Daniel/Jeremiah: A Third Way of Living in Exile

May 01, 2020

Daniel/Jeremiah: A Third Way of Living in Exile

Introduction: Leave It To Beaver (low anxiety), Archie Bunker (high anxiety), The Wonder Years (middle anxiety), The Simpsons (I have no idea, because I wasn’t allowed to watch it), Modern Family (low anxiety). We are living in a very anxious time. External pressures include an invisible virus, unknown timeline, unanswered questions, all-too-clear economic and unemployment news, and the most deeply partisan environment that I can remember. Internal pressures include loneliness, spiking addiction struggles, marital strife, depression. At least dogs and cats are in deeper agreement than ever before—they are ready to have some alone time again.

How do we live in a high-anxiety atmosphere? In our homes and neighborhoods and nations? Fight or flight? Go to battle or run to bunker? Do we only have two options?

Daniel and Jeremiah lived in these same tensions. They lived a third way. Daniel was in the first wave of refugee exiles to be taken to Babylon. Daniel 1.3-4 tells us that Nebuchadnezzar took the brightest and best away from Jerusalem. Why? Keller writes, “A defeated nations’ professional and elite classes were often taken to Babylon to live before being allowed to return home. Judah had been deported, partially in the hope that the children and grandchildren of the Israelites would assimilate and lose their identity as a distinct people.” (Center Church, 142).

Jeremiah is almost a manual for exile and post-exile. Daniel even looked to Jeremiah to help figure out how long this is going to last. In Chapter 9, Daniel opened up Jeremiah with that very question. This question makes a big difference in our stance. Jeremiah 28 and Hananiah’s false prophecy (2 years) or God’s revelation in 29.10 (70 years). You can live out of a suitcase for a little while (tourist), or you can put down permanent roots (native).

You are going to be here longer than you want, but you aren’t going to be here forever. An exile is neither tourist, nor native. Tourists don’t enter in. Natives never leave.

Both Daniel and Jeremiah present a way to enter in, but not go native.

Daniel 1. Daniel and Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego refused to eat and drink the king, but they were the best help to the king. Uncompromised in diet and uncompromised in citizenship. “In every matter of wisdom and understanding about which the king inquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters in his kingdom” (1.10). Daniel was promoted, and brought his three friends with him.

Daniel 3. The three men refused to bow before the golden image. They were unharmed. And another “like a son of the gods” joined them in the fire. They were promoted (3.30).

Daniel 6. Daniel was “distinguished above all the other officials and the king planned to set him over the whole kingdom” (6.3). Daniel knelt down before open windows and knelt and prayed three times a day toward Jerusalem.

Their goal was to be the best Jews even if they weren’t in Judah anymore.

The Witness of the Weak Centres:

https://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/the-witness-of-the-weak-centres/

“On the inaugural opening of the Bonhoeffer-Haus on June 1, 1987, Bonhoeffer’s best friend, Eberhard Bethge, addressed those gathered at this newly dedicated place of remembrance by comparing it to the newly memorialized ruins of the SS headquarters downtown. (Both places were set aside in 1987 as memorial sites, the same year Berlin celebrated the 750th anniversary of its founding.)”

“The SS headquarters existed “to assure the security of the Third Reich,”

“The house was, he said, “one of the weak centres for the destabilization of the Third Reich.”

Jeremiah says,

1. Live in the present (Jeremiah 29). Build a weak centre, that won’t, that can’t, overthrow the empire, but could transform it. Like a seed. Like leaven.

2. Buy into the future (Jeremiah 32). The kingdom is coming. I’d invest! I am investing.

Jesus’ style.

Integration Questions:

1. If you could pick a sitcom family to live with during this time, which family would it be?

2. How do we enter into our city, without going native? How is it difficult to enter in? Where are we tempted to go native?

3. Jeremiah 29 gives a vivid vision of how God’s people are to live in Babylon. How can we as God’s people here “seek the peace and prosperity of the city”? What does that look like in our context? (Question adapted from Center Church, 143).

4. How can we pray for each other this week?