First Presbyterian Church of Winchester

Serving Christ and Neighbor in Winchester and Beyond since 1800

  • Home
  • Contact Us
  • Service Times
  • Help with WATTS Week!
  • Are You New?
    • Service Times
    • Directions & Parking
    • Accessibility
    • Child Care
    • Sunday School
    • Membership
  • About Us
    • Beliefs
    • History
      • Boyd Memorial Chapel
    • Affiliations
    • Baptism
    • Communion
    • Weddings
    • Request to Use the Facilities
    • Church Leadership
    • Staff
    • Employment
    • Facebook
  • Ministries
    • Children’s Ministry
      • CM News
      • Kids Sunday School
      • Child Care
      • Safe Sanctuaries
      • Sign up for the Weekly CM Email Blast
      • Vacation Bible School
    • Youth Ministry
    • Adult Christian Education
    • Weekday Preschool
    • Mission and Outreach
    • Rise Against Hunger
    • WATTS
    • Care and Compassion
    • Prayer
    • Music
      • Children’s Choirs
      • Youth Choir
    • Worship
      • Watch Worship Online
      • Worship and Discipleship Council Collaboration
      • New Stone Gathering
    • Congregational Life
    • Stewardship
      • Make a Pledge!
      • Questions and Answers About Pledging
      • Planned Gifting
      • Automatic Withdrawal
        • Printable Form
      • Frequently Asked Questions About Donating Online
      • Donate
  • News & Events
    • View Online Worship Services
    • Coronavirus
    • eNotice
    • Calendar
    • Subscribe to Weekly eNotices
    • Member Directory
  • Sermons
    • Dan McCoig
    • Amanda Thomas
  • Donate
  • WATCH WORSHIP
You are here: Home / Uncategorized / October 27, 2013 Sermon: “Daniel and the Lions”

October 27, 2013 Sermon: “Daniel and the Lions”

October 28, 2013 by Todd Bowman

October 27, 2013

“Daniel and the Lions”

The Rev. Maren Sonstegard-Spray

Daniel 6:10-13

10 Although Daniel knew that the document had been signed, he continued to go to his house, which had windows in its upper room open toward Jerusalem, and to get down on his knees three times a day to pray to his God and praise him, just as he had done previously. 11 The conspirators came and found Daniel praying and seeking mercy before his God. 12 Then they approached the king and said concerning the interdict, “O king! Did you not sign an interdict, that anyone who prays to anyone, divine or human, within thirty days except to you, O king, shall be thrown into a den of lions?” The king answered, “The thing stands fast, according to the law of the Medes and Persians, which cannot be revoked.” 13 Then they responded to the king, “Daniel, one of the exiles from Judah, pays no attention to you, O king, or to the interdict you have signed, but he is saying his prayers three times a day.”

 

The story of Daniel and the lion’s den is one of the few Bible stories that made it into the “Tiny Bear’s Bible” which my son Nathan sometimes chooses for a nighttime book, along with creation and baby Moses and Noah’s ark.  It is a story as familiar as a nursery rhyme.

Daniel gets tossed in with the lions, God keeps him safe, Daniel emerges smiling, and we remember the happy ending.  When you stop and think about it, it is really a terrifying story.  Daniel works for a foreign conqueror who keeps starving lions as a means of punishing his enemies and law-breakers.

Daniel is one of three “presidents” who oversee a vast number of other workers called satraps.  For reasons we could guess at, the other two presidents conspire against him – perhaps they were jealous because Daniel had distinguished himself and was receiving a promotion, maybe there are ethnic and religious tensions that are boiling over.  But they couldn’t find anything wrong with him – he was honest, a good guy, faithful, diligent in his work.

 

So they work out a plan to trap him by setting the law of Darius the Mede (the king at the time) against the law of the God of Daniel.  So they gather everyone together, except Daniel of course, and get them to agree to bring this proposal to the king – the Aramaic word has the sense of swarming to the king.

 

And the proposal is that anyone who prays to anyone other than the king will be thrown into the den of lions.  And the king signs it.  In the book of Esther there is a helpful explanation for what this means (Esther 8:8): “an edict written in the name of king and sealed with the king’s ring cannot be revoked.”

 

And that’s where we pick up the story – Daniel knows the law of the land, and he knows the law of God, and he is faced with a difficult choice: civil disobedience and a horrifying death by being eaten alive by lions, or separation from the God who he prays to daily.

 

So I want us to look at this story through the eyes of Daniel who has this grave decision to make.  Daniel was not a super human or a spiritual super power – what we learn about him is that he was fairly ordinary other than being a faithful and ethical person and hard-working and he has an excellent spirit.

 

One commentator writes that “Daniel is not being pictured as a man of the age to come, marvelously able to exercise dominion over the beasts; instead, we have depicted here a man of the present age, like ourselves, who by trust and steadfastness gives a hint of the new way in which believers can deport themselves even now as they draw strength from the certainty of God’s coming great victory.”

 

Daniel has two great fears before him – separation from God and death by lions.

 

Karen Thompson Walker is a novelist who gave a TED talk about fear and the imagination, and she points out that our fears are very much like stories – they have a narrative and characters.

 

When we imagine our fears we are doing a kind of unintentional story telling.  Novelists spend a lot of time thinking about “what would happen if . . .”: What would happen if zombies attacked, what would happen if time travel were real, what would happen if there were ancient secret societies.

 

And our fears look much the same way: what would happen if I lost my job, what would happen if I lost a child, what would happen if I feel asleep behind the wheel of my car, what would happen if they say it is cancer.  Children, and novelists, are especially good at using their imaginations to create a whole story surrounding their fears.

 

Here is my example: as a child I was terrified that a horrible beast would come out of my closet at night.  Before I went to bed I would check the closet carefully and always sleep with the closet door closed – and here was my thinking, if the monster should come out I would definitely hear the closet door opening and since I was a light sleeper I would wake up, and that would give me a couple extra seconds to spring into action (I’m not sure what the plan was after that but I felt prepared) – later that fear transitioned to being afraid that a person was hiding in the closet so I slept with the door open so I could always see if there were feet underneath the hanging clothes.

 

Karen Thompson Walker points out that how we read our fears, which fears we listen to in a given situation like Daniel’s situation, makes all the difference in the world.

 

And here is the example she gives:  “One day in 1819, 3,000 miles off the coast of Chile, in one of the most remote regions of the Pacific Ocean, 20 American sailors watched their ship flood with seawater. They’d been struck by a sperm whale, which had ripped a catastrophic hole in the ship’s hull. As their ship began to sink beneath the swells, the men huddled together in three small whaleboats.  These men were 10,000 miles from home, more than 1,000 miles from the nearest scrap of land. In their small boats, they carried only rudimentary navigational equipment and limited supplies of food and water. These were the men of the whaleship Essex, whose story would later inspire parts of “Moby Dick.”  Even in today’s world, their situation would be really dire, but think about how much worse it would have been then. No one on land had any idea that anything had gone wrong. No search party was coming to look for these men . . . Twenty-four hours had passed since the capsizing of the ship. The time had come for the men to make a plan, but they had very few options . . . These men were just about as far from land as it was possible to be anywhere on Earth. The men knew that the nearest islands they could reach were the Marquesas Islands, 1,200 miles away.  But they’d heard some frightening rumors. They’d been told that these islands, and several others nearby, were populated by cannibals. So the men pictured coming ashore only to be murdered and eaten for dinner.

Another possible destination was Hawaii, but given the season, the captain was afraid they’d be struck by severe storms.  Now the last option was the longest, and the most difficult: to sail 1,500 miles due south in hopes of reaching a certain band of winds that could eventually push them toward the coast of South America.  But they knew that the sheer length of this journey would stretch their supplies of food and water. To be eaten by cannibals, to be battered by storms, to starve to death before reaching land. These were the fears that danced in the imaginations of these poor men, and as it turned out, the fear they chose to listen to would govern whether they lived or died.  So how can we tell the difference between the fears worth listening to and all the others? After much deliberation, the men finally made a decision. Terrified of cannibals, they decided to forgo the closest islands and instead embarked on the longer and much more difficult route to South America. After more than two months at sea, the men ran out of food as they knew they might, and they were still quite far from land. When the last of the survivors were finally picked up by two passing ships, less than half of the men were left alive, and some of them had resorted to their own form of cannibalism. Herman Melville, who used this story as research for “Moby Dick,” wrote years later, “All the sufferings of these miserable men of the Essex might in all human probability have been avoided had they, immediately after leaving the wreck, steered straight for Tahiti. But,” as Melville put it, “they dreaded cannibals.” They were swayed by one story much more than the others, and they listened to the wrong one. Of all the narratives their fears wrote, they responded only to the most lurid, the most vivid, the one that was easiest for their imaginations to picture.”

 

So back to Daniel – he has the lurid vision of being eaten by lions, or the less violent vision of turning his back on God.  And the story he listens to is the one about separation from God – that’s what matters more.  And so he goes and prays as he has always done, three times a day with the windows open.  There is some scholarly debate about the windows – whether we should understand them as already open, as they always were, or whether Daniel threw them open in defiance of the law so that everyone could see what he was doing.

 

 

Either way, scholars agree that in his actions he did nothing different than he done the day before or the week before – he prayed.  Mahatma Ghandi wrote that he found consolation in reading the book of the prophet Daniel because he believed Daniel to be one of the greatest passive resisters who ever lived.

 

As one commentator puts it quite creatively about Daniel’s decision, “To live without hope in God’s victory in the restoration of the world and the completion of his redemptive work is to become a slave to Big Brother, a rhinoceros bellowing through the streets in blind allegiance to an ugly and fatally flawed leader.”

 

I heard a quote once and I still don’t know who to attribute it to, but it is something to effect of, we are to so fear the face of God that we have no fear of anything else, and that I think is the lesson from Daniel.  We see in his story the intersection of two fears and while we may not face lions, we face our own kind of fears, our own difficult decisions.

 

One example of where we might encounter fears – our fears surrounding giving.  It is not that we don’t want to give back to God – we are afraid that there isn’t enough, we won’t be able to pay the bills.  Another one is when the topic of God comes up in a conversation and we stay quiet instead of saying something.   What about when the opportunity comes to stand up for someone or something, but we are afraid of what will happen – friends won’t speak to us again, the boss will fire us.  We don’t speak the truth when we should.

Our fears become bigger than what God calls us to do.  There are ways we betray God or betray truth because we are afraid.   So Daniel offers us a model to look fear in the face and trust God.

 

Amen.

 

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Serving Christ and Neighbor in the Heart of Winchester and Beyond

View Online Worship Services

Facebook Feed

Instagram Feed

firstpresbyterianwinchester

First Presbyterian Winchester
FPC Epiphany Seasonal Team Newsletter. Click the l FPC Epiphany Seasonal Team Newsletter. Click the link in the bio, then click "FPC News" button to locate the recent edition.
Worship at home with us this morning! Click the li Worship at home with us this morning! Click the link bio to go to our Facebook page, YouTube Channel, or our Virtual Church webpage for worship at 10 AM.
eNotice - Link in bio (FPC News) We're putting tog eNotice - Link in bio (FPC News) We're putting together care packages for our healthcare heroes! Have coffee with the pastors over Zoom this Sunday! and more! #winchesterva #pcusa
Whoo-hoo! Many friends were able to sign-up to hel Whoo-hoo! Many friends were able to sign-up to help with FPC's WATTS Week, but we still have some spots to fill out! In Guest Services, we need a few friends to assist on each day, and on the last day--Saturday, January 30. If you are able to volunteer, please sign-up wherever you can. Go over to http://ow.ly/Jd0w50D9PNO and take a look at each tab to see where help is needed. Instagramers, click link in bio. We do not have much time left before our assigned WATTS week. Please prayerfully consider how you can help if you are able. WATTS week is Saturday, January 23-Saturday morning, January 30. If you have signed up to donate supplies or food, come to the church parking lot for a drive-thru WATTS donation drop-off on Saturday, January 16 from 2pm-3pm, and Thursday, January 21 from 4pm-5pm. If you cannot make those dates, please contact the church office at info@fpcwinc.org. Drop-off via our kitchen door will also be available on Wednesday & Thursday, 1/20-21 from 10am-4pm.
Our Adult Faith Formation class begins tonight in Our Adult Faith Formation class begins tonight in 1/2 hr at 7:30pm.
Instagramers, click the link bio, we have the Zoom class link and class materials buttons in our Linktree.
OR...
To access the online class, click here: http://ow.ly/LE0K50D8TYJ
To access the class materials, click here: http://ow.ly/jfju50D8U1g

Led by Pastor Dan McCoig Jr. See you soon!
Special Announcements. Click in bio for latest FPC Special Announcements. Click in bio for latest FPC News.
(1) Adult Faith Formation MLK Jr Class Series begins TONIGHT at 7:30pm. Access via Zoom at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89841223984
(2) WATTS needs YOU! You can donate money and/or supplies! We do need volunteers to assist in-person but we have safety protocols in place. Please read this email or go to fpcwinc.org/watts and click the Sign-Up Genius links for details on how to help and availability. WATTS hosted at ONE site this year at 308 N. Braddock Street. FPC's week to help is January 23-30.
(3) We are putting together care packages for our healthcare heroes! We are in need of donations and/or handwritten notes.
Read this special email for details and information.
Have you signed up yet to help with WATTS Week for Have you signed up yet to help with WATTS Week for FPC? This year will be a little different due to COVID-19. Go to https://www.fpcwinc.org/watts and click the Sign-Up Genius logo to be taken to the online sign-up forms. Please read each tab's description and details on how to help. If you need assistance, please send an email to info@fpcwinc.org for help.

Image description: The color purple background. In the color white, the WATTS logo with outstretched hands sheltering a person icon. Also in the color white, it reads: WATT Week for FPC is January 23-January 30. The entire season of WATTS will be permanently hosted at First UMC at 308 N. Braddock St. What is needed: dinner sponsorships, perishable and disposable dinnerware donations, and guest services helpers. Find Details on How to Help or Donate at fpcwinc.org/watts
#winchesterareatemporarythermalshelter  #winchesterva #pcusa
FPC Epiphany Seasonal Team Newsletter - Click link FPC Epiphany Seasonal Team Newsletter - Click link in bio, click first button (FPC news), then click the most recent link.
Worship at home with us this morning! Worship at home with us this morning!
This Week's eNotice - Online Holy Communion this S This Week's eNotice - Online Holy Communion this Sunday  Online Ordination and Installation of Ruling Elders Worship on Zoom this Sunday  Drive-Thru "Remembering Our Baptism" event in the church parking lot THIS Sunday afternoon  Sign-up for WATTS Week and more! Click link in bio, then click the first button to FPC's news, then click the recent link.
Screen readers: black and white simpe, line drawin Screen readers: black and white simpe, line drawing of a person baptizing another in a river, with a dove flying above. Text: January 10 is Baptism of the Lord Sunday, a day on which Christians commemorate Jesus’ baptism by John and remember their own baptisms. We invite you to a drive-through commemoration from 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. on January 10 in our Cameron Street parking lot [weather permitting]. Wooden hearts will be anointed with oil by Dan and Amanda and placed in persons outstretched hands using an extended reacher with the words “As God’s beloved, remember your baptism.” In response, you are asked to speak quietly or silently, “I remember my baptism and will show the love God has shown me to others. Amen.” ALL ARE WELCOME!
Screen Readers: Watercolor of the Holy Spirit as a Screen Readers: Watercolor of the Holy Spirit as a dove, over water, with pastel colors. 
Ordination and Installation of Ruling Elders of First Presbyterian Church of Winchester, Virginia, after our live-streamed worship on Sunday, January 10, 2021. 11:30 AM via Zoom. Access by click the link in bio and click the "Ordination" button.
This Sunday Only - Ordination/Installation Service This Sunday Only - Ordination/Installation Service and Drive-Thru event at FPC! Plus, sign-up to help, through donations or as a helper, for FPC's WATTS Week! Click the link in our bio, then click the first button view details of this email. Click the second button to sign-up for WATTS Week, whether through donations or as a helper.
Worship at home with us this morning! Click the li Worship at home with us this morning! Click the link in the bio, then click the live stream button.
HAPPY NEW YEAR! 2021!Click on the link, click on o HAPPY NEW YEAR! 2021!Click on the link, click on our linktree, click on the latest link!
Worship at home with us this morning! Click the li Worship at home with us this morning! Click the link in the bio, then click the live stream button.
MERRY CHRISTMAS! and it's Friday! eNotice is here! MERRY CHRISTMAS! and it's Friday! eNotice is here!🎄 Click the link in the bio, then the first button to see the latest eNotice. #winchesterva #pcusa #christmas #matthew25
Screen Readers: Click link in bio, then select the Screen Readers: Click link in bio, then select the second button "Pastor Dan's Christmas Letter" for the text. #winchesterva #christmas #christmaseve #pcusa
Screen readers: Join us for an illuminated, safe, Screen readers: Join us for an illuminated, safe, and outdoor Christmas Eve Service. Dress warmly--masks and distancing required. Bring a chair if needed. 5 pm (service will be brief). This service will occur regardless of the weather. If raining/snowing, cars are welcome in the parking lot (first come basis) and friends are welcome to stay in cars with windows down for sound. Luminaries and candles will be available. Our parking lot is located on South Cameron Street, near the intersection of Cork and Cameron Streets. #winchester #winchesterva #christmas #christmaseve #pcusa #worship
Join us virtually or in-person on Christmas Eve! W Join us virtually or in-person on Christmas Eve! We will premiere our virtual Lessons and Carols worship by noon, and you are welcome to join us in-person (masked and distanced) in our parking lot at 5 pm for a special worship service. This year's Christmas Eve offering will go to the Helper Fund. If you would like to make a donation online, go to our website, fpcwinc.org, and click "Donate". Online donors: be sure to designate your giving.
Load More... Follow on Instagram

Return to top

First Presbyterian Church of Winchester | 116 South Loudoun Street | Winchester, Virginia, USA, 22601

Tele. No.: 540-662-3824 | Fax: 540-662-8498