The Daniel Blogs: Health and Safety

I kind of fell in to making lattes. I was supposed to be meeting someone in a coffee shop managed by a friend and staffed by volunteers but that meeting never happened and I suddenly found myself in one of would-be baristas instead. I got talking to one of them about an event he had been at with some of the Chaplaincy staff at his university, a kind of Q&A at which he had been particularly struck by one of the answers. One of the panel had been asked to share one piece of advice or wisdom with the students present and, after a little thought, had said, “You’re safe.”

One of the more remarkable incidents in the book of Daniel is when King Nebuchadnezzar decides that three of his Hebrew subjects had shown the kind of treasonous disobedience that merited death by incineration. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego stood accused in front of a huge blaze that had been stoked in their honour, sweat running down their faces, perhaps with their knees knocking. I wonder if Nebuchadnezzar’s eyes were drawn to those knees? Knees that had refused to give him what he wanted, that had refused to bend. Knees that dared to come before him now without a hint of the compacted dust and dirt which would have shown deference. Knees that had dared to suggest that there was a limit to his majesty and power.

Knees that would soon learn that knees that didn’t kneel didn’t stand a chance.

And while Nebuchadnezzar is perhaps looking at the knees that maybe knocked and the running sweat is possibly starting to make their eyes sting, one of them, or all three of them in unison, answered the question the King had hung in the heated air. "Your threat means nothing to us. If you throw us in the fire, the God we serve can rescue us from it and anything else you might cook up, O king. But even if he doesn't, it wouldn't make a bit of difference, O king. We still wouldn't serve your gods or worship the gold statue you set up."

Such humility in the midst of such confidence. It’s a phenomenal statement. Confidence in the power of their God. Humility that would keep them for speaking for him, that would make clear to them the error of pretending to know what he might do at any given moment. Humility and confidence which would see them choose painful death over bowing to a different master. In this statement I think we see something of the safe insecurity which marks the life Jesus offers with his promises of abundance and his warnings of suffering.

God may well choose to reward actions of faith as he seems to do for Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. After his run in with a den of lions, Daniel says he was saved because ultimately he was considered “blameless”. But God does not promise this. What he does actually promise us is that things are going to be hard. That life is going to be unfair. That when we follow him we might suffer because some people won’t understand what we are doing and others might even hate us for it. When we leave Daniel and company, things have gone pretty well, lots of rescues and lots of promotions have come their way. But they would never see freedom, they would never go home again. Even when we follow faithfully and closely and even though he is in control, God does not promise us safety in this world. Shane Claiborne’s Mum says, “I have come to see that we Christians are not called to safety, but we are promised that God will be with us when we are in danger. And there is no better place to be than in the hand of God.” Allow me to quote someone quoting someone -

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his Cost of Discipleship, reconciles these seemingly contradictory notions–the security of relationship with God and the insecurity of life in a fallen world–by appealing to Christian paradox:

The disciple is dragged out of his relative security into a life of absolute insecurity (that is, in truth, into the absolute security and safety of the fellowship of Jesus).

So are we safe or not? Yes. But no. No. But yes. Jesus says, “In this world you will have trouble, but take heart for I have overcome the world!” We are in no danger but we should never think that means we’ll be safe! Like Daniel and Shadrach and Meshach and Abednego, we need to have faith in the sovereign God who is control. It will not always be easy and the road we will be asked to walk may not always be safe. God himself is not safe! In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis includes this exchange between Lucy and Mr. and Mrs. Beaver about Aslan the Lion:

Lucy: Is he safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.

Mrs. Beaver: That you will, dearie, and make no mistake, if there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they're either braver than most or else just silly.

Lucy: Then he isn't safe.

Mr. Beaver: Safe? Don't you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.

The Daniel Blogs: Celebrity...and being like eveything else...

My friend Ben and I were asked to speak at a youth group weekend and we decided to begin our little series by talking about Esther and Jonah and Daniel and in doing so tried to learn lessons about not separating ourselves from the world around us but not becoming just like everybody else either. Jonah was our example of someone who thought he was better than those around him and so we talked about how important it was that we have more humility and indeed self-awareness than that. It is really important that we are IN the world, that we don’t distance ourselves so much from it that when it looks for us we are no-where to be found. And because you're kidding yourself if you don't think that that is exactly where and who you are.

Esther was our example of someone who had managed to blend in to the background. Before she took the brave decision of ‘coming out’ as a Hebrew no-one, not even her husband the King, seemed to have any idea that she was a Jew. While we are IN the world we should ask for the grace not to become OF the world. Not to fall for the charms of the world and think that all the stuff that it offers is actually worth having. We are no use to the world if, when it does come looking, it discovers that we are just like everyone and everything else. And we are settling for something less than we might enjoy.

And then we got ourselves to Daniel, the hero of the piece, who managed to find that coveted third way and actually keep his feet upon it.

I had decided that I wasn’t really going to get in to this here because most of what I was excited about and challenged by from that particular line of thinking I have already covered in some of the other Daniel Blogs. But then I saw the videos I have embedded below. I have long been amused by the significance Christians can place on the discovery that a celebrity shares their faith. It seems to give a hit of vindication and validation, perhaps another angle of the kind of sense which sees people buy celebrity endorsed products. When running an entertainments website for students, some friends and I organised a competition the prize of which was some merchandise given to us by the British dance act Basement Jaxx. Noticing that one of the group’s members had written “God Bless” before scrawling her signature on a poster we decided to try and start a rumour that the band were all Christians just because we enjoyed people’s reactions. But surely the giant elephant in the room would tell us, if only it could talk, that the whole notion of celebrity is just utterly ridiculous when considered in the context of the Upside Down Kingdom of God.

In the actual videos some of the pictures that have been chosen of the female celebrities sit beside their words like odd shoes. I’m not commenting on the actual people in these videos, on what they do, on what they believe or anything else. Indeed some of the quotes are pretty interesting, others profound. It’s simply the notion of Christian celebrity and the photograph choices made by the person behind the editing that at times almost sees me burst out laughing with incredulity (Please see the last frame!). Choices which seem to be rooted in the logic of sex-sells advertising. If they are beautiful, scantily clad even, and they say it, well, I guess you really MUST be worth it.

"Who'll be the salt if the salt should lose its flavour? Work a miracle in my heart."