Revelation 22:1-5

22 Then the angel[a] 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[b] with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. 3 Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; 4 they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5 And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

I am a recovering child of the Apocalypse. I went through the nuclear drills with only a math book to shield me from oblivion. My next-door neighbor was convinced the Russians would strike at any moment and bring the tribulation, just as he believed Revelation foretold. He begged me to give my heart to Jesus before it was too late. Later I pulled a book from the church library about Revelation, the last book of the Bible. It claimed to decode the four horsemen and the rise of the Antichrist. It painted a terrifying picture of humanity’s future, but assured readers that believers in Christ would be raptured to safety. What I didn’t understand then was how expecting the world’s destruction could become an excuse to ignore its suffering.

The book did not scare me, because by the time I graduated from high school in 1982 I had already seen a frightening real world. MLK’s assassination and Nixon’s resignation in disgrace were my first political memories. I had watched the science fiction movie Soylent Green, read The Population Bomb, and seen the farm crisis begin to swallow my neighbors’ farms. It would take more than the Antichrist to scare me.

Later, in seminary, I learned that Revelation’s strange images spoke to Christians living under Roman imperial power. They still speak as a warning not to trust our future to empire, military might, and greed. The idea of a rapture, and of Revelation as a code for the timing of the end, is a theological novelty from the 1830s, associated with the preacher John Nelson Darby. Hal Lindsey’s books and the Left Behind series carried this fringe theology into the mainstream. Most of the great teachers who shaped Christianity never imagined it.

The way we imagine God’s future has consequences for how we treat the earth today. Senator James Inhofe, who chaired the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, invoked scripture to dismiss human-caused climate change. “My point is, God’s still up there,” he told a Christian radio audience in 2012. “The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.” A man charged with overseeing environmental policy used God’s power as an excuse to deny our capacity to harm the earth. That is a dangerous theology to put in charge of public policy. I believe God is faithful, too. But God’s faithfulness calls for faithfulness from us.

Peter Thiel takes end-times thinking in an even more disturbing direction. Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, has warned that fear of climate catastrophe could lead people to accept a world government, which he associates with the Antichrist. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor examine this thinking in their book End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World. When environmental cooperation is defined as a spiritual threat, people working to protect our common home become enemies to be resisted. Why should we surrender our future to such fearmongering? I’m not ready to concede the forests and rivers to the tech gods, any more than Revelation conceded the world to the Roman Empire.

Yet near the end of Revelation, another vision awaits us. Our biblical story ends with a river flowing through the New Jerusalem. At the heart of the city stands the Tree of Life, the same tree we met at the beginning of Genesis. Its leaves are meant not only for the faithful but for the healing of the nations. Revelation has plenty of brimstone for empire, but for humanity it offers a river.

This remarkable passage draws on the themes of Eden and Ezekiel’s vision, but creates something new. God’s restoration is not a return to Eden. We are not sent back to live as hunter-gatherers in paradise, forsaking every modern technology. Rather, Eden grows in the city. The Tree of Life stands not in a pristine national park but in the heart of the city, which flourishes around the tree and a river flowing down Main Street.

The Greek word for “street” in these verses, plateia, deepens the image. It meant more than a lane: it was the broad main boulevard of a city, often lined with markets, shops, and statues. It is the root of the English “plaza” and the Italian “piazza,” and in modern Greek it still means a town square. It signifies common space, owned by the community and belonging to everyone. Revelation sees nature thriving into the heart of the city, as part of its common space. Access to water is a common good. Trees belong in the city. When I read that the tree’s leaves are for the healing of the nations, I imagine a park in a diverse city, where people of many languages mingle in shade and beauty.

The river runs through scripture from its first pages to its last. A river flows out of Eden. Isaiah promised streams in the desert. Amos cried, “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Psalm 46 sings of a river whose streams make glad the city of God. Jesus went down to the Jordan to be baptized, and later offered living water to anyone who thirsts. 

God’s hope for humanity is a river of life that makes us whole. And yet we persist in ignoring the actual rivers that flow through our cities, and the goodness God pours out in all creation. What would it mean to take that vision seriously in the places where we live?

During the industrial revolution, land-hungry cities buried their rivers and used them for waste disposal. When Henry Hudson came to Manhattan in 1609, the island held 66 miles of rivers and streams, according to reconstructed maps. Over time, we decided that buildings, streets, and parking lots mattered more than rivers. But cities have begun to uncover their waterways, a practice called “daylighting.” I love that word. Imagine letting a river see daylight again.

In Yonkers, New York, the Saw Mill River once powered the mills that helped the city grow. By the 1920s, its downtown stretch had been buried in a culvert beneath a parking lot. For ninety years, the river kept flowing in the dark beneath the pavement.

The Saw Mill River Coalition spent more than a decade bringing residents, businesses, and public officials together to uncover it. Imagine looking at a downtown parking lot and seeing a river, with room along its banks for a neighborhood to gather. In 2011, the river began flowing aboveground again. Within six months, Groundwork Hudson Valley reported that the channel was teeming with life. The restored habitat now supports turtles, ducks, blue crabs, fish, and the endangered American eel.

People found room there too. The new park hosts music, art, and a farmers’ market. Children learn beside the water, where a mosaic traces the American eel’s journey from the Sargasso Sea to downtown Yonkers.

Eden grows in the city, with trees for the healing of the nations. Neighbors gathering, children learning, creatures finding a home. Those neighbors had to imagine a river where everyone else had grown accustomed to a parking lot. They had to believe that what had been buried was still worth uncovering. Then came the meetings, the plans, the money, the work. Hope took the shape of people staying with something long enough for life to return.

What if we did some daylighting of our faith, of our biblical tradition? We have buried the river of life under predictions of disaster. We have paved it over with fear, built elaborate escape plans on top of it, and nearly forgotten it was there. Yet here it is, flowing through the last pages of our Bible, watering the Tree of Life, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.

Here on this peninsula, we have a place to begin. We can ask what the waters around us need, and whose livelihoods depend on their health. We can support the people already doing the patient work of conservation. We can help children know these shores well enough to love and care for them. We can bring that love into the public decisions that shape this place.

None of this requires certainty that everything will turn out well. Those neighbors did not know how many creatures would return when they opened the river. They made room for life, and life surprised them.

I am still a recovering child of the Apocalypse. I know how easily fear can fill the imagination. But I want the children growing up among us to have something more than a frightening story about the future. I want them to remember adults who loved this world enough to stay with its troubles, who planted trees and protected places, who believed their neighbors were worth the effort.



I want them to know that when we opened our Bibles to see how the story ends, we found a river. May they find us tending its banks.