March 16, 2003
By Jack Price

Series: Stages of Faith (Growing Up in Faith)

The Fear Factor!  Long before it was a TV "reality series," the "Fear Factor" was a biblical drama starring three young Jewish men - Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah.  History remembers their stage names:  Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and their ordeal in the Fiery Furnace of Babylon.  Who were these three young men and what was the source of their extraordinary courage and faith?

Early in the sixth century before Jesus, the military machine of mighty Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) rolled across the tiny kingdom of Judah, laying siege and soon capturing its capitol city Jerusalem.  The brightest and best of the Jewish captives were brought to the capitol, the now ancient city of Babylon.  Of all the Old Testament stories of Jewish captivity in Babylon, perhaps none are more compelling than those of Daniel and his three friends Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. 

Young men in the Jewish aristocracy were trained according to a philosophy of Wisdom reflected in the book of Proverbs.  They learned that a wise man lived well and was blessed by God.   Success was a sign of God's blessing and, therefore, indicative of wisdom.  Three young men steeped in this Wisdom tradition now find themselves in trouble in Babylon.  Under the tutelage of their mentor Daniel, the three had risen to middle management in Babylon's civil service.  Now these three choose to risk their lives by defying the king.  They choose to stay faithful to God whom they believed had remained faithful to them, even in exile.  The faith that developed within them in Jerusalem bore fruit in Babylon.

King Nebucadnezzar built a large, gold-plated, statue.  It might have been of the King himself or of his favorite god.  The statue was tall, sixty cubits or about ninety feet.  It also was not very wide, six cubits or about nine feet.  In other words, it better have been well anchored because a strong gust of wind would knock it over!  Or perhaps these measurements merely suggest it was really big, meaning it was important.  The symbolic numbers 60 x 6 suggest its evil nature.  So, the King commands his entire government to attend the dedication of his statue with clear and ominous instructions:  "when you hear the sound of the music, you are to fall down and worship the golden statue that King Nebuchadnezzar has set up.  Whoever does not fall down and worship shall immediately be thrown into a furnace of blazing fire."  So the stage is set and, when the music sounds and all the bureaucrats fall on their faces, our three heroes stand tall.  Even then, since they were junior executives and doubtlessly relegated to the Standing Room Only section in the rear of the second balcony, their defiance went largely unnoticed.  Slowly, word of their action filtered to the front.  The three were brought into the King's very angry presence.  Dumbfounded by their treasonous behavior, Nebucadnezzer challenged them once again to give homage to the statue.  They refused and the King ordered the fire to be stoked - seven times hotter.  Seven symbolizes perfection and the writer of this story wants all hearers to know that something special is about to happen.  The fire is out of control, so hot that some of the guards get burned up.  Our heroes, bound hand and foot, are thrown into the fire, probably a large pottery oven open on the top and with an opening on the side. 

They are thrown in and the fun starts.  The king is incredulous.  "Did we not throw three boys in the fire bound hand and foot?  Are there not now four men walking unbound in the flames?"   The king was very good at rhetorical questions.  And does not the fourth man appear to be like a (little "g") god.  You can almost hear the king saying, "Uh, excuse me in there, young men with the really powerful God.  Please come out here, if you don't mind."  And out hop the three.  They look great and don't even smell like smoke! - truly miraculous.  The king decides that their God is the God to follow so he rewrites his original decree saying, "Anybody who says there is a better God than the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego shall be torn limb from limb, and their houses laid in ruins (no more fiery furnaces for now); for there is no other god who is able to deliver in this way."  Then the king promoted Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the province of Babylon.  And they all lived happily ever after.

This is a great story!   There is a villain, the king, who really is like a big kid, kind of a bully.  There are three likeable heroes who show courage in the face of danger and fortitude when confronted with powerful temptation.  Three young men, little more than boys, take on the powerful and evil king.  They defeat him and they redeem him!  This is a compelling story and just the sort of tale to stir the imaginations of young Jewish children, to encourage them in the face of their fears.  Boys like Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah were undoubtedly raised on stories of the great heroes of ancient Israel:  Sampson, Gideon, and David.  In exile, they found in that tradition their refuge, their rock, and their compass.  In later times of exile and fear, the stories of Daniel and of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego became part of the tradition supporting new generations of Jewish young people, children such as Jesus from Nazareth.  Religion is shared tradition that gives shape to emerging faith and gives focus to "shared centers of value and power."

            Last Sunday marked the first in a series of sermons on Growing up in Faith, based largely on James Fowler's book Stages of Faith.  Do you remember what we learned? 

·        Faith is much deeper than what we believe or our particular religious tradition. 

·        Faith is much deeper than conscious thought. 

·        Faith as a verb describes a process of employing our sacred imagination in an efforts to make sense of our existence. 

·        Faith as a noun is the context, that "ultimate environment," we create in which to live our lives.  We do this creating often without being consciously aware of what we are doing.

·        Faith is a dynamic, imaginative, and growing process. 

·        Our ultimate environment changes throughout our lives through the natural process of growing up. 

·        It also changes when life's harsh realities break in and our world of meaning, forcing us to develop a new ultimate environment to incorporate new life experiences (good and bad) within a comprehensive sense of meaning.

            Faith work begins before any of us are aware of it, from the very beginning of our lives.  The infant whose physical and emotional discomforts are met or not met by a nurturing adult gradually begins to build an ultimate environment of trust or distrust.  At first, it is an environment of images only:  gradually distinguishing between self and others, gradually recognizing its dependence of the care of others, gradually realizing how vital it is to make self the center of the other's world.  Fowler says of the pre-stage of infancy:

·        "The emergent strength of faith in this pre-stage is the fund of basic trust and the relational experience of mutuality with the one(s) providing primary love and care."

·        "The danger of deficiency in this pre-stage is a failure of mutuality in either of two directions:  the experience of being central continues to dominate and distort mutuality or experience of neglect or inconsistencies may lock the infant in patterns of isolation and failed mutuality."

So, one arrives at the age of about three years and has gradually emerged and coalesced into stage one of faith development.  Fanciful images and unrestrained imagination mark faith development during the next few years as the child becomes aware of their "self" in a world of others.  Imaginative fantasy is vital for each child to begin to get in touch with what is ultimate, not logically nor systematically, but through images and feelings.  Far from being false, imagination is the way to image what is ultimate for our lives.  In terms of faith development, this is the stage in which children begin to encounter fears and "terrors of destructiveness" and, hopefully, keep them in a sense of balance and perspective. 

For our heroes, the fiery furnace can represent "fears and terrors of destructiveness."  For children hearing that story, however, the terror is held in check by the ultimate providence of God. 

As children continue to grow and develop, they begin to see themselves in relation to the stories, rituals, and symbols of faith in their family and community.  Stage 2 faith develops as fanciful imaginations begin to coalesce into conceptual meaning.  Stories and narratives become ways of making sense of existence.  Children in this stage have newly found power to make sense of life.  Power means control and this can lead to feeling overly responsible - rigid perfectionism on the one hand or judging the self to be "bad and worthless" on the other.  The ability of a child to learn to cope with the friction of competing meanings in their lives sets the stage for all future faith development.

            I was a child once.  It was back in the time when families managed to gather around the table and eat dinner together almost every night.  Some of my clearest and fondest memories are of the times following dinner when my dad would read us a Bible story.  I remember Noah's Ark, Jacob's ladder and later his wrestling with an angel, Moses in Egypt, Joshua and the walls of Jericho, and many more.  My favorite was the battle when God made the sun stand still in the sky, prolonging the day until Joshua and the Israelites could win a victory.  I loved to think that God who would do anything to help me.  The God I met during those times of growing up was really cool, very compelling, and always for me. 

Whether these stories actually happened us reported has become less and less a concern for me as I have grown.  I also know that God is not just for me.  God is for all creation, all people.  There was a truth I heard as a 7, 8, and 9 year old that helped me believe in the trustworthiness of God.  Even today, as traditional understandings of God are challenged, as I challenge them myself within my theological and religious setting, I "faith" that God is trustworthy.  I still dare to trust that God is, that I "faith" in response to God's initiative to me.

            The story is told of a soldier who did not claim belief in the God of any religious tradition.  He styled himself an atheist.  On the eve of battle, when the fear of dying confronted him, in the company of a chaplain, he uttered this prayer:  "God, if there is a God, save my soul, if I have a soul."  Faith is a universal human trait.  Religion can help us find ways to express that faith.  But God who is God is the source and object of all faith. 

Whatever your age and stage, the story of three young men and a fiery furnace can still capture the imagination.  In the adult world where most of us live most of the time, we know that when idealistic young people take on evil tyrants, there are often tragic endings.  In the modern-day equivalent of Babylon, a modern megalomaniacal monarch has killed thousands who have resisted his invitation to bow down to a human god.  In the world of reality, people often pay for resistance with their lives. 

I "faith" that death is not the end, that God is God in life and death, in life's fiery furnaces, death's fearful mystery, and in the subtle capitulations of daily living.  Let us give our children foundational faith to trust and on which to build and grow.  Let us learn to trust each other as sisters and brothers to be on a faithful and imaginative journey together.  Faith does indeed progress in stages, often as a result of natural growth and development and sometimes through crises and crises of faith.  At whatever stage of life and faith you find yourself, you can trust in what you cannot understand, lean your whole weight down on what you cannot see or touch.  Once thus committed, and only then, you will begin to experience what you have already imagined.

"God of creation, Prime Mover of life, Faithful source and object of faith, thank-you for acting first to call us to you.  On the journey, unseeing we believe, not understanding we follow.  Eternal God we come."  Amen.