May 2, 2010 | 8:00 a.m.

A New Eden

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 148
Isaiah 65:17–25
Revelation 21:1–6

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.”

Revelation 21:1 (NRSV)

One important key for interpretation lies in the definition of an apocalypse as a narrative account of a revelatory experience. It has been debated whether these accounts represent actual ecstatic experiences. Whether they do or not, it is clear that the narratives represent a revelatory experience to the audience in such a way that the audience has a virtual revelatory experience.

Adela Yarbro Collins
Cosmology and Eschatology in Jewish and Christian Apocalypticism

A story has a beginning, middle, and end. This is what my co-instructor told the class, as we assigned a story-writing exercise. Teaching a course on “Integrity in Business” a few months ago in our church’s Academy for Faith and Life, we asked the course participants to look at a picture that we had shown and then to make up and write down a story about what was going on in the picture. Afterwards, we asked the class to individually evaluate, based on a few measurements, the stories they had written. First, did the story have a beginning, middle, and end? Second, did it pose a problem, work through it, and come to a resolution? Third, did the story exhibit complexity? There were, in addition to these, two other criteria that we listed. Admittedly, our story-writing exercise and the evaluative criteria we employed were crude—certainly not the techniques that literary experts and critics would employ. The point we hoped to make was that all of us, even business professionals, tell stories. In our daily lives, we compose stories about ourselves, about things that happen to us, why they happen, and why we act or react the way we do. It is through the stories we tell, sometimes just to ourselves, that we make sense of our lives. So our stories better be good. If we want our lives to make sense, to have integrity, we have to learn how to tell a good story.

Fortunately we have for our help the Bible. Running throughout the Bible is a complex story. Spanning centuries of time, set in different regions, and told from multiple perspectives, the books of the Bible are nevertheless held together as one complex story. Sometimes we say that the Bible can be summed up as a story about this or that: about creation, the fall and redemption, or about God’s relationship to humanity. However we summarize it, we find our own stories wrapped up in it. Although we and the original authors are separated by a span of 2,000 years or more, the biblical story still resonates with us.

Perhaps the biblical book that resonates least with us today is the book of Revelation. Apocalyptic in genre, the message of the book is couched in images and symbols with which we are sorely unfamiliar. We encounter such strangeness in this book that we can hardly understand it, much less relate to it. And yet the book of Revelation is an important part of the church’s story. It is the last book in the Bible, and appropriately, it speaks about a time when former things will come to an end, when the first heaven and the first earth will pass away. Just as all stories must have not only a beginning and a middle but also an end, so must the biblical story.

The end envisioned by the book of Revelation, however, is not simply one of destruction. It is a vision of a new heaven and a new earth. Hearing the verses from Revelation read today, we can sigh in relief, for these verses ring of a hope for the end times with which we are familiar and with which the prophet John was certainly familiar: a hope expressed centuries earlier by the prophet Isaiah. Through the prophet Isaiah, God spoke to Israel, saying, “For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy and its people as a delight.”

Like Isaiah, who helped Israel to envision an end to its persecution by foreign empires, John helped the church to envision an end to its religious persecution under the reign of the Emperor Domitian. John borrowed the language not only of Isaiah, but also of Daniel and other Hebrew prophets who spoke of hope by speaking of endings and new beginnings.

In the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, John saw that God was doing not simply a new thing, but something so significant and powerful that all of creation would be transformed. Nothing would be left the same as it once was. The whole of creation would come to an end, and an entirely new heaven and earth would be created.

It is remarkable, I think, that John and the prophets before him understood something of which we have a hard time being mindful today. They understood that hope for a people—whether it be a nation, the church, or all of humanity—is indispensably intertwined with hope for all of creation. The vision God revealed to John and the words God spoke to the prophets do not convey a God who concerns himself with one problem while leaving the other problems of the planet unresolved. God does not attend to parts as if the parts don’t exist within a larger whole. Change in one thing leads to change in another thing, until all of creation is transformed.

Sometimes we act as if our actions in one realm of life can be contained in that realm. We act sometimes as if our moral wrongdoings will have only social consequences, as if they won’t affect any other dimension of life. But when we read the book of Revelation, our scope is widened to include not just the moral, social, and political dimensions of human life, but all of heaven, earth, and the seas. To be sure, John’s revelation had in focus the political powers that oppressed Christians during Emperor Domitian’s rule, but around the edges, above and below, the rest of creation was seen to be connected to, tied up with, that political realm. When a vision comes from God, who at the beginning of time created the world, how could we expect anything less than a worldwide transformation at the end of time?

And yet so often we do. We suffer from shrunken visions, failing to see the vast possibility of connections that exist among all things, both living and nonliving. Last week, this congregation celebrated Earth Day with a number of programs designed to expand our awareness of the interconnections between the choices we make and the earth we depend on. One of these programs was the Community Book Group’s discussion of Wendell Berry’s recently published book Bringing It to the Table. This book is a collection of Berry’s essays and stories on farming and food. In the introduction to the book, popular journalist Michael Pollan, whom we know for having authored books such as The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Food Rules, described Wendell Berry as a prophetic ecological thinker, by which he meant that already in the 1970s Berry was drawing “lines of connection between a hamburger and the price of oil, or between the vibrancy of life in the soil and the health of the plants and animals and people eating from that soil” (pp. x–xi).

One of the essays that I found most interesting was one that Berry wrote in 1978 in which he identified how powerfully language can shape our views of the world. He wrote, “It may turn out that the most powerful and the most destructive change of modern times has been a change in language: the rise of the image, or metaphor, of the machine” (p. 19). An industrial revolution, he wrote, has taken place in our minds. In place of biological, familial, natural, and organic images, we commonly employ and are shaped by images of machines and technology. “We do not flinch,” he writes, “to hear men and women referred to as ‘units,’” and “it is common, and considered acceptable, to refer to the mind as a computer: one’s thoughts are ‘inputs’; other people’s responses are ‘feedback’” (p. 19). We think of food as “fuel” and judge work in terms of “efficiency” (p. 20). While I think Berry would admit that there is a place for technology and the imagery associated with it, the problem arises when our psyches are so overrun by metaphors of technology that our view of the world is so reduced as to leave out much of value—things like nature, the land, people, and community. Nature, he thinks, not technology, needs to be the measure of things, and if that were the case, I think he would say, we would be better storytellers. Not under some delusion of limitlessness that technology seems to engender, we would know that things have a beginning, middle, and end. For in nature, death and decay are not only inevitable, they are also necessary for new life. “There is,” Berry writes, “really no such thing, then, as natural production; in nature, there is only reproduction” (p. 22).

The Bible appropriately ends with the book of Revelation, a vision of cosmic recreation. John believed that the whole world could be changed by a single event—Jesus Christ. This single event, he thought, could engender a cosmic recreation in which nothing would go to waste, as everything would become new. John saw God’s activity in Jesus Christ to be just as powerful—and even more significantly so than—God’s original creation of the world.

That one event might have the power to transform all of creation is both heavy and hopeful news. It means that the choices we make, the actions we take, the language we use, and the stories we tell can all make a real difference for the world. Amen.