Not According to Plan
We rose early in the morning, sleepy-eyed, to load into our already packed Aerostar. Our summer visit with family in Kentucky had reached its end. But our adventure was not over yet. My parents had planned a road trip to Black Mountain in North Carolina. We would do a little sightseeing along the way and spend one night en route to our destination.
My parents grew up in Kentucky, so they played tour guide for my brother and I as we made our way east toward the mountains. After a full day of driving and a little hiking, we approached our stopover destination, a Holiday Inn. Now, my dad reminds me that all of this happened before the days of smart phones—and even before the internet was widely in use. So the planning had been done by maps and phone calls. What this means is that, when the Holiday Inn attendant looked at us with surprise and said, “We’re booked! And I don’t see your name anywhere in our records,” we had no email receipt or other proof of purchase. We were up the proverbial creek without a paddle.
My dad herded us back into the Aerostar and set off across town in the encroaching darkness to the next recognizable hotel franchise. But to our dismay, they were booked too. And the next hotel, and the next. It’s safe to say that things were not going according to plan. My dad says he really started to worry when he started to recognize the same cars at each hotel. It seemed that we were not the only ones looking for a place to stay. In an attempt to get out of this apparent hotel rat race, my dad asked one of the hotel attendants if there were any local bed and breakfast establishments nearby. There was one, the attendant said, toward the top of a nearby mountain. With directions in hand, our Aerostar crawled up a back mountain road underneath a black sky filled with stars until finally we saw it. A large, rustic house. In the night, it looked a little bit like a haunted mansion to my seven-year-old eyes. The man at the front desk indicated that the basement was vacant, and we would be welcome to stay there.
I could go on and on about this adventure. There was the unnerving surprise of hearing people in the bathroom that we thought was exclusively ours—apparently it had a second entrance coming from another part of the house and was shared with other rooms. The next morning, we enjoyed a surprisingly sumptuous breakfast with all the country fixings you could ask for. Perhaps most memorable of all, there was a rope swing outside the house that swung out over a steep dropoff, giving you the impression that you might fly off the side of the mountain.
Hope
When most people use the word “hope,” they really mean “want” or “expect.” For example, I might say, “I hope we get some snow this winter.” Or a child might say, “I hope I get the toy I want for Christmas.” Or my parents may have been saying on that adventure of a car ride, “I hope the next hotel has an open room.” This kind of hope has a direct object. Which is to say, it has a particular target, a foreseeable result or goal. This kind of hope is what we might call “hope for.” Hope for this, or hope for that. This kind of hope often lends itself to planning. We might try to engineer the desired result (for example, by calling ahead to make a reservation, or by writing a letter to Santa expressing our wishes).
But this kind of hope stands in stark contrast to biblical hope. If you flip through an English Bible, you will find very few instances of the phrase “hope for.” Because, generally speaking, biblical hope does not have a direct result in mind. It is not hope for this, or hope for that. Instead, in the Bible, you will find a different expression. “Hope in.” “Hope in the Lord,” “hope in God,” “hope in God’s steadfast love.” Biblical hope is hope in a relationship rather than hope for a thing. Biblical hope is in a way of life (e.g., God’s steadfast love) rather than for a result.
From the perspective of the world, my family’s “hopes” for a place to stay were thwarted time and again as one hotel after another said, “Sorry, we’re booked.” But from a biblical perspective, hope in that situation had nothing to do with finding a room. Hope in that situation looked more like the childlike trust I had that, with my parents at the wheel, everything was going to turn out okay. My hope was in my parents. As long as I hitched my wagon to theirs, I would be well.
Daniel Hopes in God
Today’s scripture is a classic and a favorite of Sunday School teachers: Daniel in the lions’ den. You may wonder, however, what it’s doing here on the first Sunday of Advent. I do not know the motivations of the individuals who assembled the Narrative Lectionary, but I can share my own view. If we step back from the children’s Sunday School version of the story, we see a fascinating situation. Daniel is a Jewish exile who becomes a trusted servant of kings, first in the Babylonian empire, and then subsequently in the Persian empire. Yet, his rise to prominence comes not through cunning politics or shrewd power-plays. Rather, he repeatedly proclaims the eventual demise of the present empire (first Babylon, then Persia) and the triumph of God’s kingdom. Indeed, he lives at a unique point in history where he himself can observe that kingdoms come and kingdoms go. But the transience of human empire does not phase him, because he belongs to another kingdom, a kingdom that will never be shaken.
All of which is to say, Daniel hopes in God. He hopes in what God is doing in the world, ever so patiently, ever so subtly.
The King and Daniel:
A Study in Contrasts
One of the little details that jumped out at me this past week, is that the story of Daniel in the lion’s den actually focuses very little on Daniel. It does not tell us what he’s thinking or feeling. It does not give him any final, dramatic speech before he is thrown into the lion’s den. Instead, it focuses on the king, who is extremely distressed on Daniel’s behalf. First the king makes every effort to rescue him when he learns of Daniel’s infraction. Then he delivers a heartfelt goodbye to Daniel before enclosing him in the lion’s den. Later that night he is tormented by his anxiety, unable to eat or sleep. At the first sign of light, he hurries out to the lions’ den and cries out anxiously to see if by some miracle Daniel is still alive.
Which is all to say, the king is worried.
I wonder if the storyteller shows us the king’s worry to suggest a contrast. The implication seems to be that while the king’s running about in a tizzy, Daniel calmly submits to his fate. How can Daniel be so calm? The king sees only a dark end to Daniel’s life. Does Daniel see things differently?
“Pays No Attention to You, O King”
Throughout the book of Daniel, the Israelite protagonists are repeatedly accused of one thing. In today’s text, Daniel’s enemies tell the king, “Daniel…pays no attention to you, O king” (6:13). The enemies of Shadrach, Mesach, and Abednego made the same accusation of them before—they “pay no heed to you, O king” (3:12). But the reality is that Daniel and his peers are not so much ignoring the king as they are paying attention to someone else: God. Daniel does not willfully flout the new law so much as he steadfastly maintains his faithfulness toward God, which includes praising him three times a day.
Daniel’s hope is not like the world’s hope. He does not hope for riches or success—or even survival. Daniel’s hope is in God. Like me in that car inching across the mountains, he doesn’t know the precise outcome of the adventure, but he trusts in the one who is at the wheel. I think that, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego before him, he even accepts the possibility of death—and trusts that in such a scenario something good would still result. He would be leaving a witness to the kingdom of God. As Daniel puts it earlier to King Nebuchadnezzar, he trusts that God’s kingdom will “crush all these [worldly] kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever” (Daniel 2:44).
It is here in Daniel’s willingness to submit to death that I detect a small but significant difference between my hope in my parents and Daniel’s hope in God. My hope on that car ride was mostly passive. It required very little of me. I was a backseat passenger, literally. But biblical hope is not just passively waiting. It is an active waiting. Like Daniel who lived out his faith in a strange and sometimes uncomprehending culture, even when it meant risking his life, we live out our faith in God also in strange, countercultural ways. That is to say, like Daniel, we hope in God’s kingdom rather than in the empires where we live. And so we choose the way of God’s kingdom over the way of our world. We choose giving over accumulating, blessing over cursing, peace over violence. We choose acceptance over judgment, forgiveness over revenge, truth over convenient fictions. Sometimes it might seem like this way leads us into the darkness. But because our hope is not hope for results, we are not swayed. We are, rather, lights in the darkness, ambassadors for God’s everlasting kingdom. We might not know what’s next, but we trust God will be a part of it. We trust that God is working for the good of our world—and that we can be a part of it too.
Prayer
Unseen God,
Whose fingerprints we discern
All over our lives and world—
Inspire us with the same hopeful spirit
That led Daniel into the lion’s den,
Into the darkness,
And out the other side
Into the light of your new day.
In Christ, in whom we hope: Amen.
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