Hello, my friends,

I hope this finds you well today and that you discovered things and people whom you are deeply grateful for.

Today is the beginning of Advent. The season that extends to us an annual invitation to recenter and renew our hearts towards the profound reality brought by Christ's birth in the world. With the looming uncertainty and darkness that seems to shape the years ahead, I wanted to invite us to reflect a bit on the birth of Jesus in the presence of a ruthless dragon as brought to us by the Book of Revelation and the hope it has for us today.

But before we get to that, here are some recommendations to consider:

The season of Advent began December 1st! This season extends an annual invitation for us to reorient our hearts toward Jesus as we approach Christmas. I have written a daily devotional for this season in hopes of stoking greater hope, peace, joy, and love in our hearts as we journey together toward Jesus from Advent to Christmas. Details: What: An "ebook" of 25 daily scripture-based devotionals, designed to conclude on Christmas Day, to be downloaded and read on your favorite device. When: It is available to download now. How: Purchase access to this daily devotional by clicking the button below. $20.00 Arrival: Daily Reflections For The Season of Advent Crafted to begin on December 1st and end on Christmas Day, each of these 25 daily readings will focus on a passage from... Read more Download here! ​

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​-How to End Christian Nationalism, by Amanda Tyler, who is the lead organizer of the Christians Against Christian Nationalism campaign. In this book, Tyler draws on her experiences, conversations with pastors and laypeople, research, Scripture, and her work as a constitutional law expert to help us confront Christian nationalist fervor. In this book, you'll learn how to distinguish Christian nationalism from the teachings of Jesus and to demonstrate how the former perpetuates white supremacy. This book also unpacks key truths we can share with others: Patriotism is not the same as nationalism. Religious freedom means little if it's not for everyone. Christians follow a gospel of love, not the idol of power. It also provides very practical, compassionate, and precise ways to help bring an end to Christian Nationalism.

​-See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love by Valarie Kaur. I read this book in 2019 and its powerful message has stuck with me ever since. It is one I try to reread every year. If you would like to watch a free video of a powerful speech the author gives that is right in line with her book, I recommend watching this video called: Breathe! Push! The Labor of Revolutionary Love. ​

​-Unpacking The Immigration Crisis, by Fresh Air. This interview with Jonathan Bilzer is really worth listening to. I would also recommend reading his book as well. He brings needed and helpful insight to the complexity of immigration and what has influenced the way we think about it today. Our immigrant brothers and sisters will need support, prayer, and advocacy in the years ahead. If you would like a good free Christian resource that recommends ways to understand what is happening and how to get involved, check out Evangelical Immigration Table. ​

Okay, now onto today’s content

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Mary, Joseph, Baby Jesus, and... Godzilla?

My nephew has a giant Godzilla toy and for a long stretch of time, wherever my nephew went, Godzilla went with him. With his vivid and creative imagination, my nephew never missed an opportunity to imagine how Godzilla would interact with every situation he encountered as he went through his day.

One day, my nephew went to visit his grandparents (my parents). My mom and dad had just put up their nativity scene as they were decorating for the Advent and Christmas seasons.

My dad then sent me this picture asking, “to my pastor son, can you explain how exactly Godzilla fits into the Christmas story?”

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This wouldn’t be the last time my nephew made sure Godzilla had a staring role in the Christmas story either. Even at his own house, he made sure Godzilla had a prominent place next to the manger scene. "Shepherds quake at the sight!"

It will be one of my most favorite memories of my nephew. So imaginative and so very funny. When my dad sent me the first picture, I just couldn't help but think of the one place in the Bible where a dragon is actually present at Christ's birth.

So I jokingly responded to my dad’s text by telling him that my nephew was actually being really prophetic and depicting Christ's birth as it is told in the Book of Revelation.

It is the same passage I want to look at with you today.

Revelation 12:2-6 The Message

The Woman, Her Son, and the Dragon

12 1-2 A great Sign appeared in Heaven: a Woman dressed all in sunlight, standing on the moon, and crowned with Twelve Stars. She was giving birth to a Child and cried out in the pain of childbirth.

3-4 And then another Sign alongside the first: a huge and fiery Dragon! It had seven heads and ten horns, a crown on each of the seven heads. With one flick of its tail it knocked a third of the Stars from the sky and dumped them on earth. The Dragon crouched before the Woman in childbirth, poised to eat up the Child when it came.

5-6 The Woman gave birth to a Son who will shepherd all nations with an iron rod. Her Son was seized and placed safely before God on his Throne. The Woman herself escaped to the desert to a place of safety prepared by God, all comforts provided her for 1,260 days.

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​A Word on Revelation

Many people have found the Book of Revelation is one of the most mystifying, mysterious, and terrifying books found in the Bible. I was one of those people for the majority of my life. Yet as I have continued to study it, I have come to see it as communicating one of the most powerful messages the church of our time desperately needs to hear, if we would just have the ears to hear.

So, before we move ahead, if you’re one of those who find the Book of Revelation as intimidating as I did, let me share a few bits of advice that have helped me as I study.

The name of the Book is “revelation.” So, one of the most helpful questions to ask about the book is, “what is being revealed?” The answer is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus in the world. The fullness of God through Christ is being revealed.

This is one of the most misunderstood parts of the Book of Revelation. While many have confused it for a psychic foretelling of the future, it is rather a description of Jesus’ birth, life, death, resurrection, and return described in cosmic proportions, especially in how it conflicts with and drives out the false, evil, beast-like empires of this world. It has more to do with what Jesus accomplished through his life, death, and resurrection and how that will be brought to completion at the end of time than anything else.

Revelation uses stark Biblical symbolism, numbers, and imagery within its context to describe the ways of the Lamb and the ways of the beast in order to call us to be faithful to the ways of the Lamb until Jesus returns. The entire goal of the Book of Revelation is to call people to be faithful to Jesus in dark times as they await the redemption of all things through Jesus, not the destruction of all things. Jesus has come to save and redeem the world, not destroy the world. That “saving” reaches its fullest conclusion upon Christ’s return.

The Greek word that is translated into the English word “revelation” is ἀποκάλυψις (apokalupsis). It is where our English word “apocolyps” comes from. Yet this causes us to be distracted from what the word “apokalupsis” actually means in the Greek. It simply means unveiling, uncovering, revealing, or revelation.

This hits at the heart of the meaning of the Book of Revelation. Just like when you have a new idea about something, which brings to an end some of the old ideas you had, so too is the revelation of God in Jesus Christ in the world. When the way of the Lamb is fully revealed, the way of the beast, the ravaging, exploiting, greedy, violent, sinful, evil way of the beast comes to an end. While God's creation and humanity are fully redeemed and restored, all that tore it apart and killed it has been driven away forever. That is "good news."

The Beginning of the End

The beginning of the end of “the way of the beast” is Jesus coming to earth. An arrival we recenter ourselves and prepare for every Advent season. Some theologians have taken to call Advent a “mini apocalypse” because of how it prepares us to receive the never ending reign of hope, peace, joy, and love Jesus brings, as well as prepares us for the soon ending reign of all that suppresses and destroys hope, peace, joy, and love in the world. This needs preparation because the time between the passing of the reign of beasts to the reign of Jesus is tumultuous and difficult.

We even see the fear that falls on the hearts of those who operate in the “ways of the beast” in the Christmas story and those who suffer because of them. The fear of knowing that their reign will be coming to an end causes them to respond the only way beasts know how: violence.

Mary herself prophesies over Jesus’ life in the world by singing, in Luke 1 “He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.” It is this kind of overturning of greed and exploitative power that scared King Herod so much that he ordered all male children two and under to be killed. (Matthew 2:16-18). John the Baptist and even Jesus himself would be killed in an effort to preserve “law and order” allied with religion, in an effort to preserve the profitable practices of greed and exploitative power over the poor and the powerless. The beast always lashes out the most towards those who try disrupt the status quo it has established for its own benefit.

The Politics of The Beast

Revelation chapters 12 and 13 show the stark differences between the kingdom of the Lamb and the kingdoms of the beast in cosmic detail. Jesus is born into a world where the forces of Satan (the dragon) are already crouching, waiting to take his life and his mother’s life. Yet time and a time again, these efforts fail to defeat Jesus and those who follow his ways. It is a cycle that repeats itself all throughout in the cosmic struggle between Jesus and the forces of evil.

Revelation 12 and 13 paint a stark picture of Rome at the time and it also describes all the ways all empires of the world operate in the world. In these chapters, the authority of the dragon is given to two beasts that arrive on the scene. There is so much detail and imagery here, but let me give you a bit of what it is describing.

The first beast has seven heads, which symbolize Rome (seven hills). One of the heads appears to be mortally wounded, which is most likely referring to rumors at the time that Nero would return from the dead. This beast presents itself as the “resurrected messiah” with the power to save the world and demands international worship while it uses violence (Rev 13:1-7) and exploitation (Rev 18:1-13) to force the world into compliance.

The second beast primarily works to promote worship of the first beast (13:12). Through its lamb-like appearance, it uses deception to mask the ways of the dragon as the ways of the lamb in order to get people to worship the first beast (which is Rome/imperial power). This is why its “mark” is directly tied to exploitative economic practices, which it requires both elites and non-elites to get if they want to participate in the economy (13:16-17). Highjacking Christianity and the Bible as nationalistic tools of power for the state is a perfect example of the kind of religious “masking” the second beast represents here. It uses the things of God to get people to worship the power of the empire.

It's About Fidelity

This “mark of the beast” is commanded to be put on the very same place where God had called Israel to put God’s commands in Deuteronomy 6:8-9, on their hands and foreheads. Just as God was asking for fidelity from the people of God, to be marked by the ways of God in the world, the beast calls for people to be marked by fidelity to its ways in the world, which especially includes its greedy, exploitative, arrogant, and often violent use of power.

New Testament scholar Eugene Boring once wrote, “The beast is not merely “Rome,” it is the inhuman, anti-human arrogance of empire which has come to expression in Rome—but not only there. All who support the cultural religion, in or out of church, however Lamb-like they may appear, are agents of the beast. All propaganda that entices humanity to idolize human empire is an expression of this beastly power that wants to appear Lamb-like.”

The late Eugene Peterson in his commentary on these two chapters rightly observed that God’s politics are the antithesis of the politics of the empire, which is the “exercise of power, either through manipulation of force (militarism) or the manipulation of words (propaganda).”

In one of the best descriptions I have read on these chapters, New Testament scholar Michael J. Gorman wrote in his commentary on Revelation, “The function of propaganda is to make evil look good, the demonic divine, violence like peacemaking, tyranny and oppression like liberation. It makes blind, unquestioning allegiance appear to be freely chosen, religiously appropriate devotion. The grand lie does not appear to start as deception, but only as rhetorical exaggeration. The exaggeration deepens, lengthens, and broadens in an almost organic act of self-distortion. Eventually the rhetoric becomes a blatant falshood, but now people have not only come to believe the lie, they also live the lie; over time they have been narrated into it. At that point, the exaggeration-turned-falsehood becomes uncontested and uncontestable truth, and its effects highly dangerous. Evil in the name of good and of God is now nearly inevitable.”

What we know historically of what happened to Rome, and all authoritarian regimes of the 21st century, is that they eventually were dismantled by self inflicted wounds. This is the same fate of empires shown in the Book of Revelation. Because Rome and Babylon before it insisted on the beast like ways of greed, violence, exploitation, and ravaging the planet without any care of the consequences, present or eternal (Rev 11:18), those are the very ways that eventually devoured them in the end. God simply turned them over to the ways they insist on choosing and they share the same fate as sin and death itself: total defeat.

All the while, God in Christ is calling for faithful obedience to the ways of the Lamb, which if accepted, sets people in stark contrast to the ways of the beast in the world. Instead of greed, generosity. instead of propaganda, truth. Instead of exploitation, equity and justice. Instead of hoarding power, sharing power. Instead of coercion, compassion. Instead of violence, nonviolence, even to the point of laying down one’s life for others like Jesus did for us. The truth of the gospel is that the ways of the Lamb will outlast and eventually overcome all the beast like ways and it empires of our world.

They Lash Out Because They're Losing

The reality is though, the most devastating reality of beasts is paradoxically also the most hopeful reality. Beasts lash out the most violently when they know they are losing. Like a rabid animal backed into a corner, beasts deal out their most desperate attempts to assert its self-appointed dominance.

I think that is what we are seeing in our country today. We are seeing the final lashing out of so many beast like ways in an attempt to hold onto power. It is the lashing out of ideological movements that know they are dying.

We are seeing the lashing out of patriarchy, racism, bigotry, greed, economic exploitation, xenophobia, disregarding of the planet, anti-intellectualism, and Christian nationalism because these ideologies are facing a future of extinction and know it.

We are seeing beasts desperately trying to cling to power and they will cause great heartache, harm, and darkness before they succumb to their own evil ways.

Yet as we walk in the darkness of beasts, in breaks the words from the prophet Isaiah we hear every Advent season about the birth of Jesus, “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned.” (9:2)

So as this Advent season begins and we face a future ahead of beast like ways, we can hold onto the hope we have in the ways of the Lamb, that even though the beasts of this world may flail and use all the evil in their arsenal to try and dominate our world, they will not have the last word over us or creation, and they know it. Resurrection will have the last word. Healing will have the last word. Mercy will have the last word. Love will have the last word.

Our task as followers of Jesus as the beasts rage on is to advocate for the poor, the powerless, the marginalized, the sick, the hungry, the immigrant, the oppressed, and the planet, all who always suffer the most when beasts are trying to hold onto their power. Just as Jesus did in his time, we are called to do the same as he did and serve "the least among us” while speaking truth to beast like power.

So remember, even though the dragon’s shadow seems to loom so large over the manger, it already knows it has lost to all that has been revealed by the One who lays within it. “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” -John 1:5

Go follow the light. Go be the light. Go stoke the light in others.