A sermon preached at Calvary Presbyterian Church in San Francisco, California

July 7, 2024

Introduction to Worship

Today we are beginning a sermon series through the Book of Daniel. It tells the story of some noble-born boys from Israel who become spoils of war and are taken from Jerusalem to Babylon and trained to be advisors to the king. Daniel and his friends were part of a ‘brain drain’, where Babylon took the best and brightest minds to work for them so that they couldn’t work for Israel. Daniel should not be seen as a historical book about a historical person, even though it is set in a real historical period. 

It was written in the second century BCE, but set 400 years earlier. It is one of the apocalypse books in scripture. Apocalypse means ‘reveal’ which means that it was written to reveal something about where God was moving in the world, and particularly where God was in the terrible political situation of the second century BCE. 

Like the Book of Revelation that will be written a few hundred years later, apocalypse books like Daniel seek to tell a story about current kings, despots, and empires but without using the names of those kings and empires.  Turns out despots are vain and insecure men. They only like positive press and tend to silence enemies who write bad things about them. 

And Antioches IV Epiphanies is the bad guy King Nebuchadnezzar is standing in for. He was a Seleucid king who threatened the ability of Jewish people in occupied Israel to live and worship freely. At first the Seleucids were welcomed by the religious leaders because the Seleucids gave the chief priest some perks and power. As the invaders destroyed the Constitution and undermined the structures of their society, the religious leaders let it happen because they thought they had power and favor. Sure, the Seleucids  were harming others, but the religious leaders thought they were fine.  

And then, as happens with tyrants who care more about their own power than they care about the people they rule, Antioches desecrated the Temple in Jerusalem. He banned the bible, burning any copies of it he found. He stole the candlesticks and anything of value, melting them down to make idols. He made a sacrifice to the Greek god Zeus by killing a pig on the altar in the Temple. The Temple was God’s house. What he did in God’s house was a desolating sacrilege. 

And so the Book of Daniel is written in the midst of that. As people are watching the news and wondering how a politician who first seemed so harmless could be creating so much damage, watching the news and wondering where God could be while God’s house has been over run by adherents of other gods, we can imagine their despair. 

When people are overwhelmed by despair, tyrants win. When people start thinking that because so many bad things have happened, they might as well give up, move to New Zealand, not vote, or whatever—tyrants win. 

And so think about this as we read through the Book of Daniel. It is written to encourage people to revolt against unjust leaders and to stay true to their faith, even when those unjust leaders make it seem appealing, and maybe inevitable, to capitulate to foreign gods and foreign practices. It is written to remind people that God’s faithfulness is more reliable than human power or cleverness. Daniel was a smart and clever guy. He still ended up a slave of a foreign king. It was his faithfulness to God that set him apart from other smart and clever people.

The Bible has a way of being timeless. While there is much in the Book of Daniel that will seem odd to our ears, there is much that will resonate about the world we live in. Think about Daniel as we watch the news today. 

I understand how overwhelmed many of us feel by recent court decisions, debate performances, and the continued failure of congress to govern in a meaningful way. I hope it helps to remember that other people have been through challenging times before us too, and their perseverance through their difficulties created our good times. 

We are now at a moment where the work we do, where our faithfulness to the God who created us, called us, and protects us, where our perseverance through adversity will create better days for our descendants. 

Margaret Renkl, in her book the Comfort of Crows, writes this: 

“The television may be full of terror, and the terror may be growing with every passing hour, but the trees are full of music. The blue jays sing their tender whisper song, and the quarrelsome beeping of the Carolina chickadee is transformed into a ringing four-note song of love…

Here is the world I need, a world that exists far beyond the impulse to scroll and scroll…..

The natural world’s perfect indifference has always been the best cure for my own anxieties. Every living thing – every bird and mammal and reptile and amphibian, every tree and shrub and flower and moss – is pursuing it own vital purpose, a purpose that sets my human concerns in a larger context….

I can scroll and worry indoors, or I can step outside and remember how it feels to be part of something larger, something timeless, a world that reaches beyond me and includes me, too.”  

May the stories of our faith, the music of worship, and the songs of birds call us deeply to our purpose and give us what we need to be faithful to the living of our days. 

Daniel 2:24-49

Sermon

What is your relationship to your dreams? Do you remember them? 

I try to remember mine. I try to stop when waking, before I open my eyes and the day intrudes. Because if I get out of bed and start brewing the coffee before I think about my dreams, they are long gone. 

The poet David Whyte speaks about this in his poem 

What to Remember When Waking

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

Sometimes my dreams make sense. I can follow a thread of what my brain  and my heart have been working through and the ways things show up in my dreams. Sometimes it is more of a mystery. The other night, I dreamed that I bleached—I mean BLEACHED—my own hair at home.  Last night I dreamed I was on the choir tour and Michael said I had to play the organ because John had somewhere else to be for that concert. I don’t know exactly what corner of my life has something I feel completely unprepared and unequipped to face, but it showed up in those dreams, that’s for sure. 

My preferred dreams are when Sean Connery chats with me in the produce aisle. Actually, that dream happened to a friend of mine and I’ve been jealous of it since I heard about it. In truth, I’d be happy if any of the actors who have played James Bond showed up in a tuxedo at a grocery store. I would sleep through my alarm. 

Why do we dream? Dreams are hard to study in a lab setting, but scientists think dreams serve the following purposes: 

—they help with offline memory reprocessing, in which the brain consolidates learning and memory tasks and supports and records waking consciousness

—they prepare us for possible future threats

—they give us cognitive simulation of real life experiences, 

—they help develop cognitive capabilities

—they are a unique state of consciousness that incorporates experience of the present, processing of the past, and preparation for the future

—dreams are a psychological space where overwhelming, contradictory, or highly complex notions can be brought together by the dreaming ego, notions that would be unsettling while awake, serving the need for psychological balance and equilibrium

Dreams are common in scripture. Jacob wrestles with God in a dream one night and ends up with a real life limp. In the Book of Acts, Peter has a dream about how the church is supposed to be more inclusive than he had thought it should be. The magi are warned by a dream to return home by another way and avoid king Herod after they visit the baby Jesus. In scripture, dreams are a common way God communicates with people. 

And who am I to tell God how to do their job, but I think it’s not a foolproof communication strategy. Dreams don’t have witnesses, so we have to trust the dreamer to communicate the message correctly. And we’ve already discussed how quickly dreams fade upon waking. And even if we trust the dreamer, how does one know they’ve interpreted the dream correctly?

Are you sure that’s what God told you to do?, we might ask a friend who reports that they dreamed God wants them to drop out of college a month before graduation. Does God not want you to have that degree you’re so close to getting, maybe as a back up plan?

Dreams may seem clearer to the people who dream them than they do to the rest of us. 

There have been occasions where my dreams were clear and I knew immediately upon waking what they meant. Many years ago, not long after Justin and I got married, I was trying to figure out what I was going to be when I grew up. I’d turned down graduate programs in History. I was thinking about maybe law school or getting a teaching certification. I was actively searching and praying and discerning for my future path. A number of people at the church where we were members asked me if I’d considered applying to be the youth director. 

I didn’t just say ‘no’ to them, but each time I said some version of ‘are you crazy? Why would I want to spend time with youth? I have just barely recovered from being a youth’. 

And then I had a dream where I heard a loud voice calling my name. I was in a dorm of some kind and I went out in the hall and at the end of the hall was God. God looked like one of those Monty Python cartoon pictures of God from the Holy Grail movie and God yelled, “Marci! Are you listening?”

And I woke up and immediately applied to be the youth director of our church and now here I am, wondering what else I possibly ever thought I could do with my life. 

But I’ve had other dreams that I needed help understanding. And I’m thankful for the friends, and therapists in my life who have given me good counsel and asked the questions that helped me sort them out. 

And this is where we find King Nebuchadnezzar. He’s been having these vivid dreams and he knows they mean something but he can’t figure it out. He can’t sleep and he’s losing it. He tells his magicians that they not only have to interpret his dreams, but also they have to know what the dream is without him even telling them. And if they can’t read the king’s mind and then explain the dreams, they will be killed. I guess that’s one way to know how good your magicians and enchanters are. 

Right before the passage Victor read, Daniel and his friends pray to God for mercy and that night Daniel has a dream that gives him the answer so he’s able to tell the king what it means.

And to the king’s credit, he recognizes good interpretation, no matter where it comes from. As the story goes on, we’ll see he’ll need reminders of this more than one time. But in this moment, he gets it. 

I worry a lot of people’s dreams and ambitions are not being interpreted well in our world. People seeking power are saying that their dreams involve only success and well being for themselves, and they have surrounded themselves with people who agree with them, rather than people who might ask, “wouldn’t your well being improve if the lives of everyone else got better too?”

Are we getting good interpretation of our dreams? 

And are we allowing the dreams of people who have different experiences than we do, to come to fruition?

Langston Hughes a 20th century African American poet wrote at least a few poems about dreams. Here’s one of them: 

Dreams by Langston Hughes 

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die,
Life is a broken-winged bird
That can not fly. 

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go,
Life is a barren field
Frozen in the snow.

Having to hold fast to dreams is something the African American community has had lots of practice in. Hughes lived through the Jim Crow era. His poem is written from a place of deep and difficult experience. And yet it is a poem of hope. Dreams can give us life in difficult times, reminding us to focus our hopes on what we can’t quite see yet. 

As we hear the stories of Daniel and his friends this month, notice their hope and faith in situations where despair and resignation would be understandable. Our ancestors in scripture, and in our actual family trees, have stories to tell us about faithfulness in difficult moments. 

This week I invite you to notice your dreams. And to notice where the dreams of others are being voiced. 

I began this sermon with a poem by David Whyte. That poem continues with these lines: 

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?…..
–from The House of Belonging, Many Rivers Press

May our dreams give us connection to the urgency that calls us to our one love. Dream on, friends.