I want to hire the P.R. person for dragons. I mean, mermaids and mermen have their moments, unicorns come and go in a poof of rainbow glitter, trolls get some screen time on occasion, but no one does it like dragons, grinding it out year after year. Sometimes they are perched on a pile of gold and incinerating local villages. Sometimes they are the ally and wise counsel to the human hero. They are the Meryl Streep of fantasy creatures, able to play any role, or maybe the Keith Richards, born old and never aging.
They are back in the cultural mix at the moment, as the prequel to Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon, hits HBO. The novels in that series were bestsellers, the show a smash hit, though I admit to only making it through the “Red Wedding.” If you know, you know.
One of the popular tropes regarding dragons provides the title for this morning’s sermon. “Here be dragons” is sometimes thought to be what ancient and medieval cartographers wrote on the edges of the map, indicating unexplored territory, and there was a lot of unexplored territory back then. It turns out to be an anachronism. Cartographers did indicate the danger of the unknown with pictures of fierce beasts, including dragons, but the earliest use of that phrase, in the Latin form “hic sunt dracones,” doesn’t appear until the start of the 16th century, on a globe now in the collection of the New York Public Library.
The unknown can be scary. But the known can be pretty scary too. And dragons don’t just hang around under the mountain or at the edge of the map. Sometimes they wear well-tailored suits and red silk ties, sometimes black robes.
I am inclined to Neil Gaiman’s take on dragons, as you heard in our first reading. He is the award-winning multi-genre writer of groundbreaking comic books, bestselling novels, and children’s fiction, with many of his works adapted for film and television, including the new Netflix series Sandman. And it is one of his works for children, Coraline, later adapted for stop-motion animation, that provides us with that reading, the reminder that dragons can be defeated.
In today’s reading, Jeremiah also reminds us that dragons can be defeated. He is writing at that moment when Judah is about to be crushed by the Babylonians, one dragon among many in a time of famine and warfare. There were no good decisions to be made, only slightly less awful ones. Jeremiah reminds the people of Judah of the Exodus, for the central story of the Hebrew religious tradition is not a mythical Adam and Eve, is not Abraham and Sarah, is not David usurping the throne from the warlord Saul and creating a nation-state.
No, the central story of the Hebrew religious tradition is the escape from Egypt, an escape they attributed to divine intervention, an escape they celebrated with Passover, and that story, which we neglect at our own theological expense, includes an imperfect leader, indecision and fear, for Pharaoh and his army were dragons. Remember, scripture tells us that the Hebrew patriarch Joseph rose to power in Egypt by helping the pharaoh steal all of the land and livestock of his own nation during a time of famine. Pharaoh used his position to increase his wealth and power. Joseph wasn’t Oskar Schindler. He was Mitch McConnell.
It isn’t that Abraham isn’t important, that our sisters and brothers in Rabbinic Judaism don’t tell the story of King David. It isn’t that they don’t have their own issues with power and patriarchy. They do. But it is Christians who got hung up on David, for they wanted to turn Jesus into a king, complete with a bogus family tree.
The Hebrew story is the story of a God who is with a stuttering fugitive murderer standing up to an overwhelming enemy and demanding liberation for the oppressed. It is the story of Moses.
And though some are obsessed with their conception of a violent god, focused on a bloody corpse nailed to a cross, the courageous rebels of the Protestant Reformation remembered too that dragons could be defeated, and chose the empty Easter cross as our symbol, a reminder not of cruelty, but of victory.
It is easy to focus on the challenges, the negative, the dragon in the sky. It is our creaturely nature to focus on danger so we can run or fight. But it is the pine cone that falls beyond the tree line that expands the forest ecosystem, the regrowth after the fire, the sailor who sails off the edge of the map into the maw of the sea monster that expands our knowledge. Fear is a tool, but it is not life, and it is not holy.
It is true that the fearful small-hearted people who seek to divide and control outnumber us sometimes. But we are smarter than they are. And we have God on our side. For it has always been true since the Big Bang that the holy, the truly holy, is expansive, creative, impossible to control, and that diversity is the order of creation. The sign of holiness is not obedience. It is chaos and creation and the expansive love that cannot sit still. Holiness is not found in submission. It is found in play.
Jesus tells us “be not afraid.” He doesn’t promise us that things are going to be easy. That’s a bill of goods pushed by religious charlatans. Jesus tells us that things will be hard. Jesus tells us that here in this fleshy earthly moment, there be dragons. He also promises us that love wins, because God is love, and at his most extravagant, Jesus promises that love is even more powerful than that greatest of dragons, death itself.
Now, I know it can be hard to believe. The land is on fire, there are dragons in the sky, and there have already been casualties.
But stop. Just for a moment.
Look at a flower. Listen to a whole Radiohead album. Get lost in a Neil Gaiman comic book. Bake some bread and pour a glass of good wine. Sit with a loved one and remember times of laughter and joy. See God in all things, for God is in all things, and Christ is with us, as he promised, and he will be with us when we head back out there to fight the dragons, for as Gaiman reminded us, as story reminds us, as scripture reminds us, dragons are real, and they are out there, and they can be defeated by folks just like you and me. Amen.