Christmas thoughts
The world is in awful trouble. Why I still have wild hope in Christ.
I woke up on Christmas morning thinking about the hopelessness in the world. The tragedies that so many people are experiencing. The precarious state of our nation and the world. 2026 promises to be further destabilizing and challenging.
I’m under no illusions about that.
But as I pondered all this while lying in bed on Christmas morning, I found my heart fluttering with an irrational and wild joy and hope.
Because I truly believe Jesus—from start to finish—is the antidote to all of this. And I truly believe he will have the last word. Not in the form of cultural domination (the hope of which we see on naked display in some circles of the church). And certainly not in any kind of nationalism or even worse—ethnonationalism. And certainly not any such movement that would use Jesus as its mascot.
Empire promises that violence will bring peace, that the accumulation of power and weapons will bring security, and that domination will bring stability, Jesus Christ and history itself proves this wrong. 🕊️
The little baby born outside of Empire’s structure, amongst the exceedingly vulnerable gives us opportunity to ponder the inevitable fall of every empire and the endurance of his truth and gospel.
Empire shows us over and over again how violence multiplies violence, how hoarding wealth produces scarcity rather than flourishing, and how domination breeds revolt—producing the same broken cycle over and over again. These are the structural sins so often overlooked by an Empire co-opted church. In each iteration, the empire-aligned Church thinks that it will be different this time. It never is.
BUT— Christ’s kingdom endures forever because its logic is rooted in something completely different. This is what makes it so compelling and beautiful and subversive.
At first glance, it is less visible. But the longer one looks, the more the logic of the kingdom becomes visible. It relies on quiet seeds buried in the Earth — not flashy spectacles. It honors quiet faithfulness. It flourishes most in the margins of earthly power.
This becomes a truth that compounds across generations. We can look back over Church history and see the more visible and loud Empire version of Christianity—and we can also see the quiet and faithful Christ-kingdom version operating in the midst of it with self-giving love, invitation, humility, and truth. This kingdom is not at all dependent upon the structures of empire. Thus, it endures outside of those structures, offering an enduring alternative.
So it was when he first appeared as a baby in Bethlehem and so it remains today.
May we all discover more and more what his kingdom is all about— and separate the beautiful truth from empire’s falsity.
He’s helping us, now. I feel it.
Love and blessings to all my friends across a very wide spectrum of belief and thought and experience on planet earth. What unites us all is that we are ALL beloved—moreso that we can imagine—by Christ, himself, the heartbeat of this kingdom.
Merry Christmas!
Jesus never called for loyalty to Rome or to Israel or to a revolutionary vision for a new earthly kingdom. He called for loyalty to God, through loyalty to himself as Son of God. We are citizens of earthly empires and nations, but that citizenship must always be subservient to our loyalty to Jesus--no matter the cost, even at the cost of our freedoms and lives.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on Christmas Day. I'm sorry I missed it so I could wish you a blessed day. I trust it was. It sure started out on a serious note, but you faith & trust & optimism is so uplifting to those of us with less faith.
Happy New Year.