Sermon Ideas For Daniel 12:1-3 Part 3

In John Milton's Paradise Lost, Michael is the angel who shows Adam human history and who guides Adam and Eve out of Eden, closing the gates behind them and setting the angelic guard. In Daniel 12:1-3, Michael is the one who, at the end of the world, arises and, as the deliverer, fulfills the prophecy made to Abraham in Genesis that his progeny will be like the stars, numberless and filling the sky. Daniel 12:1-3 shows us the passing away of an old order and the emergence of a new one. That transition is symbolized by the book, which links past and present. Michael presides over the opening of the book of the lives of those living and dead. This image of the book reminds us that we understand our lives through narrative, through telling stories. This image also reminds us that our stories are essential: each person's story is one part of a greater story of humankind and of the cosmos, and all of our stories are interrelated, making up the fabric of human and sacred history. Each of us is like a doorway: a connection between the past and the future.

Michael, the archangel, is the deliverer of his people. Like the Moses of Exodus, he brings his people out of the bondage to a tyrant and into freedom. In Moses, Man of the Mountain, Zora Neale Hurston's Moses delivers the Hebrews from Egypt into Canaan. Hurston's novel, filled with African-American folk tales and language, shows us the role of the deliverer. Moses realizes that though he is chosen by God to deliver his people, he cannot make them free. Freedom, Moses comes to understand, is a choice. It comes when individuals choose to bind themselves to each other in community under the covenant. Essential to the covenant is narrative. What Moses can give his people is a story that tells them where they came from and where they are going. In Deuteronomy 6:20-25, the Hebrews are reminded that the laws that they must obey are linked to the story of their deliverance from Egypt. The story is the foundation on which we build our lives as we continue to live actively and fully in the present.

William Blake, in a poem from his 1793 notebook, writes:Eternity He who binds himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses joy as it flies Lives in eternity's sunrise.

Blake's lyric reminds us that, as Augustine, Kierkegaard, and Hurston tell us, we live life forward and understand it backward. That is, we must not try to hold on to the moment. As we said in the lesson on Hebrews 9:24-28, the acceptance of full participation in human life is the acceptance of suffering. We must enjoy our happy experiences, mourn our losses, integrate both into our "life stories," and let them pass, opening opportunities for and informing the future. Toni Morrison, author of Beloved, says, in an interview, that we cannot understand the importance of events as we live them, but that, in looking back, we see how what we did at certain moments led us to become the persons that we are today.

In literature, there are numerous characters who try to freeze the moment. In Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire, the main character Louis decides to become a vampire because of the death of his brother. The loss of his brother marks Louis' loss of faith and the beginning of his fear of death. What Louis discovers as soon as he becomes a vampire is that he misses his human life. Doomed to live forever, as he thought he wanted to, Louis discovers that the life of a vampire--based on the destruction of human beings--is one of despair. Throughout the novel, Louis seeks limitations on his existence, trying to find his origins and trying to find a vampire who can tell him if good and evil exist--that is, trying to find his end. What Louis has done is to freeze his existence at a particular point; thus, he can never achieve self-understanding. The metaphor of the vampire--of the "living dead"--is a good image of one who cannot or will not work through grief and fear and move forward in life. Instead, Louis, who has refused to suffer, is frozen in time.

Rice's supernatural story reminds us that, unless we grieve and go forward, we will find ourselves with only one story to tell and that we may never understand that story fully.

Donna Tartt in The Secret History, the story of a group of students who kill a classmate, has her narrator say that, before that event, he might have had many stories to tell, but after it, there was only one story and that he must now tell that story over and over. In the novel, the group of students is never caught and never punished. The sense that they escaped with impunity after doing something so monstrous haunts the main character. As Daniel 12:1-3 reminds us, there is no escape from the consequences of our actions. In the theological sense, events are written in the book to be judged and punished. In the everyday sense, since our lives are interrelated, all actions have results. They alter our lives and the lives of others. While Tartt's character may escape prison, he is imprisoned in his own guilt. His act and the acts of his friends change their worlds forever. The title describes a "secret history." We see that this is a paradox: history is public and, in writing the story, the narrator unveils the past and puts it forward for our judgment.

The film Julia also shows us people coming to terms with essential moments in their lives. Julia is the story of Lillian Hellman's friendship with a mysterious woman, Julia, who becomes involved in the Resistance during World War II. This compelling and strong woman becomes a foil for Hellman who, as Julia ia fighting Nazi oppression, is trying to make her career as a writer. The interrelationship of their lives, revealed most powerfully in the death of Julia and in Hellman's search for her missing child, shows us, as George Steiner puts it, the different orders of time: that as we live our ordinary lives, extraordinary things are happening that, ultimately, shape and change us as these orders intersect and overlap. Hellman's memories of Julia are told in her autobiography Pentimento. Hellman tells us that

...old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines...That is called pentimento because the painter "repented," changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again.¹

Daniel 12:1-3 reminds us that we, like Hellman's artist, engage in this "painting over" every day. We create, recreate, and we call and are called to account for our acts: pentimento.

Carolyn Jones

1. Lillian Hellman, Pentimento: A Book of Portraits (New York: New American Library, 1973):1.