The Outcome
Daniel 12:1-3
‘At that time Michael, the great prince, the protector of your people, shall arise. There shall be a time of anguish, such as has never occurred since nations first came into existence. But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone who is found written in the book. Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.
Psalm 16
A Miktam of David.
Protect me, O God, for in you I take refuge.
I say to the Lord, ‘You are my Lord;
I have no good apart from you.’
As for the holy ones in the land, they are the noble,
in whom is all my delight.
Those who choose another god multiply their sorrows;
their drink-offerings of blood I will not pour out
or take their names upon my lips.
The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup;
you hold my lot.
The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
I have a goodly heritage.
I bless the Lord who gives me counsel;
in the night also my heart instructs me.
I keep the Lord always before me;
because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.
Therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices;
my body also rests secure.
For you do not give me up to Sheol,
or let your faithful one see the Pit.
You show me the path of life.
In your presence there is fullness of joy;
in your right hand are pleasures for evermore.
So the psalm we just heard, while a generally lovely and hopeful one, is one in which there’s not a ton of agreement or consensus as to what it’s really about. There’s a lot of ambiguity in it. In verse 3 for example, it’s very unclear what “holy ones” means. It could mean some kind of angels, or supernatural guardians; it could also just be referring to the good and faithful people the psalmist is surrounding himself with. “Those who choose another god…” in the next verse, again, it’s not clear who these people are. And the psalm as a whole is curious in that it could either be someone asking God for protection while going through something trying and scary; or it could be someone thanking God for getting them through a difficult time.
So I guess the question for us… does it even matter? The ambiguity, maybe, works in our favor. Because why shouldn’t we read this psalm as both? We’ve been through difficult times and made it out, thank God; and we may be entering more difficult times, and this is the time we ask God for protection and guidance on making it through.
Unlike Psalm 16, our passage from Daniel, despite its unknown authorship, despite its over-the-top and sometimes horrifying visuals and prophesies, is much easier to figure out, context-wise, at least. The book of Daniel was absolutely written during a time of distress and anxiety. It was written during the reign of an eccentric, volatile, and paranoid king, Antiochus IV, in the midst of the Babylonian exile. The Babylonian exile was a strange time, because though the Jewish people were living in a land that wasn’t there, though they were occupied and an ethnic minority, for the most part, they were allowed to practice their faith. But then Antiochus IV came along and started a fierce campaign trying to stamp out Judaism. He took over their temple and turned it pagan; he banned them practicing their faith entirely. This ended up provoking a full-scale rebellion, the Maccabean rebellion to be exact, against the king and his paranoia and bigoted rage— it took a couple more decades, but the Maccabees did end up gaining independence. It’s believed that this section of Daniel may have been written in the lead-up to this rebellion.
And the most glaring thing about this passage from Daniel is verse 2: “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake…”. This is the first clear reference to resurrection in the Bible. And so as you can probably imagine, many Christians have really latched on to this as prophesy of the end times, of Jesus’ resurrection… but I don’t want to do that. I want to take these passages in their specific context, because I think that’s the best way it can really speak to us today. As much as we want to read this as prophesy, when the author of Daniel wrote this, it was highly unlikely that he had Jesus specifically in mind. This was about the author’s own people rising up from the dust… rising up from this terrible time of exile and persecution into something new.
Whenever we read apocalyptic texts like these, I want to remind you that apocalypse doesn’t mean the end of the world. It means a revelation (hence the book of Revelation in the New Testament), a disclosure of something grand— it means revealing. And everything in the book of Daniel leading up to this moment at the end is a big reveal. Daniel has a lot of parallels with the story of Joseph— he ends up in service to the king as a prophet, and for the first half of the book of Daniel, he is interpreting the king’s dreams for him and ultimately telling the future. The second half of the book of Daniel is comprised of Daniel’s own visions and prophesies of what is to come—he’s already told the king that he will go crazy and his kingdom will fall; in chapter 7 he begins to have visions of how that will come to be, of beasts and angels and warfare and violence in both the heavens and on earth… and it all leads to this our passage today. It all leads to a time after anguish when Daniel’s people will rise and the good and the wise will lead one another to righteousness, and, presumably, the holy land.
But this hasn’t happened yet. The book of Daniel ends with instructions: “But you, Daniel, keep the words secret and the book sealed until the time of the end.” Daniel asks the angel who gives him these instructions how this will all end, what the outcome of these wild and terrifying visions come true will be. The angel replies, and these are the last three verses of the book of Daniel:
‘Many shall be purified, cleansed, and refined, but the wicked shall continue to act wickedly. None of the wicked shall understand, but those who are wise shall understand. From the time that the regular burnt-offering is taken away and the abomination that desolates is set up, there shall be one thousand two hundred and ninety days. Happy are those who persevere and attain the thousand three hundred and thirty-five days. But you, go your way, and rest; you shall rise for your reward at the end of the days.’
So… we don’t really know. We get these wildly specific numbers that have driven apocalyptic preachers crazy, trying to prove the math of these supposed end times… but we don’t really get details of what the world will be like after all of this. We simply get a promise that those who persevere will be happy. And we get visions of new life arising from chaos and anguish.
I’ve talked quite a bit about the fact that one of my biggest anxieties is really anything that has to do with uncertainty. While I’ve generally accepted that I can’t tell the future, I just like to know that things are going to be okay. I just like to know what the end game is when making plans. I like schedules. I like routines. I don’t love diverging from routines, I’m not a very spontaneous person. But over the past few years, I’ve tried to be better about this. I’ve tried to embrace uncertainty. Instead of being terrified of the more frightening possibilities of the future, I’ve tried to accept, even take comfort in the fact that we don’t know for sure that the worst will happen.
As much as I’ve been avoiding the news since the election, and I’ve been doing it pretty successfully, one op-ed headline caught my eye and braved the New York Times website to read it. It is titled, “If You’re Sure How the Next Four years Will Play Out, I Promise: You’re Wrong.” The author, Dr. Adam Grant, points to a landmark study that looked at decades worth of political and economic predictions and discovered that “the average expert was roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.” [i]
And even in this Biblical story of prophesy and soothsaying, this story in which a young man successfully interprets multiple dreams and tells the future exactly, it ends without an answer. It ends with instructions to seal this prophesy until the time comes, and when it comes those who have been good and wise will be happy. No answer to Daniel’s question, “…what shall be the outcome of these things?”
Now, make no mistake… embracing uncertainty and accepting what we can’t know isn’t me saying that we should just sit back and watch whatever happens happen. I’m saying we can’t sit back and despair because we don’t know that everything’s gonna go to hell.
I signed onto a clergy support zoom the day after the election, checking in with folks on how they were gonna talk about it on Sunday, how everyone was feeling, etc… one colleague mentioned that Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer was helping them move through the week— for anyone who isn’t familiar with it, it goes like this:
God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.
We can’t change things that have already come to pass. But we know what should be changed. We know we are called to a bring about a world in which all people are equal, in which there is justice for all people. And we know where our power lies… it lies in each other. It lies in this community. It lies in our ability to reach out and lift up.
Daniel wrote during a time in which encouragement was dearly needed… a time when his people’s way of life was close to being completely snuffed out by an angry and paranoid king. And so he had spectacular and frightening visions of anguish and violence, ending with rising up from the dust and coming to back to life, being renewed and restored. And yet… Daniel’s final question is never answered. “…what shall be the outcome of these things?”
There are few things in life we can be certain of. There are few things in life over which we have any power. I think this feels especially true and especially overwhelming for many of us these days. There’s a lot of catastrophizing going on. I’m guilty of doing it myself sometimes. But this is where that serenity prayer comes in handy—there are some things right now, and over the next few years that we will not be able to change. It’s hard to accept that, especially when some of those things turn out to be harmful, potentially even fatal to the more disenfranchised among us. But we are not wholly powerless.
In our psalm for today, there’s not theological or scholarly consensus what verse 3 is referring to: “As for the holy ones in the land, they are noble / in whom is all my delight.” Some think the holy ones are angels, or some other divine or supernatural force. But what if they’re just… good people? What if we look for the holy ones among us? Because that is where our power lies… it lies in one another and in what we are willing to do for each other. It lies in creating a space here for people to meet and be together, and work together for a better world. As I stated at the beginning of this sermon, we don’t know if the psalmist here is asking for protection from something distressing in his current moment; or if he’s thanking God for getting him through a difficult time. But it doesn’t matter. It can be both, it should be both. It is both. We’ve been through frightening times before, and we’ve stood each other and uplifted and encouraged each other by keeping our faith in an all-loving God and by loving each other in turn. “Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever,” Daniel is told in 12:3.
We will look for the wise among us, and we will work to be the wise. Our faith in an all-loving God will not faulter and so we will not either. I know anxiety and tensions are still high. The breakneck pace at which cabinet appointments and new threats and grant pronouncements are thrown at us and reported on are meant to exhaust and overwhelm us. Don’t let it. Keep your faith in the unconditional love of God, and in the humanity of Christ; see the holy and the human in each other. And keep encouraging each other no matter what happens. Because as much as pundits and talking heads and “experts” claim to know what’s coming, no one can see the future. Even Daniel, for all his future-telling, his prophesy and his divinely influenced dream interpreting, pleaded to know the outcome of these wild visions and got no definitive answer. Uncertainty is hard. The unknown is scary. But let’s take some comfort in the fact that we don’t know that the worst case scenario will happen. And we have the God-given power and grace to lift up each other. Amen.
[i] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/12/opinion/donald-trump-election.html
