WHAT KIND OF CITY WOULD YOU BUILD?

A Sermon by Bill McDonald from Revelation 21:1-6

May 6, 2007

Revelation 21

¹Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. ²And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. ³And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

“See, the home of God is among mortals.

He will dwell with them;

they will be his peoples,

and God himself will be with them;

⁴ he will wipe every tear from their eyes.

Death will be no more;

mourning and crying and pain will be no more,

for the first things have passed away.”

⁵And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” ⁶Then he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.

What kind of city would you build? You can build your own, you know. Wikipedia says that the genre of city creation games started in 1982 with a video game called Utopia in which people competed to build societies on one of 16 islands and were judged by the quality of life they constructed for the imaginary inhabitants. Nowadays you can go to SimCity.com or to citycreator.com and start building your own metropolis. If someone handed you 40,000 uninhabited acres in West Texas and an unlimited budget and told you to build a city, what kind of city would you build? Of course, the first thing I would do would be to move it from West Texas to New Hampshire!

What kind of city would you build? A friend of mine saw the title of today’s sermon in our church newsletter and he phoned me to make sure that this new city would have casinos! That’s the kind of friends I have! Others of you might put a Baskin-Robbins on every corner. Here’s an idea: how about requiring a transmitter collar on every dog to broadcast its barking into its owners’ bedroom every night? How about a park, a grocery store and a doctor’s office in every neighborhood? Some of you might even get real futuristic and plan to synchronize the stoplights on major streets. What a radical idea! If you could start from nothing, how would you construct the perfect city?

Writing from exile on the island of Patmos, the disciple John envisions a new heaven and a new earth and a holy city, the new Jerusalem. He speaks in the positive about some things that would be in this new city and in the negative about some things that wouldn’t.

It was time to move on and so my wife Julie and I were interviewing at various Disciples congregations around the U.S. We took off out of St. Louis in a raging thunderstorm aboard an airplane that was no bigger than a Louisiana mosquito. After landing at a small Arkansas airport (and stooping to kiss the ground!), we had a wonderful visit with an energetic church in one of the fastest-growing small cities in Arkansas. It sounded perfect. The church had multiple staff, great plans, new buildings--and an oil well! The only church I have ever known that had an oil well. Julie and I would be able to afford to live in a house on the lake. Excited about the possibilities, I casually mentioned that in our tour of the town I had not seen any minorities, no people of color. The Search Chair’s response was, “There aren’t any.” I asked if that was by chance or by design and I got the worst answer I could have gotten. “Well, a minority family might be accepted in this town--but their kids had better be awfully good at sports or music.” We told that Search Committee the same thing that I would say today in our little city-building exercise. I don’t want to live in a city where whole categories of human beings are not welcome. John says that God’s home is now among mortals, not just white mortals, not just North American mortals. “He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples.” Notice the plural on that word, “peoples.” The new Jerusalem is not just for the “chosen people,” not just for the twelve tribes of Israel, but for all the nations: Jews, Palestinians, Europeans, Americans, Iraqis, Mexicans, Africans, Koreans, even those of us who are Scottish! The peoples of God.

Can we imagine the idea of a holy city for the whole world? Or are we stuck on just a prosperous city for ourselves? Perhaps a walled city to keep the outsiders out. Continuing in Chapter 21 John foresees a “great, high wall” around the city with twelve gates. But in verse 25 he writes, “Its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night.” Gates that never shut, hearts that never close, welcome that knows no boundary—sounds like a holy place to me.

In the Woodford Sun, a delightful county newspaper, I like to read the past issues column, detailing what went on in Woodford County on the same date in 1886, 1903 and 1930. In this week’s column it reported about a young mother of three dying of “consumption” after a long battle. Another item reported on a 55 year old community leader dying of “apoplexy.” Reading those two strange names, we might pat ourselves on the back and say that there are two diseases we have conquered with modern medicine, much like polio. You don’t hear of those anymore. Of course “consumption” is tuberculosis, and we have done quite well in the treatment of that consuming disease. But “apoplexy” is what we now call stroke and that illness is still quite widespread, though we have better treatment for it and better prevention than they did in the day of those newspaper reports. John foresees a time when all illnesses are gone, when “mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” Of course, it’s not only illness that brings mourning to human lives, just look at the news with its photos of wailing parents carrying the bodies of their children. If only over the past 100 years we had made the same strides in the science of peace that we have in the science of medicine. If we had, then our world would be much closer to John’s envisioned holy city. Imagine how much good we could have done for the world if we had used the trillion dollars we have spent on the war in Iraq for cancer research instead—or for AIDS research. What if health care for our citizens equaled the defense budget each year? The human propensity toward war robs the world’s people of health, stability and opportunity. And war comes from division and strife. John may have written this passage in exile while seated on the Isle of Patmos, a small Aegean island off the southwest coast of Turkey, looking across the waters toward the churches he had served in Asia Minor, separated from them by the barrier of the sea. So he writes, “¹Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.” Do we dream of a day when the walls and barriers and boundaries that separate us from one another are finally no more? I do…I hope you do.

In my version of the perfect city I would want to make a deal with God. Now, deals with God sometimes aren’t real sincere. One man during a turbulent airplane ride plagued with mechanical failures cried out, “God, get me out of this and I will give you half of everything I own!” The plane immediately smoothed out and the flight was calm the rest of the way. On disembarking someone ran up to the man and said, “Brother, I heard what you said on the airplane. I heard you say that you will give half of what you own to God. Well, I’m a preacher with a needy church and won’t you start right now fulfilling your deal with God?” The man responded, “Nope, I made a better deal. I told God that if I ever got on a plane again he could have it all.” My deal with God would be more sincere than that. I would promise to make room in the perfect city for God if God would make room there for me. Notice John’s words, “And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.” If we are ever going to get anywhere in civilization, social engineering won’t do it, empire building won’t do it, treaties and pacts won’t do it, good intentions won’t do it. The holy city comes to us from God. If we are ever going to find our way through its gates, we have to follow God there. God is already showing the way, but who are we following?

We are in the Easter season, the season of resurrection, the time of alleluias. Given the course of human history, given what we have seen of humankind, we may doubt that John’s vision can ever come true for planet Earth. But Gene Boring in writing about this Bible text encourages us to note that God does not say, “I am making all new things,” but instead says, “I am making all things new.” Not destruction, but transformation. Not a deletion of humanity but putting God’s curser over our hearts and hitting the Refresh button. Not starting over with a new Adam and Eve, but cleansing us sinners until we shine like new. And that is resurrection applied to our lives.

What kind of city would you build? Try it out. But here’s a hint: when you build it, use God’s plans.