Swimming in Babylon: Why We Can't See the Systems That Control Us
I am very much the product of my parents, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Sunday mornings in our house meant gospel music filling the kitchen while my mother called us to get ready for church. We'd sing together as we made corned beef hash from a can and scrambled eggs—simple food made sacred by her voice and the music that seemed to pour from her very soul. It was my mother who led us through Bible study on Saturday mornings during the summer, her vast collection of commentaries and religious books showing me early on that faith and scholarship weren't enemies but dance partners.
My father shared my mother's conviction that Christian faith should be our family's foundation, but he brought something else to our dinner table: a keen political analysis that refused to let us forget the realities of race and class in America. He was the one who would turn the dial away from my mother's gospel music toward NPR, making sure we stayed current with international politics.
When images of the first intifada crossed our TV screen, it was my father who would lean forward and ask in that voice he used when he wanted to drive home a point: "Now, who has the tanks and who has the rocks?"
As a military veteran who'd been drafted in the 1960s, my father simply could not understand why we as Black people would ever show deference to the symbols of America or celebrate the Fourth of July. To this day, he'll still rail against Independence Day. We never stood for the national anthem in our house—not out of disrespect for the country, but out of a deeper respect for truth.
The Confusion of Familiar Resistance
This upbringing left me genuinely confused when clips emerged of then-candidate Barack Obama's pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, saying "not God bless America, God damn America for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating her citizens as less than human." I couldn't understand why the same kind of critical resistance to American injustice that I'd heard all my life—from my father, in school, in churches—was suddenly so controversial. "The comments struck me as expected resistance from people who had been consigned to the underside of history."
I felt that same confusion when people responded in shock to Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players refusing to stand for the national anthem. In refusing to show deference to the symbols of America, they were urging a national interrogation of who America has been and who it is now. They were refusing to accommodate an image of America that felt untrue to their lived experience.
This confusion taught me something important: we often can't recognize resistance when it comes from our own context, using our own language and challenging our own comfortable assumptions. What sounds prophetic from a safe historical distance sounds dangerous and divisive when it's happening in our own time.
Revelation as Resistance Literature
I begin with these stories because they help us understand what the book of Revelation is actually doing. Despite what runaway bestsellers like the Left Behind series would have us believe, Revelation isn't about decoding the future in excruciating detail. As Eugene Peterson puts it so beautifully: "Revelation is not prediction, but perception."
The book is apocalyptic literature—a genre that first-century hearers would have immediately recognized. It claims to unveil supernatural realities through otherworldly beings and strict black-and-white categories, taking readers into a visionary world of symbols and sensory experiences that serve to provoke and disorient. You cannot boil this down to rational, one-to-one explanations like "Tuesday is the rapture."
Think of Revelation as a prison letter—because that's essentially what it is. The author, a person named John who we don't know much about, has been exiled to an island for preaching about Jesus. This is bold insight that can only come from someone who doesn't have much left to lose.
But here's what's crucial to understand: this letter was written to marginalized Christians living under Roman rule. The seven churches in the province of Asia (modern-day Turkey) weren't experiencing widespread persecution, but they faced sporadic harassment and the constant threat of losing economic and social standing if they didn't show proper deference to the empire.
Revelation as Uncensored Art
New Testament scholar Brian Blount thinks of Revelation in terms of music—specifically Black spirituals, blues, and rap. He quotes Michael Eric Dyson's insight about how "the blues functioned for another generation of blacks similarly to the way rap functions for young blacks today: as a source of racial identity, permitting forms of boasting and machismo for devalued black men suffering from social emasculation, allowing commentary on social and personal conditions in uncensored language, and fostering the ability to transform hurt and anguish."
Revelation is doing something similar. Like rap, it's an uncensored way of validating the value and perspective of those on the margins while critiquing the system. It provides a vivid way to transform pain and the experience of exclusion.
When I was thinking about this connection, I tried to recall rap songs that encapsulated this idea, but then I remembered: my mother didn't really let us listen to much secular music. What came to mind instead was how sometimes, on my day off, I'll put on my alter ego, get in the car, and play music at a somewhat inappropriate volume. When my wife gets in the car after me, she's shocked. One of my favorite songs to play is Beyoncé's "Flawless"—a song about female empowerment and self-worth that has this joyous swagger while demanding that people bow down to her.
"Revelation is doing something like that, creating a sensory experience that invites participation, that provides vivid images and commentary for both psychological effect and critical awareness."
Resistance art doesn't always conform to our sensibilities. But it serves a crucial function: it helps those who are marginalized see their worth and name the systems that would diminish them.
Meeting Babylon: The Woman on the Beast
To understand Revelation's resistance, we need to understand what it's resisting. In Revelation 17:1-8, John encounters a vision that needs explaining—a woman named Babylon sitting on a scarlet beast with seven heads and ten horns. She's described as a prostitute because of her intimacies with earthly rulers, clothed in luxurious garments and fine jewelry, intoxicated by the murder of witnesses to Jesus.
The imagery is deliberately shocking and layered. John himself is amazed by what he sees, and the angel has to pull him out of his stupor by asking, "Why are you so amazed?"
That question—why are you so amazed?—is one every disciple of Jesus has to confront when faced with the overwhelming force, material abundance, technological know-how, and superficial beauty of Babylon. In what ways does Babylon's overwhelming power stop you in your tracks? In what ways does it shut your mouth and stunt your imagination by making the radical way of Jesus seem impossible to actually live out?
The woman clearly represents Rome—she sits on seven hills, just like Rome, and parodies the goddess Roma who appeared on coins of the day. But Babylon is also more than Rome. It represents any domination system that puts Christians at risk of being stupefied by its power.
Scholar Scott McKnight summarizes Babylon's characteristics: it is idolatrous, extravagant, status-conscious, murderous, militaristic, economically exploitative, and arrogant. We could spend weeks unpacking each of these, but I want to focus on two that feel particularly urgent for our moment.
The Idolatry That Looks Like Orthodoxy
The first rule of Babylon is that it must claim your worship. But here's the insidious part: Babylon doesn't need you to renounce Christianity or stop saying "Jesus is Lord." In our context, it just needs you to believe that "Jesus is Lord" and "America is Lord" are the same thing. That "Jesus is Lord" and having your political party in power are equivalent. That worship of God and worship of the state—whether that state holds conservative, liberal, or socialist values—can peacefully coexist without tension.
This afternoon, as I write this, Charlie Kirk is being laid to rest—a man created in the image of God who was also profoundly racist. I expect his funeral will be a case study in what happens when we fail to discern Babylon in our midst, with her idols of power and profit wrapped in the language of faith.
But Babylon transcends the Christian nationalism rising in our country. It's at work every time we worship obtaining power over others, believing that will solve our problems. It's present whenever we worship the end so much that the means no longer matter to us. Babylon operates every time we worship "us" and remain content with the disposal of "them."
The Arrogance That Refuses Grief
Babylon's second defining characteristic is arrogance—a particular kind of ego inflation and triumphalism that resists self-reflection, self-critique, and repentance. In Revelation 18, John describes Babylon saying in her heart, "I rule as queen. I am no widow, and I will never see grief."
This echoes what the prophet Jeremiah said about the original Babylon: "You said, 'I shall be mistress forever,' so that you did not lay these things to heart or remember their end... you who say in your heart, 'I am, and there is no one beside me.'"
"Babylon is always an experience of ego inflation and triumphalism. It resists self-reflection and self-critique and repentance." Babylon cannot stand the idea that it is not eternal and will do everything in its power to convince you that "this is the way it always has to be." It does not have the ability to recognize its losses and genuinely grieve them.
Too often, the arrogance of Babylon lives inside us simply because we're too afraid to admit that we are not in control. The book of Revelation uncovers the lies we hide behind that prop up false security, loudly proclaiming that God will overcome every Babylon with the strength of divine love.
The Wilderness We Need
But here's what I don't want us to miss in our passage: John says he saw the woman Babylon riding the beast after he had been "carried away in the spirit into a wilderness." The recognition of Babylon's mystery only becomes possible as we cultivate a wilderness place in our own lives—a place of solitude, prayer, and silence where we can commune with the Spirit.
While we can recognize and discuss historical patterns of domination, Babylon is so insidious that you can't think your way into seeing her present shape. She is the air we breathe, the water we swim in, the norm of our world. To discern Babylon and become the kind of people who embody God's alternative—what Revelation calls "New Jerusalem"—requires stepping away from the drumbeat that undergirds our daily lives.
To talk about resistance to Babylon, we first have to talk about how we get outside her influence long enough to see her clearly. The message of Revelation is that such space exists only within the worship of God and communion with the Divine.
Living in the Space Between
We have several more weeks in this sermon series to let Revelation's beauty and complexity form us as faithful witnesses to Jesus. We'll contemplate how Babylon exists not just "out there" but in our churches—maybe even in our own hearts. We'll think about how empire operates within us, shaping our desires and assumptions in ways we rarely examine.
But as we continue this journey together, I want to leave you with both a challenge and an invitation. The challenge is this: Babylon's power lies partially in our inability to imagine alternatives. When we become convinced that the systems of domination around us represent the only possible way of organizing life, we've already been captured.
The invitation is simpler but more difficult: seek a quiet place daily—a wilderness space that will feel stark compared to the noise and activity of our world. A place to worship God, to be carried away in the Spirit, and to know Babylon for what it truly is. A place to remember the good news that Jesus is Lord, and Caesar—whatever form Caesar takes in our moment—is not.