Sunday, May 12th, 2024: "The Healing City"

Watch the Sermon here

 First United Presbyterian Church

“The Healing City”

Rev. Amy Morgan

May 12, 2024

Revelation 22:1-2

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 2 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. 

The Clinton River runs through downtown Pontiac, Michigan. But you can’t see it. That’s because it was covered up in 1963. The city was struggling with perennial flooding, and it was more economical to pave over the river than to implement flood mitigation designs. There have been studies and plans and public forums over the last few decades about the possibility of uncovering, or “daylighting,” the river. But to this day, the Clinton river flows into a conduit at one end of town and flows back out on the other end of town. 

The majority of the parks in Pontiac don’t contain much in the way of green space. Many of them are actually just basketball courts or a few pieces of playground equipment surrounded by broken-up concrete. The larger, greener parks in the city, with access to rivers and lakes, are on the outskirts of town, in areas that identify themselves by the name of their neighborhood to pretend they aren’t located in Pontiac. 

This is characteristic of low-income cities, or parts of cities, in our country. Rivers and green spaces are paved over and replaced with high-density housing and concrete sidewalks. And this is not just an aesthetic problem. Studies show a strong link between income inequality, access to green spaces, and life expectancy. Lower-income city-dwellers are expected to live 10 years less than their high-income neighbors. 

In addition to this injustice, lack of green spaces in urban areas adversely affects the health of the whole city, and the whole planet. It is estimated that by 2050, 68% of the global population will live in cities, and an estimated nine million people already die every year as a direct result of air pollution. As cities grow larger, the impact of these population centers on rural agriculture and global climate increases. Urban green spaces reduce surface and water temperatures, stabilize ecosystems, improve mental health, and clean the air of toxins. So a green city is a healing city. 

The Revelation of John was written at a time when cities were in need of healing. 

Most Christians in the first century lived in urban areas, and when the Great Fire of Rome erupted, Emperor Nero found Christians to be a convenient scapegoat. He blamed them for the fire because they didn’t worship the Roman pantheon, and Christians were tortured and killed in gruesome ways. After Nero’s death, civil war resulted in four emperors in two years before Vespasian managed to hold on to the throne for a decade. One of the ways he asserted his authority was to destroy the temple in Jerusalem, an event that reverberates throughout most of the New Testament writings. A few years after Vespasian’s death, his son Domitian took over, and he is credited with exiling a Christian named John to the island of Patmos. 

In Roman cities, poorer Christians lived in buildings akin to low-income apartments, while wealthier citizens had homes with central courtyards. Aqueducts were an essential part of urban planning, a relatively modern technology that provided water to city-dwellers. Bathing was a major past-time of the wealthy, so oftentimes water was diverted to bathhouses, leaving poor residents without clean water to drink or bathe in. 

This is all to say, by the time John of Patmos receives a revelation from God, Christians have been experiencing persecution, chaos, and conflict in cities across the Roman Empire for several decades. So it makes sense that John’s revelation contains letters to seven churches in seven cities, includes imagery involving the ancient city of Babylon as a stand-in for Rome, and concludes with a vision of a new Jerusalem, a city where God dwells with God’s people. 

John’s Revelation is not prophesy; it is not a prediction or even promise about the future. Revelation, translated from the Greek word apocalypse, means “lifting of the veil.” This genre of writing, found throughout Jewish and Christian scriptures as well as in other ancient near-eastern writings, is characterized by vivid symbolism, coded language and numerology, and visions of the end of this age and beginning of a new age. These writings come out of desperate situations and extreme suffering. They are meant to offer secret knowledge of God’s direct intervention in the hopeless circumstances of their audience. Apocalyptic writing reveals the truth about what is happening right now, not a prediction of what will happen in the future. John’s Revelation re-casts the present suffering of Christians in the first century as the final death gasp of the powers that be as God is intervening to make all things new. 

At the very end of John’s Revelation, he envisions a city. A city with a river flowing right through the middle of it. It isn’t paved over in the poor section of town or diverted to recreational bathhouses. It is accessible to everyone. One of the final verses of Revelation says, “let anyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes, take the water of life as a gift.” 

The water of life feeds the tree of life, the tree in the garden of Eden whose fruit held the promise of eternal life, the tree humanity was barred from when they were expelled from the garden. John doesn’t envision a return to the garden of Eden, though. He sees the tree of life in the middle of the city, in the middle of where Christians find themselves now, where they are suffering now. One commentator noted, “In John’s view, the new Jerusalem is the fulfillment of all human dreams for the community and security of life in the ideal city.”

This ideal city is a green city, with a crystal-clear river flowing through it and healing trees growing within it. In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Kimmerer teaches us that, “In some Native languages the term for plants translates to ‘those who take care of us.’” The tree of life, like many plants and trees in our environment today, is a tree of healing. It takes what is broken and hopeless and gives it new life. 

John’s Revelation asserts that this healing is not just for individual hurts, but for “the healing of the nations.” The Greek word for “nations” here is ethnos, a word typically used to refer to non-Jews. God’s life-giving covenant with Israel is being offered to the rest of the world through this healing tree. Everyone is being brought into this new Jerusalem to live together in joy and peace. The tree of life is a tree of communal healing. Kimmerer might say that trees are especially adept at this kind of healing, as she writes, “trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together.” In the city-made-new, the city revealed to John, life and healing comes from rivers and trees, and it comes to everyone together, living together in the city, feasting together at God’s table. 

This is not the city first-century Christians were experiencing. But John’s Revelation gave them hope that behind the veil, this city existed. John’s vision showed them that God was dwelling with them, in their cities. God was at work, defeating evil and bringing life and healing. Their time of suffering was coming to an end, and a new age of joy and unity was beginning. 

What John describes in his Revelation is not an event, not a point in history. He is describing an unfolding and ongoing reality. He is lifting the veil that blinds us to God’s new creation in the midst of suffering and despair. It is a vision of hope that sustained the Christian of the first century and can continue to give us hope today. 

We live in cities in need of healing. Our circumstances may not be as desperate as John’s original audience, but we have plenty of things to make us feel hopeless today. There is suffering in our cities, where income disparity fuels inequality and pollution poisons people, plants, and animals. Partisan politics keeps the governance of our cities dysfunctional. We scapegoat immigrants for crime in our cities. 

The young people who are graduating from high school and college are facing an uncertain future. The rising costs of higher education, housing, and even basic necessities like food, feed their already high levels of anxiety from climate disasters and school shootings. They’ve lost confidence in our leaders, our institutions, and their future. 

But what if we could see that underneath the injustice, the dysfunction, and the anxiety, there is a river of life, a tree of life, right in the middle of all our suffering? What if we could see that God is dwelling with us, making all things new? What if we could see the cities we live in, not as hopeless wastelands, but as places where all who thirst are invited to drink from the water of life and are welcomed into the loving and healing embrace of God? What if we could lift the veil and see this reality unfolding all around us, right in the midst of our pain and despair?

It's a tall order, to be sure. But imagine how differently we would live if we could see in our cities what John saw in his. Perhaps we would “daylight” rivers that had been paved over in destitute cities, and maybe we would “daylight” other life-giving resources that we have hidden and forgotten about. Maybe we would plant gardens on the roofs of skyscrapers and turn blighted and abandoned lots into micro forests. Maybe we would believe the nations, the ethnos, can be healed and seek to participate in that healing. 

Christian theologian and mystic Thomas Merton wrote, “You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.” This is what Revelation offers us. Not a precise depiction of God’s unfolding reality, but eyes to see our present situation in all its tragedy and all its blessing and to live into hope.

That is my prayer for all of us, and especially for these young people preparing to graduate. In a world that constantly bombards us with fear and despair, may we trust that a river of life is flowing through our city. In a world characterized by death-dealing practices, may we trust that a tree of life is healing the nations. And may we be those who not only trust, but see, and work to reveal this new creation. 

To God be all glory forever and ever. Amen.