at this stage of the year is
this: "I am working. I love you passionately, and most of all, I
will win in the end." I stood by
and watched a good friend of mine being bullied when he was thirteen. It was much the easiest thing to do, and
there didn't seem to be much God could do about it. But now he is thirty, my friend is working with the homeless in
London - I believe God used even his suffering to work for good in his life,
and the person who bullied him has since become a committed Christian.
Are you canny enough to realise this and to believe
that God can make things become better if you trust in Him? This term, God wants you to know that the
things that have gone wrong, that have messed up our lives, can't win, because
he is working and he will win this world, and us if we will let him, in the
end I'll just finish with one story
from my own life. I was thirteen, new
at this school, and I had recently committed my life to Jesus. I went and sat in the dining room, under one
of those lumps of margarine that hung from the roof, and along the table from a
sixth form lad whose name escapes me.
"What's this about you becoming a Christian?" he said. "Um..yes, that's right." "It won't last," he said. "You might as well give up
now." Some of you will know that
I'm training to be a vicar. Well, one
day while I'm wearing my dog collar, I hope that I'll meet that bloke so I can
go up to him and offer him a cucumber sandwich. And if I do, I'll think of Daniel being canny enough to stick to
his guns, and I'll thank God that he does love me, that he does work in this
world, and that he will win in the end.
Let's pray:
Goodness is stronger than evil,
love is stronger than hate,
light is stronger than darkness,
life is stronger than death,
victory is ours through Him who loved us.