Sermons
June 15, 2025 (Proper 6)
Urban Gardening
Revelation 21:1-4, 22—22:5
Do you know who, according to the book of Genesis, founded the very first city ever?
It was Cain, Adam and Eve’s son—the same Cain who was the first murderer. Cain was the firstborn son of the very first people, the oldest member of the first generation who had never lived in Eden. After he killed his own brother, Abel, in a dispute over sacrifices to the Lord, he was sent out into the land of Nod—which means “Nowhere”—with a mark of God’s protection on his forehead. The first murderer built the first city, and named it after his eldest son, Enoch.[1]
After that many people lived in cities—the word civilization actually means that there are cities, and people live in them—packed pretty close together. All the good and bad elements of society in concentrated form: that’s what’s in a city. And back before modern sanitation techniques, cities weren’t always the most pleasant places to live. They smelled bad—animal and human waste, with nowhere else to go, ended up in the streets. And when diseases of filth like cholera, plague, and typhoid got going, particularly when the weather grew hot, they spread like wildfire through the cities of ancient and medieval days.
If you had the means, you got yourself a place in the country where you could go to escape the heat, the stench, and the potential for disease, coming back to town when it cooled down some. If you couldn’t afford to have such a summer place, you stayed in the city, did the best you could, and hoped the hand of disease didn’t reach you (people didn’t know then about germs spread disease, and they didn’t have access to any of the modern medicines that make it possible to treat many illnesses).
But a city did offer a certain amount of protection, since ancient and medieval cities had walls with gates that could be closed to keep out enemies. If there was such a threat, people from the country might come and stay in a city until the danger had passed. However, this form of defense had a major weakness: a determined enemy could lay siege to the city, using the walls of the city against those inside. Once the food and water supplies inside the city ran out, an attacker could prevent anyone inside from going out to find more elsewhere. The people in the city would begin to starve, which weakened their ability to defend their walls—or forced them to surrender.
And back before modern building and firefighting techniques, cities had a bad habit of burning. If one building—wood buildings with thatched roofs, in a lot of cases—caught on fire, in the right weather conditions, there wasn’t anything that could stop the fire from spreading and destroying entire sections of a city.
For whatever reason, this is what happened in Rome at the time of the emperor Nero. It’s hard to know just how that fire got started, but people at the time blamed Nero himself, since the part of the city hardest hit by the fire soon became part of his expanded palace. Some say it was to shift blame off himself that he scapegoated Christians for the fire, and began the first widespread persecution of Christians throughout the Empire. Suddenly, instead of being small-scale and localized, depending on what a local leader thought about Christianity, persecution went global. I won’t go into just what happened (I think I mentioned some of it a few weeks back); suffice it to say that the atrocities perpetrated against Christians under Nero were truly horrifying.
In seminary I took a class one summer called “Contextualization.” That’s a fancy word that basically means looking at the world around you and seeing what it’s like, what its needs are, what language it speaks, so you can minister effectively there and bring the Gospel to people in ways they can understand.[2] But this wasn’t a class full of theory, in which we read a bunch of books and thought about ways we could bring the Good News into various situations and mission fields. The professor had us read one book, and then sent us out to work.
It was an urban ministry course; the book we read was called City of God, City of Satan,[3] in which the author argued that Christianity is an urban religion, always has been an urban religion, belonging in cities as much as it does anywhere else. We realized, reading that book, that we sometimes behave as though Christianity is a rural religion, that it has nothing to do with cities, that urban ministry is a grueling and difficult job because there really isn’t anything Godly in the city.
Christians sometimes talk as though Christianity is about “getting ourselves back to the Garden,” to quote from Joni Mitchell’s song about Woodstock, popularized by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Get out of the city, get back to nature, back to the country, back to the slower pace and old-fashioned values of rural life. Then, and only then, can we be faithful Christians in ways that just aren’t possible in a city.
After all, according to Genesis, it wasn’t God who made cities. God planted a garden and put the first humans in it. Cities didn’t come until after those people sinned and were driven out of the garden. The first city was built by a man, by a sinful man, the first murderer.
So is there anything good to be found in the city? Can a person live in a city and be faithful to God? Or are they hotbeds of decadence, sin, crime, and immorality, to be avoided by good Christians at all costs?
Then we read the end of Revelation, the part where all the tribulations and plagues and violence are over, where God has won the victory and banished evil forever, and we are shown the place where God and God’s faithful people will live for all eternity. And it’s a city. It’s an enormous, beautiful, perfect city: the angel measures the city and it’s a cube, multiples of twelve on all sides (twelve is a perfect number, a symbol of completeness). Its walls, gates, and streets are all made of precious substances: gold, pearls, crystal, precious stones. It’s a city.
Revelation doesn’t show us, at the end, the world destroyed and begun again. The old spiritual interpreted Noah’s rainbow promise as “No more water, the fire next time.”[4] But that’s not how it is. God’s promise was never again to destroy the world, and the world is not destroyed at the end of Revelation.
The fact that the Bride of the Lamb is a city, the New Jerusalem, tells us that humanity has not been judged irretrievably sinful again—all human achievement is not wiped away. The fact that’s an enormous city into which all the glory and honor of the nations is brought tells us that God has not just preserved a tiny remnant, the faithful few who will live eternally with God while the masses remain in the outer darkness.
No, all is not destroyed and remade again out of whole cloth. Revelation doesn’t take us back to the Garden; Revelation takes human achievement, human civilization, and redeems it, perfects it; and then plants the Garden in the middle of the city, in the middle of human civilization. “See, the home of God is among mortals…”[5]
Remember the description of the Garden from Genesis 2: “The Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that was pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river flows out of Eden to water the garden…”[6]
Then hear again this part of our reading for today: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”[7]
At the end of time, God doesn’t destroy all the things we’ve built and take us back to the primeval garden. At the end of time, God redeems and perfects what we have built, and brings the garden to us.
[1] Genesis 4:1-17. Archaeologists suggest that the first cities actually appeared in what is now Turkey, none of which is called “Enoch,” but that’s beside the point of the story in Genesis.
[2] If you want to see a Biblical example of contextualization in action, read the account of Paul’s time in Athens in Acts 17.
[3] Robert C. Linthicum, City of God, City of Satan: A Biblical Theology of the Urban City (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1991).
[4] The spiritual is “Oh, Mary, Don’t You Weep.” The version recorded by Bruce Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tebjshm7f_I.
[5] Revelation 21:3
[6] Genesis 2:8-10a
[7] Revelation 22:1-2