Shiny Stuff

AM Psalm 16, 17 • PM Psalm 134, 135
Dan 3:1-18 • 1 John 3:1-10 • Luke 3:15-22

Gold is a major character in today’s reading from Daniel. My research has had me look into it, and it is interesting stuff. Every ounce on earth is a space traveler. Gold is born either in a supernova, the explosion of a massive star, or in a collision of two unimaginably dense neutron stars. It is flung into space. Some coalesces with other materials to form planets and other celestial objects. Most of earth’s gold is in its unreachable molten core, but some arrived about two hundred million years after the planet’s birth when we were bombarded by something like a billion billion (that’s a one followed by twenty-four zeros) tons of meteors and asteroids. It was plowed into the earth’s crust. Some was brought up, usually in mountains, by tectonic activity. That is the gold that people have mined for maybe seven thousand years.

Gold has virtually no practical uses, and yet across cultures people have considered it the definition of wealth and the essence of beauty, probably because it is shiny and does not corrode. Often it has been considered divine. Egyptians called it the breath of the gods. Aztec ideas were a little earthier. Put discreetly, they called it god-scat, a kind of holy fertilizer for humanity.

I like to remember that the band Suzanne put on my left ring finger more than thirty-seven years ago is stardust that has come from an unthinkable remove to end up exactly where it ought to be.

But it is not God.

In the lesson from Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar erects a golden image—we’re not told of what, maybe himself?—that in our terms is about ninety feel tall and nine wide. On a musical command, everyone of every land is to fall down and worship it. Since the option is to be roasted alive, just about everybody does.

Just about, but not all. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, as faithful Jews, will worship no other God, however shiny. When the king learns of this, he calls them to his court and to the massive golden image. They say, in effect, “meh.” And when he says they must worship or head to the furnace, they answer, “No, thanks, and OK.”

We know, of course, that things work out for them, but in our materialistic world, it’s hard for me to imagine a more extreme version of a temptation to false worship than a nine-story column of gold. Every one of us has been tempted, and will be tempted again, by the pursuit of some reward that would take us away from a God-centered life, but have you, or I, had anything approaching that? A Nobel prize? A plush multi-story hotel named after us? An endowed university professorship?

Small beer, as they said out West, when compared to the temptation in Daniel. When the occasion arises, I’ll try to think of those three who remind us of what’s most important, and it’s not gold.

Written by Elliott West

Elliott teaches history at the University of Arkansas. He has been a member of St. Paul’s for more than twenty-five years.