Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.
Today’s meditation comes from the annual Knox service to bless gardens and bicycles.
From Garden to City and Back Again
Scriptures: Genesis 2:4-9, 15-17 Revelation 21:22 to 22:5
One of my professors once remarked on the arc of the Christian Bible: the story of humanity starts in a garden and then ends in a city.
Our readings reflect that today and of course, there’s a lot of symbolism built in to this whole arc.
The Garden of Eden represents humanity as an innocent part of nature, living in a lush garden amongst the animals, naked and unashamed, basically just another creature on the earth (interestingly, vegetarian, too) free to eat of all the fruit in the garden with that well known exception of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
One tree that the humans were free to eat from, but obviously didn’t, was the tree of life, the tree whose fruit lets you live forever. Part of the punishment for disobedience was to be barred from eating from this tree by an angel with a flaming sword.
So, having learned about good and evil, humanity stopped being a simple animal and was expelled from Paradise. You don’t have to take this literally to see all the possibilities here; the commentary on humanity’s connection to nature: once we get cast out we have to cultivate our plants, work hard to break up the soil, pull weeds, fight thorns; growing food becomes hard work.
This was a powerful story for the Hebrews who, for a lot of their history, were agriculturally based. It doesn’t matter to us that in paleolithic times real life would have been nasty, brutish and short. We can understand that, intellectually and still yearn for an idealized past, a garden of Eden that lives in our imaginations.
And look how far we’ve moved from that ideal garden! Even in Biblical times it was clear that we were moving off farms. The city is a most human invention, concentrated humanity which requires the support of surrounding food producers – what we now call our consumption “footprint”.
The farm is already disconnected from the wild side of nature: we protect our livestock from predators; we try to keep the wild plants we can’t eat from taking over our fields. But the city is even more disconnected from nature, both wild and domesticated. Even in Jesus’ lifetime people could work in a city and never have to grow their own gardens or be involved in any kind of planting, and that was 2000 years ago!
Symbolically, people understood that a city could represent total disconnection from God and God’s good creation. This disconnection didn’t mean that cities were necessarily evil – Jerusalem was hailed as a holy city starting with King David – but by the time the Revelation was written Rome had destroyed Jerusalem and Rome was seen as an evil city. Of course, you couldn’t write that down without getting arrested so the author referred to an older evil city – Babylon – and planted clues, like the Whore of Babylon sitting on 7 hills (Whoops! Wasn’t Rome built on 7 hills?); okay, it wasn’t super subtle.
But clearly, cities could be problematic by their very nature and that’s not surprising, is it? When you pack people in together, sure, you might be safe from invaders beyond your walls but within those walls diseases can spread in ways not possible in rural areas and if your hygiene wasn’t great, things would stink as they were making you sick.
Most cities were seen as bad: Jericho was cursed, Babylon was evil, Rome was evil, and don’t even talk about Sodom and Gomorrah: only Jerusalem was a good city and it had been destroyed.
So, John shows us an image of a New Jerusalem in our second lesson and look what he does: not only is it built of precious metals and stones with streets paved of gold, but it has a river flowing from the middle of it with crystal clear water and trees of life growing on either side of this river. What is he showing us?
We have a hybrid: the holy city of Jerusalem is cleaned up and combined with the garden of Eden; the walls of the city protect us; while the natural creation of God is brought into that city so that people may live fully, enjoying the idealized life they lost at the beginning of time.
It’s quite the story. We’ve moved from Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained and one of the most important symbols of that is the garden growing in the city.
This ancient story still speaks to us as we are gathering to bless the gardens we have planted in our city. We have lots of our own reasons: we want unpolluted food without having to transport it across country; we want to experience the joy and spiritual satisfaction of getting our hands dirty and nurturing life from the soil; we want to step back from the urban experience and re-connect with that dimly remembered paradise.
There’s something in us that wants the New Jerusalem to come true. We are in the process of creating for ourselves a version of this perfect place described by John in the last book of the Bible. And there’s nothing wrong with that at all. For thousands of years we have known the dangers of becoming disconnected from creation. We have felt the need to be part of the life of the planet, not just by walking around and breathing, but by nurturing living things.
If our New Jerusalem isn’t encrusted with rich and shiny things I won’t worry because what we are doing is planting that garden in the city. We are taking our human space and re-connecting it with the nature that gives us life every day. We are attempting to heal that unnatural divide and I think this is a good first step as we start to build a 21st century version of the New Jerusalem.
Amen.
Knox United Church Nepean 