“He knelt upon his knees three times a day and prayed, and gave thanks before his God.”

(Daniel 6:10)

In the opening chapters of the book of Daniel we find several charming stories designed to call out our courage and our loyalty for persevering faithfully in performing our religious duties.  One such story is that of Daniel in the Lion’s Den; another, the tale of Shadrack, Meshack, and Abednego in the Fiery Furnace: and still another, the account of the Hebrew youths who refused to eat the rich food at the king’s table, choosing rather the simple diet of their kosher rations.

Obviously, the setting of these stories is the Jewish Exile.  God’s people are a minority group living in an alien culture.  The pressing questions of their daily existence are: “How shall we act here in a strange land? What practices from our past experience and tradition are essential in our new environment? What should be put aside as non-essential, old fashioned, and offensive?  If we hold on to customs and values that clash with the way of life of the majority among whom we now live, what treatment can we expect?”

These are questions the stories of Daniel are concerned with.  They focus on dietary habits, on pagan idolatry, on the practice of prayer.

Though the details of these quaint stories may sound queer in our ears, there is a timelessness about them that is always applicable to us.  We, too, grapple with the questions of how shall we act in the strange new world of today, where the religious practices of our past seem out of place and misunderstood.  We must be always asking: What is essential and what should we let slip away as no longer of meaning?  What are some of the penalties our culture will make us pay if we don’t cease some of these old traditional religious practices?”

How important are dietary rules – of clean and unclean foods, and “Fish on Friday”? Or, should we observe a vegetarianism that refuses all meat?  What about clothes as symbols of a way of life dedicated to God?  Are hooks and eyes more pious dress than clothes with buttons?  Does complete draping of the human form give more glory to God than does nudity?  Should strict Sabbath observance according to ancient traditions never be changed, and must a confession of faith be preserved in the 16^th century terminology in which it was originally written?  And what connection has a moral code with religion?  Does God care about human conduct at all, and if so, do the Ten Commandments still apply, or are some of them passé now: like stealing, and breaking and entering, and bearing false witness?  Is adultery no longer wrong because of the newfound sexual freedoms?  Is murder no longer to be considered a sin since violent attacks and indiscriminate and undeclared warfare are more popular now than they used to be?

I remember my brother saying when he and his wife were wrestling with the problems of their teenage children:  “Ours is a time when the youth of today are putting down everything out of the past.  The question is: What will they pick up and carry on into the future?”

At least two things we need to keep in mind as basic to all our deliberations on what is relevant and irrelevant in religious practice.  One is that some religious practice must be kept or our whole value system will perish.  And the other is that any religious practice we hold onto, however minimal, however truncated, however adjusted to the status quo, will be scorned as bigotry by the pagans.

Frances Fitzgerald in her book, Fire in the Lake, looking back on what we learned during the Vietnam War, observed that “the basic distinction between American and Vietnamese culture is that the Americans are turned toward the future, the Vietnamese toward the past.”  The Vietnamese are under the influence of Confucius who said, “I am one who loves the past and am diligent in investigating it.”  So for centuries in Vietnam “the mandarin, the literate elite, directed all their scholarship not toward invention and progress, but toward a more perfect repetition of the past, a more perfect maintenance of the status quo.  When a French steamer was sighted off the shore of Vietnam in the early 19^th century (so the story went) the local mandarin governor, instead of going to see it, researched the phenomenon in his Confucian texts, concluded that it was a dragon, and dismissed the matter.” (Ibid.)

It is characteristic of the Judaeo-Christian tradition at its best that it points exclusively neither to the past nor to the future, but bids us stand erect in the present, exercising our capacities both of memory to survey the past and hold it in as firm a grasp as possible for today, and at the same time, use our imagination – that radar of our minds for probing the possibilities of the future, and yet, not to stop there, but to exercise also that third native capacity bequeathed to us by our Creator – to reach up through faith into the limitless expanse of eternity and commune with our God.  In such a stance must we make judgments about relevant and irrelevant religious practices at every step of our earthly pilgrimage?

Prayer then must remain the most persistent symbol and indispensable tool of the religious life in every changing condition.  But the religious person of every age and culture must be as aware as Daniel was of how perilous a business it is to play with the fire of prayer.

Foremost among the perils of prayer is this: always prayer to God is an affront to tyranny.  It courts repression and possible punishment.  Daniel had to face an edict of Darius that put the King ahead of God.  The ruling of the monarch was that no man was to make any petition or request or prayer to anyone other than the emperor for 30 days.

But Daniel was a man who had a well formed habit of saying his prayers to God.  He went straight to his place of private prayer and poured out his thanksgiving and his requests to God.  It was the normal way that Daniel had of expressing his faith, allegiance, and dependence upon God.  And it got him into trouble.  It landed Daniel in the lion’s den.

“We are always facing an incipient nationalism that threatens to usurp the place of God.  The relationship of the individual to the state is always a changing thing under various kinds of governments and in changing cultures.  (This is the ultimate question and problem for us American Christians in observing our Constitution’s doctrine of the separation of church and state.) The one sure thing we know is that the state is not God, and the Christian’s allegiance is first of all to God.

“It all comes back to our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to God.  We all have to be put in our proper place and setting.  It makes no difference if a man is a king or a slave, still he must be subject to the will of God.  The independence of Daniel shows that people who worship God and bow down only to Him, are the truly free men and women.  The spirit of Daniel is the spirit of those men who swore their allegiance to the kings of Aragon in these words: “We, who are as good as you, swear to you, who are no better than we, to accept you as our king and sovereign Lord, provided that you observe all our liberties and laws; but if not, then not.” (Interpreters Bible Commentary on Daniel 6)

The second peril to prayer in the story of Daniel and the Lion’s Den is its clear teaching of the importance of the regularity of worship for the people of God, and of how any interruption or diminishment of prayer is a victory for the enemies of God and the adversaries of God’s people.

Darius’ edict was not to abolish prayer but just to suspend it, to discontinue it, for the space of 30 days, but Daniel will not give up even for one day his custom of praying three times a day before the open window with his face toward Jerusalem.  The rule of religious discipline that Jews in exile should turn three times a day toward their homeland has many rich possibilities for our meditation.  What is our true homeland?  How long has it been since we turned in that direction?

“It has been said that our day is too overcrowded to allow time for private devotions.  It is argued, with eloquence, that while people in former times had leisure, we do not have time for anything but work and pleasure.  The modern family, we are told, cannot be expected to have family worship.  The individual caught up on the rush of our civilization does not have time enough to relax, let alone time enough to pray.  Thus we find many reasons why we must not be expected to maintain our devotional life.

“One of the most distressing things about us is our inability to see the relationship between cause and effect.  It never seems to dawn upon us that our tensions and our fears spring out of our lack of quiet worship. If we would live true to our heritage as children of God there is no other way than keeping close to our Heavenly Father.  That means living in His presence and taking time to listen to His voice.  (St. Luke’s gospel records that Jesus’ disciples came to him one day with the request: “Lord, teach us to pray.”  Why such a request?  Could it be that these men who lived closest to Jesus and observed him in frequent prayer had guessed that the secret of their Lord’s power, poise, peace of mind and assurance of God’s presence in His life, was his practice of prayer?)

“We cannot give up our devotions and find ourselves adequate for living.  Daniel knew that in the ordeal ahead of him he must have the power of God, and it was no time to neglect the method he had found which released power to him.

“It is a great mistake for us to think that we can drift along and then be ready to meet life’s crises when they come.  The crises simply reveal the kind of persons we are. They uncover our strengths and weaknesses.  We ought to take to heart this ancient book of Daniel’s insight that men and woman have to be strong within before they can perform the mighty act.” (Ibid, on Text)

Finally, if prayer is interrupted, diminished, or ceases, life is stripped of the highest values not only subjectively, but objectively.  It seems awkward to talk of “the witnessing power of prayer,” yet we must.  We shy away form such a thought of the uses of prayer because we remember so vividly Jesus’ teaching about how phony the Pharisee’s prayers were – those men who stood in the market place and, for a show of piosity to be seen of men, made long prayers.  Of course, such prayer play acting deserves neither the name of prayer nor worship.  It is only self-seeking ostentation.

Nevertheless, when the act of worship is genuine, when prayer is honest and vital and earnest, then the faithful suppliant comes back from the presence of God with new supplies of love and peace and joy, and understanding of the true values of life, grasped from the very hand of God.  These riches one has for oneself, but also one has these treasures to share with others.

I heard a Methodist minister, speaking on the Methodist Hour, tell of a problem a young couple had when the husband found himself under the control of a strong infatuation.  It had gone no farther than his thoughts, but it was affecting his marriage.  His wife sensed something was wrong and one night she asked him about it.  He told her the whole truth.  For two hours they leveled with each other and were at an impasse.  Then they went out for a walk in the darkness and met an elderly neighbor whose wife had died two months before.  The old widower was out walking his dog.  As he passed his young troubled neighbors they heard him say to them:  “Kids, love each other a lot.  Life is so short.”  They hurried home and fell into each other’s arms.  Their problem was solved.  But how?  By the witness of one whose own experience of trusting himself in love to another proved the value of that venture.

So also any faithful servant of God, who across the years has maintained a responsible relationship of prayer with God, experiences the redeeming power of God’s forgiveness in life, and so has perceived and grasped the essential value of a life of faith, and therefore comes back with authentic tidings to tell, bringing back rich treasures to share with others.