King Darius, a rock and a hard place

A common evening in my house consists of everyone on their hands and knees, crawling around the house, roaring. After watching a few scenes from the Disney movie, the Lion King, finding a lion Simba stuffed animal at et cetera, and buying a lion king sweat suit for Flora at Chad and Janine Paul’s garage sale last summer, I have successfully convinced my daughter to enjoy one of the pop-culture events that dominated my childhood. This is how you parent, right?

For me as a child, lions were friendly, playful, and sang songs. Even when hearing the story of Daniel and the Lion’s den, as a child, the lions were clearly harmless, making me wonder, what was everyone scared of.

It has been a while since I really spent time with this classic story of Daniel and the Lions den. In the past, I would have been drawn to the faith of Daniel, and who prayed even though it was illegal and life was threatened by the Persian empire. The story fit perfectly within the milieu of early Anabaptist persecution stories that I grew up swimming in. If your faith is strong, you too will pray or worship, despite what the evil government legislates.

However, when reading it for this Sunday, I found myself empathizing with the plight of the King Dairus this time. The king who had to decide on upholding the law and Daniel’s life – someone he cared about.

Today’s theme for kicking off advent is “between a Rock and a Hard Place,” and it seemed more fitting for the king, than for Daniel.

I wondered if Daniel could have gotten out of his “hard place.” I am confused why Daniel didn’t pray more privately, so people couldn’t see him. And anyways, there is nowhere in the Torah that says that Jews should pray 3 times a day facing Jerusalem. I get similarly confused when people today are frustrated with “prayer not being allowed in schools.” What do you mean it’s not allowed. You can pray at any time. You just can’t force your religion on someone else. One can twist this story of Daniel supporting one’s illusions of Christian persecution in America, and forget that Daniel’s religion was one of a minority group.

But King Darious, he truly was stuck between a rock and a hard place. He, the king, signed a law into place that threatened death for anyone, who practices another religion – even his friend.

Does the king send his friend into the lion’s den? Or does he ignore the law that he created?

The conspirators kept repeating to him, “Know, O king, that it is a law of the Medes and Persians that no ordinance that the king establishes can be changed.”

I wondered why King Dairus couldn’t just make a new ordinance that creates exceptions to his law.

Historically, Darius 1 ruled Perisa and lived from 522 to 486 BCE. He is known outside of the Bible for seizing the throne of Perisa during a time of political instability, he was a great organizer, and is actually known for dividing the Akey-ma-nid territories into these administrative units called sat-ra-pies, as alluded to at the beginning of our passage, when they refer to the “administrators and sa-traps con-spiring against Daniel.”

There is very little historical chance that the king of Persia was interacting with a prophet named Daniel in this way. However, the writers of Daniel probably placed him into this story because of the influence that Darius had in Jewish reconstruction when Zerubbabel helped the jews back to their lands after the babylonian exile. If you can remember, the Jews were in exile during this time. Their temple had been destroyed as Babylon took over the lands. Following the Babylonian exile, the Persians came along and became rulers of the land. And King Darius was supportive of the Jewish reconstruction and the return to their lands.

So when telling this story of Daniel, placing Darius into this story makes sense in the minds of Jewish authors because he probably was between a rock and a hard place often, as he struggled with his sympathy towards the Jewish people as they were rebuilding their lives inside his empire -an empire, that he would have wanted to maintain law in.

Perhaps King Darius wondered, “What freedoms should Jews be allotted while still maintaining the Persian Empire?”

Wicked Problems

We are Americans, in one of the strongest empires in the world. And when I think best of people, I imagine that our political leaders are often between a rock and a hard place.

Do we support Ukraine, or have them give up land to quickly try to create peace.

Do we support Palistinians experiencing genocide, or bolster up Americans strongest influence in the middle east.

What about the environmental crisis?

Do we buy battery powered cars that require cobalt mining that is harming laborers and the land they mine in, or do we drive gas powered vehicles that release CO2 into the atmosphere increasing global warming.

How do we globally respond to the climate change we are going through without further harming people that are already being marginalized?

These issues, are called “wicked problems.” I really badly wanted to somehow fit in a reference to the musical Wicked, which just came out in theaters this weekend. But alas, I took it out, wanting to keep this sermon under 20 minutes.

“In 1973, design theorists introduced the term “wicked problem” in order to draw attention to the complexities and challenges of addressing social policy problems. Wicked problems lack clarity in both their aims and solutions. They are subject to real-world constraints that prevent multiple and risk-free attempts at solving. Wicked problems have 10 important characteristics – here are a few of them.

1) They do not have a definitive formulation.

2) They are ongoing – These problems lack an inherent logic that signals when they are solved.

3) Their solutions are not true or false, or good or bad.

4) There is no way to test the solution to a wicked problem.

5) They cannot be studied through trial and error. Their solutions are irreversible so, “every trial counts.”

6) There is no end to the number of solutions or approaches to a wicked problem.

8) Those who present solutions are liable for the consequences of the solutions they generate; the effects can matter a great deal to the people who are touched by those actions.”

For instance, our issues within health care in the United States are a wicked problem.

• Those seeking health care have to deal with the usability of the health care system,
• The ongoing issues of communication between providers ,
• the patients have to able to, or want to engage with the system,
• there are people with health disparities that experience inequity in treatment
• and so many other issues for people getting the care that they need.

Fixing our healthcare system is a wicked problem. You put in Obamacare, and a new set of issues arise, and millions of people still don’t have insurance.

So many major issues that we face as a country have unintentional consequences when we try to fix them. They are wicked. So what should we do – nothing?

Environmental Theologian Whitney Bauman writes about the importance of “uncertainty” when wrestling with these wicked problems, because the solutions inevitably negatively affect people. We cannot be so sure that our solutions are good and just.

Climate change can be true, but our solutions and how we respond to it, requires uncertainty. Bauman argues that certainty around our truths creates too simplistic of a worldview, and simple worldviews can lead to a disregard for the truth.

For instance, if the left is so certain about its solutions to climate change through using with battery powered cars, and then we learn that lithium and cobalt mining is harming people and the environment – and you are the right and you see this hypocrisy, it’s easy to throw away the truth that our climate is rapidly changing because of the CO2 emission from combustion, because the see left as lying hypocrites.

Bauman thus argues that the destructive forces in the world utilize certainty – they have a final solution, one that makes sense in the minds of a group of people. A group of people who cannot speak for the experiences of everyone.

So how do you break up a solution that fits so perfectly into the ideology of the time? Ambiguity. Uncertainty. The ability to name we might not have it right.

Ambiguity ends up being a tool that challenges those destructive, certain, forces.

Ambiguity can look like denouncing harm that you see in the world, and yet also remaining open to the possibility that the solutions you believe in, could be wrong. In doing this, we open ourselves up to people whom we disagree with. And from this posture, they too know that we are open to them.

In our story of Daniel and the Lions Den, King Darius was straddling a wicked problem – creating law and order in his empire, and yet having sympathy for the Jews who were coming out of exile. He could have been a leader similar to his administrators, who were certain of their solution – wanting to suppress the religious traditions of the Jews to assimilate people into his empire. Instead he was open to the Jews – open to the care of people who did things differently than him.

When we embrace ambiguity and uncertainty, what we are talking about is repenting – an uncomfortable concept to many of us. To repent is to name that we are part of the problem. To repent is to name that the solutions we used to solve the problem could harm someone else. To repent is to name that you could be wrong about the world. That your world view might have it all wrong.

For how central repentance is in the Christian story, it is sure not something Christians do very often. We like telling others to repent. The classic street corner prophet calling for everyone on the streets to “REPENT!”

But what I am advocating for, looks more like the prophet on the street corner repenting, instead of telling everyone else to repent.

Naming how we Christians might have it wrong. Naming how we might be harming someone or ourselves, and we don’t even know it. Naming that the solutions we think might work, might have left out someone’s experience.

King Darious knew that sending Daniel into the den of lions was wrong. He was doing it for the sake of his empire. The author of Daniel writes, “Then the king returned to his palace and spent the night without eating and without any entertainment being brought to him. And he could not sleep.”

But the next day he goes and finds that Daniel is alive, and he is overjoyed. Darious in a way, he repents – he says,

“I issue a decree that in every part of my kingdom people must fear and reverence the God of Daniel.

“For he is the living God

and he endures forever;

his kingdom will not be destroyed,

his dominion will never end.

He rescues and he saves;

he performs signs and wonders

in the heavens and on the earth.

He has rescued Daniel

from the power of the lions.”

Darius was open to being wrong, and he found a new way forward.

Some scholars write about this story being an analogy for the experience of the Israelites in exile. The exiled Israelites felt like they were in a pit of lions, imprisoned by the empires that took turns ruling over their lands. And this story reassured them that God has not abandoned them. That God rescues and saves. God pulled Daniel out of the den and so will God pull you our of exile.

This first Sunday of Advent is usually themed around hope. Today we light the candle of hope.

“The context for hope, is radical uncertainty,” writes Catorina McKinnon. Hope is a space of uncertainty. If you know what is going to happen, if life is certain, you do not need to hope. Hope is needed in these spaces of where we are between a rock and a hard place. Hope is needed when we are contemplating the wicked problems that surround us, because we do not know what will happen. But we must hold this hope with uncertainty, and openness to being wrong.

May we be open to being wrong. May we speak truth without certainty. May we repent for how we have caused harm with our problem solving. And may we walk humbly with God who persistently walks with us, pushing us, whether we are in the den of lions, or throwing people into them.