Nadia Bolz-Weber, a Lutheran pastor in Colorado, tells the story of her church that would put on a living nativity each Advent. Members of the congregation would take turns dressing as Mary, Joseph, shepherds, and angels, to create a little manger scene in the church’s parking lot where locals could drive by and see live animals hanging out near a feeding trough filled with a baby doll Jesus. Because it was cold, the church members would do this in shifts lasting no more than 20 minutes at which time another Mary and Joseph or Angel would step in to brave the cold. On one occasion, Nadia was helping volunteers get dressed when a seven-year-old-boy came in from his shift. She asked him how he liked being a shepherd. “It’s okay,” he answered, “but next year I think I wanna be a pirate.” You know, the pirate that was at the birth of our Lord. That’s absurd, right? But is that any crazier than many traditional carols or Hallmark creches? Is it sillier than a drummer boy, or nativities with a pious little Santa Claus kneeling down or a pig as one of the animals? Anyone of these things is a perfect example of weird things creeping into Nativity scenes. And who knew that even the Bible would get in on the action with a dragon?
The Biblical account of Christmas is quite scary. It’s far more HBO than Disney. It’s a story about sex (or lack thereof), fear, political tyranny and violence, homelessness, the challenges of the working-class poor, the plight of refugees, pagan magicians, angels, and now, apparently, a dragon. And while many Christians worry about keeping Christ in Christmas, I believe that Christians might have more to worry about keeping the Bible in it as well. My son, the actor, recently turned me on to a YouTube channel called Corridor Crew where these special effect artists remake movies. One of the things they sometimes do is take movies that are PG and turn them into Rated R movies by making the violence realistic. So they’ll take the Marvel movies and redo them so that Thor’s hammer doesn’t knock someone over but obliterates them, and Captain America’s shield doesn’t bounce off someone’s chest but cuts them in half. The point is not to be gross but to actually make the violence explicit. That’s what John’s retelling is trying to do for us as well. By adding special effects, so to speak, the Apostle is trying to render the Christmas story in a more realistic way. So why do we need a dragon?
It's a wonder watching story for this difficult and dark world – “now.”
The Biblical story of Christmas reveals a God who enters our world as it actually exists rather than as we might wish it would be. Someone this week told me that the redemptive story that I read last week from the First Nation translation of the New Testament sounded like it was a story happening in the present. And, in a very real way, it is and John wants to scoop us up in that story. God’s love is too radical to enter a fantasy world, even though this is often how we treat Jesus, like we are trying to shelter him from reality. We often behave as though Jesus is only interested in saving and loving a romanticized version of ourselves and so we hide behind cute mangers in clean stalls. But friends, there is a dragon!
The fact of the matter is that the real world of Jesus’ birth was as messed up as ours with people as weird, wearied, bored, and hurting as ours. If we’ve lost the plot of the real Christmas story it’s simply because many of us have imagined that Christianity is the thing we use to escape from difficult realities instead of the place where those difficulties are acknowledged and faced. And let’s be real honest, there are many ways of pretending that things aren’t broken in ourselves and in the world and escapist religion is a classic option. A Christmas story without a dragon aims to offer a place where we have endless opportunities to pretend everything is fine. But Christ wasn’t born into a Norman Rockwell world but entered the real one. Christmas is a story of hope and joy in a dangerous world. That’s why this story needs a dragon. What’s your dragon as you enter into Advent? What threatens to eat you? What do you need “hope” for now?
It's a wonder watching story about one monster and strong mothers.
Our story is allegorical, biblical, and political. And the most important thing to know, to see what John is doing, to understand the book of Revelation, is not to try and predict the future rightly but to know your Bible well. That’s why it’s important to remember that of the 404 verses found in Revelation, 275 include one or more allusions to the OT with evocative, poetic language meant to jar us awake. It doesn’t so much aim to inform us about some conspiratorial end but reinvigorate our worship and passion for the mission of God by telling an ancient story in a new way. John’s vision of is not some futuristic prediction but an art house, heavenly remake of three Biblical classics – Creation, the Exodus, and the Christmas story! It’s an epic story about one monster and three mothers.
According to John, our present and future victory is found in the past. It hearkens to . . .
· STORY ONE: Creation / Mother Eve / and a prophecy that her offspring will crush the head of the snake and it will strike his heel - Genesis 3:15
· STORY TWO: Exodus / Mother Zion / promised Messiah
Exodus = “wilderness”, and worship of God (Ex. 9:1); Exodus 19:4 – “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians and how I bore you on wings of eagles . . .” is referenced in Rev. 12:14; and Isaiah 66 - in which Zion, the Jewish community, is the mother out of which God’s purposes are birthed, out of which Israel will find redemption. But also important is the added point that even God himself is like a mother that comforts her child, in Is. 66:13. And these find their fulfillment in . . .
· STORY THREE: Nativity / Mother Mary / Jesus, the Lamb & Messiah - Ps. 2:9 – messianic psalm
Our story, our salvation, our hope, “the power and the kingdom of God” came about because a peasant girl faced a dragon. This is visual picture of Mary’s Magnificat. This historical, concrete event, allegorized by John, reveals its cosmic force. So our story has this powerful feminist impulse. That it is the faithfulness of warrior woman through which God will birth redemption. I’m reminded of the exchange between the African-American Christian and Suffrage activist Sojourner Truth and a white clergy man about the authority for women to preach. Sojourner truth said, “Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with it!”
We also discover a monster. John’s vision expands a single text (Genesis 3:15) into an extraordinary apocalyptic struggle between good and evil. This monster, we are told, is serpent and dragon, deceive and accuser, the devil – though it seems incredibly significant to go back to the Gospels and notice that the threat of the devil there came from human actions, like King Herod. Whatever we are to make of this figure a few comments are worth noting: 1. It raises the stakes. John’s genius is to take Jesus in a manger attended by shepherds and magi and put him in a cosmos attacked by a dragon. Our response to the Christmas story cannot be reduced to shutting the door against a wintry world, drinking hot cocoa, and singing carols. This is not a story about souls saved in the end but about good winning over evil and remaking of the world now. The dragon reminds us that our Christmas story isn’t about Ebenezer Scrooge merely having a change of heart. It’s about evil waging war and ultimately being defeated. 2. Second, it defangs the devil. It also aims to remind us that evil rages on earth not because it is so powerful, but because it is so vulnerable. This version of the Christmas story has Satan being expelled, silenced, knowing “that his time is short!” Friends, there is no war on Christmas. Christmas is the war and Jesus won, John tells us, when he was born.
Finally, friends, a wonder watching story is how we win.
“But they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life even in the face of death.” (12:11) John offers us here a way of life that goes against the grain of our national, political story – conquering takes place though story not manipulation, through dying not killing. What if we don’t need so much to convince people but tell a compelling story? What if we don’t need to cling to our rights but refuse to cling to our lives? What if we don’t need a more persuasive point but a story that names the challenges of our world and reminds us that the meek are not weak? What if the real enemy of our world isn’t even a dragon but a world in which we think there aren’t any? What if the real problem that John and the gospel aim to address are boredom and weariness? What if the gospel is less like a political stump speech and more like Lord of the Rings? J.R.R. Tolkien wrote an essay called, “On Fairy Stories.” In it he says that the power of these tales isn’t that they are “make-believe” but that they help us practice seeing and paying attention. They train us in attitudes of perception. Enchantment, he notes, isn’t seeing things as they are” but “seeing things as we are meant to see them. Stories aren’t concerned with a scientific description of the world but with beholding its sacred meaning. Friends, let’s be honest with one another, I sense in us a bit of disenchantment, a bit of boredom, a lackluster story. We need dragon stories. We need the enchantment of children and dragons.
Zion last year exclaimed to Caitlin, “Mom, mom, it’s a miracle. Zebedee laughed at me.” We need eyes that see laughter as a miracle. We need to be reminded that we live and die by the stories we tell. A good story can lift you up and give you strength but a bad story, a wounding story, a worrying story, can kill you slowly. When I was a grad student at UCSB working on my history degree I boned up on all of my apologetics reading from seminary. Apologetics is about learning how to handle and address thorny questions about God, the Bible, good and evil, miracles, and as I prepared myself to study with incredibly smart people I armed myself with every arrow of logic I could find. But I never used them. That’s not to say that people didn’t come to my office seeking answers, or asking questions, or needing to cry. They did – often. But when they came they didn’t come with pointed questions but heavy stories. I’ll never forget when one of the smartest people in the department came to my office. He asked me if really believed the claims of Christianity about Jesus. When I told him that I did, I asked him to sit down and he told me a story about how he used to believe but the other kids in the youth group called him fat and made fun of him so he no longer believed. In his story, the church had forgotten “the word of their testimony” and the story that created it. They actually spoke like the dragon.
Our weapon is story of enchantment of a dragon defeated by a savior. Why do we need a dragon? The danger of not having one is that we might forget that the “word” of our testimony and its story of enchantment and redemption is how we win. We need the strange image to remind us that the spiritual life cannot be reduced to a checklist of explanations, a moral code, a life plan, a theological scheme. We need a dragon in order to truly see and a better story to tell.
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