Good morning. How's everyone doing?
Good. All right, if we haven't met, my
name is Mandy. I'm on staff here at the Garden
Church, and I am excited to be kicking off our new sermon
series on the book of Daniel. Oh, give me one second.
All right, so I'm curious how many people have gone through a
sermon series on the book of Daniel before?
Raise of hands, a couple of people.
OK, More people than I thought I was actually thinking to myself.
I don't know if I have like, I feel like it's a lesser chosen
book in my mind, maybe because it's prophetic and apocalyptic
and all of that. But it's a fun challenge for me.
It'll be a fun challenge for all of us.
So Daniel, as some of you may know, is an inspiring book full
of valiant acts of faith, But it is also hard to make sense of,
partly, again, because of, you know, the apocalyptic elements.
There's a lot about it that is metaphorical and interpretive.
But partly part of what's hard about it is the fact that it
takes place at a time in history that most of us know very little
about, which is Israel's journey into exile.
And so exile is a very specific experience of displacement
because it involves being forcibly taken from your
country, separated from everything you've ever known,
and taken to live in the land of your captors.
So a core element of exile is the loss of 1's home.
Like not just the physical space, but everything that it
represents, the safety, the familiarity, belonging, the
sense of identity. And the loss of those things is
really the context of the book of Daniel.
So on the topic of home, you know, a bunch of you in this
room are people that I know personally.
But if we haven't met, I will warn you that I do something
really awkward when people ask me where I'm from, which is that
I give everyone a different answer depending on how I'm
feeling that day. So which is super confusing for
everyone, including me. But the the problem is that I
get fixated on the question behind the question because, you
know, the people asking you aren't usually just like
collecting factoids about you just in case they get quizzed in
the future. You know, they're they're trying
to get to know you, they're trying to make a connection.
And so, you know, if they're familiar with the place that you
grew up, then they might have some understanding of how you
see the world or what experiences you've had or what
you expect from other people. And that's what makes the
question feel complicated to me because if you just ask me,
like, where geographically did you spend most of your years as
a minor? I might say northern New Mexico.
But if you said, tell me about the places that shaped you,
which is a great question, I would love it if someone asked
me that question. I might mention that my family
moved at least once a year from the time I was born to when I
was 7. I might say that I felt like a
misfit in the small town where I spent most of my, like, primary
school years. And I was like actively plotting
to get out by the time I was in high school.
And I might say that I still think of Los Angeles as my home
because that's where I met Jesus.
That's where I experienced my first really rich Christian
community. And that's the first place that
I had a real sense of belonging. So that's what home means to me.
You know, it is a place, but it's also memories.
It's a it's a people. It's a feeling that you're more
yourself when you're with them. So to me, the question beneath
the question is, where do you feel that you belong?
How would you answer that question?
I mean, some of you might be getting like warm fuzzies
thinking about the place that you call home, but some of you
might feel kind of a, a sadness like a a pain because it's
connected to loss or difficult memories.
So as we begin our journey into the book of Daniel, this is a
question that we're going to be confronted with.
How do we respond when our sense of security and belonging is
taken from us? And how might that shape the way
that we view and relate to God? So before we turn back to the
book of Daniel, I'd love to open us in just a quick word of
prayer that God would meet with us and speak to us this morning.
Father God, we are grateful that you are here to teach us, God,
not me, but your Holy Spirit and your word.
So God, we pray that you would be present in this place.
We pray that you would be present among us.
We pray that even though we are talking about a people in a
place that are centuries and miles away from most of our
experience, we pray that the common humanness would speak to
us this morning. God, we believe that you have
things to say, that your word is for us, that it is rich, that it
teaches us things that we need to know about reality, about who
we are, how who you are. And we also believe that you
meet us in it, God. So we just pray that you would
open up our hearts and minds this morning to be able to hear
from you. And yeah, I just thought you, by
your Holy Spirit would continue to shape the way that we view
ourselves, the way that we view the world, and that you would
bring our hearts more and more into alignment with yours and
your desire for us. We pray all those things in
Jesus name, Amen. Amen.
So earlier Amy very kindly read the first few verses of the book
of Daniel, which tell us that in the third year of the reign of
Jehoiakim, king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon
came to Jerusalem and besieged it.
That's first one. Already we might feel lost.
There's so many names we can't pronounce.
You know, we're not really sure why these people are important
maybe. And what does besieging mean?
Like it sounds bad. My first instinct is to be anti
besieging. But I'm also going to need like
a thesaurus. So to Orient us, let's just back
up a minute and kind of get oriented to Daniel's world.
So to do so, I'm going to kick us off with a 2 minute history
lesson. So just 120 seconds.
Nobody time me but 120 seconds. And you'll know everything that
you need to know about the history behind the book of
Daniel. OK, sound good?
You excited? OK, let's do it.
All right, so it all starts with a civil war.
So way back under King Solomon, which might be a familiar name.
Israel enjoyed this brief period of peace, but after Solomon
dies, things basically rapidly fall apart.
Infighting causes the nation of Israel to split into two into
the northern and southern kingdoms.
And both kingdoms experience like a long line of mostly
violent and wicked kings who like claim the the throne
through insurrection and who brings the Israelites deeper and
deeper into idolatry. So these wicked kings leave
Israel in a weakened state, basically totally unprepared for
when bigger stronger nations come knocking at their door.
And the southern Kingdom, which is also known as Judah, is
conquered first by Egypt and then by Babylon.
Now, Babylon's conquest kind of happens in stages, which is part
of why it can be hard to track the timeline.
But first, the first thing that Babylon does is they appoint A
vassal king over Israel. And a vassal king is like a
puppet, essentially. So they do have authority, but
like, Babylon is like pulling the strings behind the scenes.
And, you know, the king has to, like, pay taxes to Babylon and
provide military support to Babylon.
So that's kind of the arrangement.
But secondly, Babylon deports Israel's best and brightest to
come live in the Babylonian empire.
And that's what we saw happening in Daniel 1 verses 3:00 and
4:00. So it says that King
Nebuchadnezzar brings some of the Israelites from the royal
family and the nobility, young men without any physical defect,
handsome, showing aptitude for every kind of learning, well
informed, quick to understand, and qualified to serve in the
King's palace. And they were to learn the
language in the literature of the Babylonians.
Now, that might seem like kind of a strange practice, right?
So Babylon conquers Israel, and then they kind of just
immediately send out a talent scout to be like, OK, who are
the smartest and the best educated and like the best
looking Israelites and throw in any who come from good families
too. And we'll basically bring them
here and give them fancy jobs in the royal palace.
So it's kind of odd, but that's what happens.
And that's how Daniel and his friends, Hananiah, Michelle,
Azariah, that's how they all end up in Babylon.
One of the talents I need to develop is the ability to turn
pages more. I feel like.
Do you think our, like, opposable thumbs become most
less useful because we're interacting with technology all
the time? Anyway, we'll see what happens
as time passes. Well, that's it.
That's your two-minute history lesson.
So how do we do? Everyone still tracking with me.
OK, great. Perfect.
OK, so recap. This is what it means to live in
exile. So your homeland and your people
are conquered by foreign nation. Your places of worship have been
ravaged, and sacred items have been carried off to the temple
of a foreign God. You're taken to live in a
foreign land and to work for your oppressor.
And you're under pressure to adapt to the culture of your
oppressor, to speak their language and embody their way of
life. And even your names are changed
to foreign names. So kind of that last marker of
your former identity is taken from you.
So this is a desperate situation full of a loss and grief and
fear, right? Everything's very tenuous, and
these sentiments are captured really elegantly in Psalm 137.
It's about exile, It says by the rivers of Babylon.
We sat and wept when we remembered Zion.
There on the poplars we hung our harps, for there are captors
asked for our songs. Our tormentors demanded songs of
joy. They said, Sing us one of the
songs of Zion. How can we sing the songs of the
Lord while in a foreign land? If I forget you, Jerusalem, may
my right hand forget its skill, may my tongue cling to the roof
of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not
consider Jerusalem my highest joy.
So there's like a pain, attention, a longing in these
words. How can we sing a song about our
homeland when our hearts cry out that our home has been lost to
us? How can we forget where we are
from? But how can we remember without
being overwhelmed by grief? So this is kind of the emotional
overtone of the book of Daniel as we go in.
And so our big question of today is, how might Israel's
experience of exile speak to us and shape our faith today?
Well, to answer that question, I have kind of three main points
that we're going to focus on. So first, exile invites us to
experience God differently. Second, exile normalizes our
longing for something better. And 3rd, exile frees us to focus
on eternity. So first, exile invites us to
experience God differently. So exile involves like tangible
losses right of home and country, but it also involves
intangible losses of what you thought that your life would be
like, like how you imagined your future or how you thought that
God would show up in your hour of need.
So in Daniel 1-2, we see, for instance, that the Lord gave the
king. This is what it says.
It says the Lord gave the king over to Judah, basically to his
enemies, along with some of the articles from the temple of God,
which are like carried off into the temple of a Babylonian God.
So already the story immediately starts with the sense that God
has given up on Israel, or at least that's what we imagine the
are the the Israelites might think as they're in exile.
So another book of the Bible that was written about exile is
Lamentations. And this is a much more poetic
book. And so again, it gives us kind
of a glimpse into the grief of the people.
In chapter 5 it says, remember, Lord, what has happened to us?
Look and see. Our disgrace, our inheritance
has been turned over to strangers, our homes to
foreigners. We have become fatherless.
Our mothers are widows. We must buy the water we drink,
and our wood can only be had at a price.
Those who pursue us are at our heels.
We are weary and find no rest. And then the chapter ends with
this kind of cry out to God. Why do you always forget us?
Why do you forsake us for so long?
Restore us to yourself, Lord, that we may return, renew our
days as of old. These are like heart wrenching
verses, right? Like God's people have lost
homes and family members. They're weary and they're
hungry. And so they essentially cry out,
God, where are you? Have you forgotten us?
Have you abandoned us completely?
So maybe this is the first place that we might have something in
common with the exiled Israelites.
Like, have we ever felt abandoned by God?
Have we ever felt like we're not sure where he is in the midst of
our struggles? Have we ever wondered if he's
forgotten to answer our prayers? And, you know, maybe you read
the news and every day there's like, you know, a new headline
of some injustice, some atrocities, some senseless
suffering. Maybe you've experienced a
personal loss and your relationship with God has felt
distant ever since. Or maybe you've prayed the same
prayer over and over again for years on end, but it doesn't
feel clear if God has heard you. It's difficult enough to
struggle in your personal relationship with God.
It's another thing to feel that God has abandoned your people,
your nation, your church. And ancient Israel was all
three. Like, they were an ethnic
community. You know, they were a political
entity, and they were a religious body.
And so for generations, their identity was really rooted in
this idea that they were God's people, you know, the standard
bearers of the truth, the chosen ones.
Surely God would spare them from suffering.
Surely God would stand behind their leaders.
Surely God would allow his own people to be overtaken by
enemies. But that's exactly what happens.
And the reason was sin, like exile should not have been a
surprise to the Israelites Centuries, centuries and
centuries before. When God gave Israel the law, he
warned what would happen if they broke it and if they just chose
injustice and violence and idolatry instead.
In Leviticus 26, God says what will happen is your land will be
laid waste, your cities will lie in ruins, and then the land will
enjoy its Sabbath years all the time that it lies desolate and
you were in the country of your enemies.
And that was far from the last time that God rang the warning
bell. So the era of wicked kings that
we kind of talked about earlier, it lasted for over 300 years.
During that time, God sent dozens and dozens and dozens of
prophets urging Israel to repent and to remind them that God
would not stand by them while they refuse to provide justice
to orphans and deny the rights of the poor, which is what the
prophet Jeremiah warns. And they freely just keep giving
themselves to idols generation after generation passes, and the
people just refuse to change their ways.
But what's especially tragic is that we have people like Daniel,
Hananiah, Mishael, Azariah who suffer the consequences.
The book of Daniel doesn't provide like a ton of detail
about their background and their lives.
But through the book, we mostly see them acting with integrity
and what's pretty radical faith in God.
And yet they are sent into exile.
There's this verse in Lamentations 57 that may have
resonated with them. It says our ancestors sinned and
are no more, and we bear their punishment.
So how do we make sense of this, really?
How do we cling to faith in God when our leaders sin and we face
the consequences? When our parents or our bosses
or even our church leaders fail us and we are left to clean up
the mess? In some cases, like the
Israelites, admittedly, we might be part of the problem, right?
Like sometimes we do choose selfishness, or we turned a
blind eye to justice and then we kind of act surprised when it
catches up with us. But there are other times when
it feels like despite our failings, like we didn't create
the broken system or the broken families were in.
So what then? Like, where is God in the midst
of our struggle or in the midst of our exile?
So the themes of exile might hit closer home than we thought.
I was thinking about, you know, the years since the pandemic,
that whole era where the world just shut down, right?
And I was thinking about how we experience more like shared loss
and communal reasons to lament than I think I'd experienced in
my lifetime before that. But as I process my own griefs
from that, I've realized that the pain doesn't just come from
the loss itself. It also comes from the unmet
expectations, like from the way that loss kind of reshapes our
view of reality. You know, we thought life would
look one way, but it didn't turn out like that.
We thought certain things were true in our relationships with
others or even in our society, but it turned out we were wrong.
We thought God would show up in a certain way, but then he
didn't. I think that last one is the
sticking point because whether we're aware of it or not, each
of us has an internal script of how God is supposed to relate to
us. It's usually subconscious,
right? So it makes it easy to assume
that our script is just like reality.
But for instance, I became a Christian when I was living in
Los Angeles, and I feel like the default mindset in LA could be
summarized by the phrase good vibes only.
Like people literally sell T-shirts that say that on the
beach. So there is kind of like this
determined avoidance of pain and struggle and even inconvenience
that really shapes the whole culture and that bleeds into
people's spiritual lives. And often it shows up as this
kind of subconscious script that says I'll know God is real if he
keeps me from suffering. Or it might sound something like
as long as I'm a good person or a good Christian, that will
protect me from pain or even discomfort.
And maybe you grew up with kind of a similar script.
Or, you know, maybe it might say something like, as long as I
work hard and do good deeds for God, he will reward me.
Or God is on the side of the specific community or this
political party. So if I just align myself with
them, God will be pleased with me.
Which are all very American scripts to live by.
But most of us have scripts like this that are really based on
like our culture or kind of influential voices in our lives,
but they're not based on Scripture and they're not based
on truth. And the reason Daniel has
companions are able to endure exile well and maintain
faithfulness to God is because they are following a script
based on a right view of God. Because God does not promise
that we will never feel pain. God has not promised that we
will never experience loss. God has not exchanged good deeds
for like, get out of suffering free cards.
That's not a part of the biblical paradigm.
The greatest leaders of Israel suffered.
The apostles and evangelists of the early church suffered.
Jesus suffered. So God does not promise a life
free of suffering, but he does promise to never leave us or
forsake us. And that is the key, because
when we put our trust in God that promises for us, our
comfort is in the fact that God stands with us.
He identifies with our pain. And we can be sure of that
because of Jesus, who willingly went to the cross for our sake.
A God who is willing to suffer with us is a God that we can
trust. Jesus could have avoided that
ultimate and excruciating pain and humiliation and separation,
but he pursued it out of love for us.
So the God who is willing to go to the cross for our salvation
is the same God who shows up for Daniel and his friends in
unexpected ways. You know God, we'll we'll see
this later as we go through the series.
God gives Daniel the ability to interpret dreams to save him
from the wrath of the king. God walks alongside Daniel's
friends in the fiery furnace and protects them from harm.
God shuts the mouth of lions to protect Daniel when he is
sentenced to death. So he does show exile is
happening and yet God is showing up and providing deliverance and
evidence of his presence and showing his faithfulness in
other ways. Kind of both are happening at
the same time. And this is in response to
Daniel and his friends just continual reliance on the mercy
of God. And imagine if Daniel and the
others had operated by the script, you know, if I find
myself in exile, God must not be with me.
They literally would have missed out on some of the most
extraordinary miracles of the Old Testament.
But by clinging to the God who stands with them, Daniel and his
companions discover the extraordinary ways God can show
up even in our most desperate moments.
Hebrews 13 contains these two kind of like anchoring quotes
from the the Old Testament. The first one is the one that
says. God has said I will never leave
you nor forsake you, and then the Lord is my helper.
I will not fear. What can man do to me?
I feel like that is the script that Daniel and his friends live
by, like a faith that God is beside them and even the darkest
tragedy cannot destroy them. That exile is not the end of the
story. So our second point today is
that exile normalizes our longing for something better.
So despite these dire circumstances, Daniel and his
friends are shown a certain amount of favor in the Royal
Court. And Daniel, 15, says the king
assigned them a daily amount of food and wine from the King's
table. They were to be trained for
three years, and after that they were to enter the King's
service. So if the first temptation in
exile is to believe that God has abandoned you, the second
temptation would be to adapt to exile, like to try to make
Babylon your home. So this temptation, I think,
appeals to something that all humans have in common, which is
this desire to belong. As we talked about before, we
want to be connected to a place and a people, to find a home.
And so this is another way that we might relate to the
Israelites in exile, this feeling of existential
homesickness. And I say existential because
you could argue that homesickness is actually part of
the human condition. Like, we can trace it all the
way back to the fall in Genesis 3, where Adam and Eve rebel
against God and must leave the Garden of Eden.
And leaving Eden meant so much more than, like, leaving behind
a place, you know, it meant a loss of stability and comfort
and intimacy with God. And since then, humanity has
just found itself striving to return to that place of
stability and comfort and intimacy, but always coming up
short. So whether or not we realize it,
our hearts are longing to go back to Eden.
There's something in us that resists the brokenness of this
world, right? Like the world is full of
suffering, but we long for comfort and pleasure.
This world is full of violence and strife, but we long for
peace. It's full of judgment and
prejudice, but we long for acceptance and belonging.
The world is full of loss and disappointment, but we long for
permanence and fulfillment. So despite the fact that we are
surrounded by darkness, something in US resists it, like
something in US knows that we were made to live in the light.
It's difficult to live with unmet longings, isn't it?
Like it creates this tension inside of us.
So we're like, tempted to try to resolve it.
So we like, you know, maybe we try to numb out or, you know,
dull our desires by kind of detaching from them, you know,
doom scrolling, like doing whatever we can to forget.
Or we might go to the opposite extreme and chase highs, you
know, look for like the next adventure, excitement or the
next accomplishment or status symbol to kind of strive after.
But the problem with these coping mechanisms is that we're
resisting this very real thing that we can feel in our hearts,
which is the reality that we're not supposed to be satisfied
with this world as it is. God is not satisfied with the
world as it is, which means that the more that our hearts align
with his and the more that we kind of catch his vision for the
Kingdom of heaven to come to earth, the more dissatisfied
we'll be with this broken world. And that is the second lesson of
exile, To resist becoming comfortable in Babylon, we kind
of have to let ourselves stay dissatisfied or to lean into
that deeper longing. And just like Daniel and his
friends, we live in a world that we don't really belong in.
Like first Peter 211 literally refers to Christians as
foreigners and exiles in this world.
So one of the gifts of realizing that we are exiles is that it
normalizes this longing that stirs within us.
We are supposed to want more. We are supposed to feel like
even the best experiences this world has to offer are not
enough, that they're too fleeting or too shallow or too
unsatisfying. It's like that famous quote by
CS Lewis. If I find in myself desires
which nothing this in this world can satisfy, the only logical
explanation is that I was made for another world.
So here's the plot twist. What if the longing we feel is
not something to be fixed? Like what if the solution is not
to just kind of grasp for any destruction or pleasure or
affirmation that the world can offer?
What if this dissatisfaction is meant to draw us closer to God?
When we feel in our hearts an ache that nothing in this world
can ease, we become vibrantly aware of our need for Jesus.
Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in him.
So that longing for more is kind of like a fuel that we need to
propel us forward, like toward God and toward the things of
God. It motivates us to right wrongs,
to heal wounds, to counteract the coldness of this world with
love. It moves us to preach the gospel
and to tell people that in Jesus there is healing and hope.
There is a return to Eden. There is eternal life in God's
presence. And maybe you felt that longing,
but you've tried to, like, dampen it.
You know, maybe you've even grown complacent or apathetic or
given in to defeat. But if you have, I would invite
you to get in touch without longing.
It's still there, buried beneath everything.
We are not supposed to be satisfied with this life.
We are not supposed to make this life satisfying.
Our time in exile is meant to turn our eyes to Jesus because
he is the answer to our longing for something better than this
world can give us. Which brings us to our last
point today, which is that exile frees us to focus on eternity.
And this is maybe the most counterintuitive of them all.
So in our sermon series, we're not going to spend much time on
like the prophecies at the end of Daniel, but I'm going to
summarize them for you now. So basically Daniel, you know,
prays on behalf of his people for God to forgive their sin and
show them mercy and bring them out of exile.
And God essentially tells him two things.
So first, this time of exile will come to an end in his
lifetime. And 2nd, the exile, the cycle of
exile will repeat itself again, meaning the people will turn
away from God again and come under the control of a foreign
presser and cry out for help. And God will answer.
Rinse, repeat. I think I've seen that tree
before. It goes around and around, and
this is a sobering realization because it reminds us that as
humans, we need much more than like temporary relief from our
current bad circumstances. We need something fundamental
about this world to change. We need our own hearts to
change. Unfortunately, the last thing
that we have in common with the Exiles is that we believe in a
redemptive God. God is able to bring light out
of complete darkness. He is able to embed blessing
into the most desperate circumstances.
And the redemptive story arc of the Bible, which we need to keep
at the front of our minds, is that God is renewing the world.
His plan is to transform every creature, every experience,
every aspect of our current world so that it returns to its
original state, purely good, radiant with the light of His
glory. So basically, we are all
awaiting like a cosmic glow up that will last for all of
eternity. You can quote me on that.
So anticipating this renewal is absolutely essential if we were
going to hold on to hope in this fallen world.
And that is how Daniel and his friends survive exile with their
faith intact. If they focused only on their
circumstances, only on their limited kind of vision of what
they could see ahead or on the pain that they had just left
behind, they would simply despair.
Like they need a bigger vision to remain faithful and
courageous and stable. Like they needed a vision of
God, a God who renews all things.
So when I began writing the sermon, I was kind of struggling
to make the connection between the Israelites experience of
exile in our lives today because the circumstances are very
different than a lot of us have experienced.
But if we look beyond kind of the details of the circumstances
again, we see that exile is fundamentally this experience of
your reality being disrupted, of suddenly losing access to
everything familiar, everything that helps you feel grounded.
It's feeling like the rules of the game were rewritten
overnight, and now you don't even know how to relate to the
world around you. It's a disorientation.
Your life suddenly feels fragile.
And that made me think about the pandemic.
So recently, I have personally been reprocessing some of the
like sources of grief from that season, from the again, the time
when the world shut down and everything became unfamiliar to
us. Everything changed.
And part of the reason I've been revisiting that era is I
realized that even if I don't currently feel like a heaviness
or a sadness about some of the hard things that happened or the
things that I lost, I realized that they had still kind of
quietly shaped the way that I see my future.
So for instance, you know, I lost a job like many of us did,
but I also lost like relationships there and a work
community and even a vocation that I just never returned to.
All of these things that I invested in deeply that just
kind of disappeared seemingly overnight.
And the same thing happened within church.
Like countless people moved away or moved on.
And with many of them, there wasn't even like an in person
meaningful goodbye. It just kind of felt like
suddenly all of our familiar rhythms and people in spaces
just vanished. And even in the season where we
started to rebuild, right, we were still faced with more loss,
more movement, more change, more people burning out from just
trying to get so hard to keep everything together.
Some relationships even imploding because of like,
political disagreements and other pressures from the world.
And in the midst of all of it, we're still just trying to,
like, take the next step forward and chart a new path forward
towards a new life. So when I think about it that
way, it turns out I might understand exile a little bit
better than I thought that I did.
And even though I thought I had processed these griefs, I
realized again that they had changed something in me.
Because now there was this quiet script that, you know, I
shouldn't get attached, too attached to anything, because it
could just fall apart at any moment.
And Daniel and the Exiles could have bought into that same
script. That is not a sustainable way to
live. So what's the solution?
Like, how do you move forward and rebuild and invest in what's
good when you know that life is fragile and when you know that
the world will likely disappoint you again?
Well, the Bible's answer is maybe surprising, but it's also
really beautiful, which is that we keep our eyes on eternity.
We move forward knowing that this present brokenness is not
all there is. It's not even the thing that's
most real. We rebuild, believing that we
are a part of God's renewed world already.
We invest in good, knowing that what we do out of love for
others and for God's glory are the only things that will last
forever. There is this kind of unexpected
gift in exile because when our lives are comfortable, it's
tempting to want this life to fulfill us.
As if the joy or the satisfaction or even that sense
of home that we long for has to happen here and now or it'll
just be lost. Forever, my friend said, is far
from the truth. The truth that will free you is
that home is waiting for you in eternity.
And that truth is how Daniel and his companions were able to
stand behind their convictions with such courage.
That truth is how the early church lived with such a
beautiful, reckless faith. They served and preached and
healed and embodied the love of Jesus without fear, because they
knew that nothing lasting could be taken from them.
They knew that the treasures we store up in heaven are the only
ones that last. That this light, momentary
affliction, as the apostle Paul says, cannot compare to the
eternal weight of glory that awaits us.
That paradise is in the presence of God himself, and we are
invited to live there for all eternity, and that the joy we'll
have there will far eclipse the years of pain that we faced on
this earth. So as I was doing kind of the
research around exile, there was another era in human history
that came up for me as I was reading and putting things
together, and that is the African slave trade here in the
US. So the African slave trade was
also a time of exile. And amid all the atrocities,
something extraordinary happened that makes me emotional.
Countless enslaved people put their trust in Jesus, and they
made their faith of their own. They designed their own church
services. They wrote their own worship
songs, which we know as spirituals.
And so there's this one spiritual that I found called
the City of Heaven. It's called the City called
Heaven. And it just moved me.
And so I'm going to read part of it for you now.
It says I am a poor Pilgrim of sorrow.
I am tossed in this wide world alone.
No hope have I for tomorrow. I've started to make heaven my
home. Sometimes I am tossed and
driven, Lord. Sometimes I don't know where to
roam. I've heard of a city called
heaven. I've started to make it my home.
It's about me to tears the first time I read it.
Something about it really like hits me because there's this
time, right, of such darkness and oppression and injustice.
But despite the fact that their lives had been stolen from them,
these Christians found a new source of hope that no one could
take away from them. They called it heaven.
We might call it the renewed earth that God creates in
Revelation. Same idea, but their hope was
not that this current world would right all the wrongs that
had been done. Their hope was in a future that
completely. It was just completely
different. It was set apart.
It was a future where they found their rest and joy and the
presence of God for all eternity.
And I think the thing that makes me emotional is realizing that
there are sources of injustice that we will never see resolved
in this world. But the people who are the
victims of this injustice, who put their faith in God, now have
peace and rest and joy for the rest of eternity.
And man, does that make that worth it?
Like, isn't that beautiful? Because the world's not kind to
so many people in so many places, but God is.
His ways are mysterious to us. He's so much more patient than
any of us are, but he's also so much more just than any of us
are. And he calls us to wait upon him
so much. Like a pandemic or maybe a
tragedy that you've experienced in your own life.
You know, we don't choose to go into exile, but we can choose
what we do once we're there. We can, you know, there's the
option that I suggest nobody chooses, which is to turn to
broken coping mechanisms to try to resist reality, you know,
maybe try to adapt to a broken world and lose a bit of our
souls in the process. But there is another option.
We can refuse to let our faith be shaken.
We can sing anyway. We can worship anyway.
We can set our sights on the better life that is to come.
We can live in a way that brings a little taste of heaven to
earth today. So I'm going to end with this
quote from Frederick Beechner. I wanted it to be like, I could
have read you an entire 2 pages from his book.
So I had to choose a very short, short quote.
But I feel like it captures kind of that calling to stay
connected to the true home we find with God and why it
matters. So he says the fragmentary
nature of our experience shatters us into fragments
instead of being whole. Most of the time we are in
pieces and we see the world in pieces, full of darkness at 1
moment and full of light the next.
It is in Jesus, and in the people whose lives have been
deeply touched by Jesus, including ourselves, that we see
another way of being human in this world, which is the way of
wholeness. And when we glimpse that
wholeness in others, we recognize it immediately for
what it is. And the reason we recognize it
is that no matter how much the world shatters us to pieces, we
carry inside us a vision of wholeness that we sense is our
true home and that beckons to us.
It is part of what the book of Genesis means by saying that we
are made in the image of God. That is the vision I want us to
carry with us. So let me pray for us as we
close. Lord God, we recognize that we
live in a broken world that we cannot fix.
God. It causes us grief to know that
we live in a broken world that we cannot fix because we would
like the pain to end now. We would like exile to not
happen. We would like injustice to come
to an end. God, our greatest hope is that
you want all of these things so much more than we do.
The price you were willing to pay to achieve that was great.
You held nothing back. Jesus, you went to the cross.
You paid for our sin. You put an end to basically the
disease that afflicts us as humanity so that we would get to
enjoy a renewed world. You did it all on our behalf,
God, and we thank you for that. And we pray, Jesus, that you
would help us to not be a people who are complacent, who are numb
to this world, who strive for things that can never satisfy or
who give up hope. We pray that you would guard
these, guard us from these things by your Holy Spirit, and
we pray that instead that you would help us to connect deeply
to our longing for heaven, that we would connect deeply for our
desire to see this world completely renewed.
God, that that hope would be alive in US and that it would
change the way that we Live Today.
God, because when that hope is alive, we don't live as if
nothing matters. We live as if everything
matters. Because you can use it towards
your great purposes. God, it's not on us.
The pressure isn't on us, but we get to invest in and kind of
foreshadow the world that is to come.
God. And what a joy it is to be able
to do that. What a joy it is to remember the
testimony of many people who died without seeing that perfect
world realized, but who everyday walked out their faith with such
courage and such beauty and such hope.
God maybe be like that in this world.
So God, we asked that if there is anything in our way this
morning that you would remove it and that we would cling more
closely to you and the hope that we have in you.
Jesus, we pray all of that in your name, Amen.