January 4, 2026 | Rev. Bret Lortie
Each December between Christmas and New Years I have a kind of unintentional ritual of heading off into space. Usually exhausted from the fall church startup and holidays, I’ll fire up an old hand-me-down projector, in the basement, given to me by my son and on a 10’ screen rewatch one of my favorite sci fi space operas. The rotation includes Firefly, Farscape, Stargate Universe, Deep Space Nine, Alien. This ritual doesn’t work on a puny TV … it’s got to be huge. This year I rewatched the Expanse series, followed by starting back into the books that never made it to the screen. Sometimes I’ll watch my sci fi space operas while flying my computer space simulator, a 1:1 recreation of the Milky Way, with up to 10,000 other online space-faring gamers.
I fly around in space…
while watching people fly around in space!
To be clear, this ritual is a very conscious attempt to escape what’s going on “out there.” Do any of you share this feeling of overwhelm following the holiday season? Do any of you want to secretly escape, at least for a week or two? Maybe fly off into space?
Of course I’m using my sci fi space obsessions to escape an oppressive feeling I get each time this year that there’s just too much happening in the world. Too much commercialism and materialism around the holidays. Too much oppression and violence in the news. Too much cultural supremacy and hegemony. Too much life under empire. And I’m not talking about us living under the occupying rule of empire. We are empire, and right now our role as global oppressor is more clear than ever. I’ll get to Venezuela in a minute.
Yet, here’s the irony of using science fiction and space exploration games as an escape from our feelings living in an age of expanding empire. Science fiction is obsessed with empire. With the ravages and excesses and parallels of empire. Sci fi is filled with resistance to the evils of imperialist expansion, transcultural greed, and human corruption. Resistance to empire is a mainstay of science fiction. Star Wars is, of course, a perfect example with the resistance, named “The Resistance,” pitted against the empire, named “The Empire,” but in what we snobs would call serious sci fi, or speculative fiction, we find the same fixations on how to resist the overwhelming power and lure of human empire. In Frank Herbert’s Dune, for example, resistance takes the form of religious fanaticism and later ecological science as antidotes to empire. In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, resistance to empire utilizes math and science, which the author names psychohistory, as the tools to erode the power of an emperor who, re-cloned through the centuries, is literally named Empire. In Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, resistance is simply exposing the inherent violence, social manipulation, and injustice that rightful citizenship must be earned and is never a birthright.
No survey of this topic would be complete without mentioning the Patternist and Parable series of Octavia Butler. A profile of Butler in Black Women in America notes how Butler adds to this critique of empire “racial and gender-based animosity … ethical and unethical uses of power, and how the assumption of power changes people.” Butler challenges humanity’s innate tendency towards hierarchical thinking, tribalism, caste, intolerance, and violence. One critic noted her novels are trial solutions “to the self-destructive condition in which she finds humanity.”
The best science fiction isn’t about some shiny technology that hasn’t been invented, but about inventing scenario after scenario, world after world, in which human resistance is tested against the evils of empire. The question is always there: Will humanity survive our own impulses to build structures of greed, oppression, power, and spirit-crushing expansion? Will we?
And so, even as I try to escape each year during this time between Christmas and New Years, which just so happens to be the season of Epiphany, there is no escape from the conditions of empire. Resistance is futile. At least, so far. //
Often, some awful piece of news coming out on a Friday or Saturday night has me scrambling to re-write my sermon. This week, the news played right into everything I had written.
Here we are again, invading another country, this time Venezuela, for oil. The president said yesterday that the United States will run Venezuela until a “safe transition” takes place and we will be “very strongly involved” in Venezuela’s oil industry. As if to emphasize this isn’t about drugs or elections but expanding imperialism, Secretary of State Rubio said Cuba should also be concerned following these strikes. Cuba has little to do with global narcotics but is sitting on a reserve of 124 million barrels of oil.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth just had to point out that “America can project our will anywhere, anytime, the coordination, the stealth, the lethality, the precision, the very long arm of American justice, all on full display in the middle of the night.” “Welcome to 2026,” he said. “America is back.” And by America, I believe he clearly means American empire.
What does this all have to do with Epiphany, the season of Christmas spanning 12 days between December 25th and January 6th? I put the epiphany story of the Three Wise Magi right there with all great stories about resistance to empire. In the overall context of the Biblical story, we know that the people of Israel moved from being nomadic peoples to empire builders themselves, culminating with the United Monarchy under King David. Following the rule of Solomon, the United Monarchy is conquered by a series of other empires, the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Byzantines, and Romans.
We pick up this larger story of empire with the three Magi traveling in a time when the Hebrew people are living under Roman rule. After being given a secret spy mission by Herod to report back the location of this threat to his imperial rule, the Magi come to the house where Mary has given birth. The Magi bring the baby gifts of gold, incense, and precious oils. None of which a baby really needs, of course, but it establishes in the story that this child is worthy of the gifts of royalty. There is a threat to Roman rule afoot, a resistance to empire nobody yet understands. As the story unfolds, we learn this resistance is not one of weapons and violence—but of love and intercultural acceptance. Of care for the disadvantaged and outcast. Of resistance to religious hypocrisy and power.
The story of the Magi as told in Matthew is an alternate account to the nativity story told in Luke. It’s the Lukan story where Jesus is nestled in the manager surrounded by animals and adored by shepherds and angels. The stories all get blended together in our Christmas pageant—shepherds, magi, Herod, Augustus, camels. But each of the gospels tells a different story. Mark and John begin with prophecy and Jesus’ adult baptism–there’s no mention of a baby whatsoever. In Luke, we get a manger and whole “no room at the inn” story.
But in Matthew, the one with the three Magi, we get a different story. There is no manger. Instead, when the Magi get to Bethlehem they simply enter a house, most likely a cousin’s, to see “the child with Mary,” and they kneel and pay homage. The Matthew story is focused on the relationship between Herod, representing empire, and Jesus, the embodiment of resistance that offers a world hope and love. The Magi are caught in the middle of this tension. They were just following a star.
Herod, historically, was a tyrant. Biblical scholar Richard Horsley describes in The Liberation of Christmas: Epiphany Under Empire, how Herod … oppressed his own people with taxes to fund his grandiose building projects, including a rebuilt temple that exceeded the opulence of Solomon’s. Herod “instituted what today would be called a police-state, complete with loyalty oaths, surveillance, informers, secret police, imprisonment, torture and brutal retaliation against any serious dissenter …. Matthew 2 comes to life vividly against the background of Herodian exploitation and tyranny.”
A key to understanding this story is that Herod isn’t a Roman. Rather, he is a Jewish monarch who has sold out to Roman overlords and will do anything to maintain power.
You can almost hear Herod saying:
I did it all for you!
I rebuilt the East Wing,
I invaded Venezuela,
I suspended the Rule of Law!
For you. Because I am one of you.
Sound familiar?
It isn’t that the story of Epiphany has echoes to which we should pay attention today. It is the story of today. It is the age old story repeated again and again, of resistance in the context of fear, of hope in an atmosphere of oppression, of love winning against hate.
This is what makes the real story of the Christian scriptures so subversive. I am often incensed at the corruption of the Christian story, at the amnesia of the church regarding its foundational message. I just finished a book by Paul Strathern on the Medici family’s four Renaissance popes. Strathern discusses at length how the church itself became an instrument of empire, corrupt, insatiable for expansion, an instrument of unimaginable violence. And that’s why I’m so drawn to the Epiphany story. It reminds us that the story of the church is a vast corruption of the promises found in the Gospel of Matthew’s account of the Three Magi, which concludes with the Magi returning home, by another route. They have seen the promise of love coming into the world. They are transformed by it.
They decide not to return to the halls of power, where they would certainly have been materially rewarded. Instead, they just go home. By another route.
Maybe this is the impulse I feel each year after Christmas, to hide out in my basement lair, with my sci fi stories of empire, pondering the meaning of what it means, armed only with a voice of love, to resist the march of empires.
You see, this question of resistance to empire, from the gospel narrative to speculative science fiction, is a perpetual choice we must consider. Will we spend our lives succumbing to the violence of our times or will we always choose the side of love? Will we be dividers or peacemakers? Those who harm or those who heal?
As we light our burning bowl this year,
I invite you to bring these questions forward.
The burning bowl ritual invites us to consider something we choose not to bring into the new year.
This year I invite you to consider something about empire when you choose your few words. Maybe it has something to do with your distant role in the oppression of others. Maybe it is the hate for Herod you must leave behind so you can focus on the love that saves. Maybe it is a regret from last year that holds you back from the good intentions of this one. Whatever your words, write them down, cast them into the fire, and let us leave them behind together.
I also have a gift for you this year. As you exit the sanctuary, I invite you to re-enter the world with a single word of intention, picked randomly from a basket of cards. Who knows what the serendipity of the universe might be saying to you.
Finally, please write only on the scrap of special temple paper, which burns quickly and cleanly and won’t start a fire. If you come forward with another kind of paper, please don’t be offended if set it aside for burning later.
Please write your words, leave them behind in the fire, and be ready for the new year ahead.