God Can Work With This

This is a sermon that I preached on Sunday, 5/25/25, at Berkeley Friends Church. The scripture reading for this sermon was: Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5. You can listen to the audio, or keeping scrolling to read my manuscript. (The spoken sermon differs from the written text.)

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Sometimes it seems like civilization was a mistake. There’s a long history of thinkers – like romanticists and primitivists – who have held that our society’s decision to abandon the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and adopt settled agriculture and fixed addresses was a devil’s bargain.

The Bible seems to agree. Our story begins with humanity living at peace and happy in the Garden of Eden. But then, when humans chose to rebel against God, the result was agriculture – earning our food by the sweat of our brow and fighting with thorns and thistles. According to the book of Genesis, agriculture began as a result of Adam and Eve’s sin. The first city was founded by the first murderer – Cain – after he was forced by God to wander as punishment for his evil.

As Genesis continues, we see more and more cities popping up and a truly powerful civilization emerging around a city called Babel. In this city, they were very industrious – fully embracing the terms of the curse. They applied the sweat of their brow not just to food but to architecture. The rulers of Babel built a tower that they hoped would reach to heaven. Maybe they thought that through their own hard work and achievements they could reach back to God. When God saw this, he was not pleased. He responded by scattering the people of Babel, confusing their language. 

The story continues. There are many more cities, and many new human civilizations that emerge after Babel. It’s notable that in all of the scriptures, there is not a single instance of a city being founded by a righteous person. Assyria and Babylon and Rome and Egypt were all evil empires that threatened the people of God or presented temptations. The city of Jerusalem itself was not founded by God’s people, but was actually built by the Jebusites in the first place before the Israelites came into the Promised Land.

Jerusalem itself became a holy city – Zion, the city of David, the site of God’s holy temple. But even in this case, we find great ambiguity about the role of the city. Jesus was very negative about Jerusalem, addressing it as a wayward child that refused to give up its rebellion. Jesus called Jerusalem “the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!” Jesus wept over Jerusalem, but Jesus also declared God’s righteous judgment over the city and insisted that it would soon be destroyed for its evil – just like Sodom and Gomorrah and Nineveh and Babylon before it.

According to the Bible, throughout human history civilization and cities have been monuments to human rebellion. Even Jerusalem, the city where God’s presence dwelled most acutely in the Temple, was repeatedly crushed for its corruption and violence. Our civilized way of life – our systems and cities and chariots and empires – represents a sort of teenage rebellion against God. We insist on doing things our way, regardless of any good advice our Father might have for us.

Yet surprisingly, in the final pages of Scripture, we don’t see God discarding the city. Instead, we see a new city descending from heaven – a redeemed Jerusalem.

Given the biblical negativity around civilization and cities, one would expect that God’s long-term plan would be to eliminate them entirely. It would be reasonable to assume that the end goal for God is to return humanity to an uncivilized state. We might be tempted to sing to ourselves, along with Joni Mitchell:

We are stardust

We are golden

And we’ve got to get ourselves

Back to the garden

And we wouldn’t be entirely wrong. In our reading this morning from the book of Revelation, we do see that it is God’s intention to return us to a garden. We see that the new garden of God is one inhabited by Jesus himself; he is the light, more powerful than that of the sun and the moon. This garden contains the River of Life flowing out from God’s throne. At its center is the Tree of Life. Up until now humans were prohibited from eating its fruit, but now its fruit and its leaves will grant life and healing for all nations.

In this vision of God’s ultimate plan for humanity and the cosmos, we see that our destination is a new Eden.

The early Quaker leader George Fox experienced a foretaste of this coming reality. He wrote about it in his Journal, saying:

Now I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new; and all the creation gave unto me another smell than before, beyond what words can utter. I knew nothing but pureness, and innocency, and righteousness; being renewed into the image of God by Christ Jesus, to the state of Adam, which he was in before he fell.

In this particular passage from Fox’s Journal, he seems to imply that the experience of God’s grace and Spirit represented a restoration to the state that humanity was in before the Fall. Yet our reading this morning from Revelation shows us that the kingdom of God is even more than that. 

What Jesus offers us is not merely a return to the garden and the state that we were in before – as wonderful as that would be. Because we’ve changed since we were in Eden. In the garden, we were children. And in our teenage rebellion, we left home for good. 

Our reading this morning reveals that, as Thomas Wolfe once famously observed, “You can’t go home again.”

We cannot simply return to the Garden of Eden and resume our simple life as hunter-gatherers nurtured in the bosom of God’s creation. As we are made new in Jesus, we are called to become spiritual grownups, and this means moving beyond childhood and also beyond teenage rebellion into something more complete and complex than what we have experienced before.

We get a hint of what this might mean in John the Revelator’s image of the heavenly Jerusalem coming down from above and taking its place upon the earth. While this heavenly city has many qualities that make it much like the Garden of Eden, it’s impossible to miss the fact that this heavenly Jerusalem is, in fact, a city. It is the city that the author of Hebrews says that Abraham was looking forward to – “the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.”

The kingdom of God does not take us backwards to an imagined golden age in the past. It is a reality that takes root in the world as we have made it, with all our pain and suffering and sin and darkness. The kingdom enters in through the person of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit. He shines light in the darkness, revealing what this world is and who we are.

The arrival of the kingdom takes place in the midst of our earthly city and begins the transformation of our lives and our social relationships. Through the presence of Jesus in our midst, we are becoming that heavenly city.

A key revelation here is that nothing is lost. Yes, we were children in the garden, and yes, we became rebellious teenagers and went our own way, practicing agriculture and building cities and fighting wars and committing genocide and all sorts of evil. We all make a lot of mistakes when we are teenagers – some of us more disastrously than others – but the hope is that as we mature into adulthood, we gain wisdom that will make us good caretakers of this world, and of the next generation.

Who I am as an adult transcends and includes who I was as a teenager and who I was as a child. It’s all of one piece. Our reading this morning from the book of Revelation shows us that God has no desire or intention to throw away the people that we have become through our struggles as teenagers. A lot of bad things have happened. We have done terrible things. But God’s way is not to crush the bad but to transform it, to redeem it, so that our imperfect lives can become vessels for his perfect will.

It’s an amazing thing and sometimes hard to believe: God does not want to make us different people. God wants to make us more fully who we really are. And that means honoring our past and our path of development. It means not demanding that we become little children again in the garden, but teaching us how to be adults in the city – adults who have learned wisdom and are ready to do the work of loving and stewarding the earth, and participating in God’s creativity.

It is easy to get so discouraged about where our world is at. It’s tempting to imagine that the only way forward is to smash everything and impose an entirely new utopian order onto the world. It is tempting to imagine that there is no redeeming this society – that America is just lost and bad and violent and vicious and sinful.

But that’s not how God sees us. God sees us with the eyes of a father, a perfect father who sees his rebellious teenage children who are cursing him and refusing to listen to him and doing all sorts of terrible things that break his heart. But like the father in the story of the prodigal son, he is waiting for us and ready to embrace us. He doesn’t want to get rid of us – he wants to see us become whole.

The same applies to this civilized order we have built from Cain to Bezos: the “City of Man” in the words of Augustine; the “world” in the language of John. The Gospel of John states that “God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” 

The light of Jesus shines into this mess we have made and says, “I can work with this.” God doesn’t want to destroy human society, he wants to see us become whole. God doesn’t want some other, imaginary good people – he wants us. God loves us as we are, because we are his children.

Instead of wishing to erase the past or smash the status quo, what if we trusted that God will use everything that has happened to us and everything we are from this moment forward? Nothing is lost. Nothing is wasted.

Good can come out of evil. Joy can come out of suffering. A garden can blossom out of a city. Jesus will shine out of our lives – not in spite of our struggles, but through them.

This is the promise of the New Jerusalem: Not return, but redemption. Not escape, but transformation. And it begins now.