Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

In our Office Reading from Daniel today, we’re met with the aftermath of King Belshazzar’s debauch: the prophet Daniel is brought in to the banquet hall to (quite literally) read the writing on the wall and announce God’s judgment on the Babylonian Empire—the kingdom will end and be given over to another, because it has been weighed and found wanting.

That image of weighing as an image of meting out justice carries with it a number of other associations having to do with injustice: very often, prophets decry unjust scales as a way of decrying a breakdown in trust, in honorable relationships, and as the failure of social, political and economic systems (and the interpersonal relationships those systems structure and condition) to support, provide for, and lift up the vulnerable, the oppressed. This critique of Babylon is certainly hovering there in the background with that prophetic invocation of weights and measures.

What brings that critique to the fore, though, is Daniel’s horror at Belshazzar’s profanation of the temple vessels during the course of the king’s decadent feast. Now it may seem like Daniel’s upset principally over the misuse of some goblets, but there’s a whole lot more going on here. In fact, there are likely many layers to Daniel’s abhorrence of what the king and his guests have done to the temple furniture: sorrow over the temple’s destruction; anger at the disrespect of the king for appropriating to himself things that not only don’t rightly belong to him, but things that rightly belong only to God; the list could go on. But one of the things the temple self-consciously represented in its furnishings and design was an image of a restored and harmonious world, all things in heaven and on earth in right relationship: the temple was God’s vision of what creation was meant to be, translated into material terms that creation might be able to understand. Which is to say: the transgression here isn’t about disrespecting God’s furniture per se, but about disrespecting and abusing the whole of creation of which the vessels of the temple are representative. The holy things of God’s House are due veneration not simply because they’re dedicated to God and God’s service (though that may be reason enough): they’re due veneration because they represent a vision of righteousness, justice, goodness, beauty, and truth that is meant to characterize the whole of creation and all human relationships...a vision that ultimately comprehends all of creation as sacred because it is dedicated to God and God's service. (It's not for nothing that the prophets understand justice as integral to worship.)

So the judgment announced by Daniel here is not, “Look, Belshazzar, God says you didn’t treat his cups properly: you’re horrible, so you’re kingdom’s done now.” It’s, “You abuse the things of the temple, the things that represent and embody God’s vision of a world restored, because you habitually abuse the world, because you abuse the people of the world. You profane the temple because you profane the holy in others; your profanation of the temple is a sign of your empire’s profanation of the world. And it ends now.”

Beloved, it can be very easy to treat casually, to take for granted, or to appropriate to ourselves and our uses what’s holy, whether it be a sacred vessel, a doctrine, an article of faith, a mystery…and if/when we do, we’d do well to ask ourselves, “What else that’s holy in my life and in the world around me am I ignoring, treating lightly, taking for granted, or appropriating to myself? Where do I fail to honor the experiences, the lives of others? Where do I ignore the poor, the stranger, the oppressed? How do I instrumentalize the world, objectify others, ignore another’s suffering? And how is grace inviting me back to a vision of a world restored and renewed by love?”

Beloved, what if we were to understand every person in our lives, every person in the world, as a living mystery of God’s grace and love? What might the holy mean then? What might the sacred become to us? And what might it require of us?

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+