“All New Everything”
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, November 16, 2025
Reading: Revelation 21:1-7 & 22-27
The story is told of Billy Graham arriving in a small town to conduct a revival. He sees a kid on a bike and asks him where the post office is. Kid tells him. Then Graham invites him, say, come to my revival tonight, I’ll tell you how to go to heaven. The kid responds, “Mr. if you don’t know where the post office is how on earth could you know anything about heaven?”
When I was first taught about heaven, I was a preteen at my Christian camp, with a college-aged counselor. He said whatever you need in heaven for it to be paradise for you, it’ll be there. His example, not obviously suitable for our pre-teen ears. He said as a kid you can’t imagine anything better than chocolate. But as you get older, you realize sex is way better than chocolate. We all looked at him, wide-eyed. You see the flaw, right? Heaven there is all about what you want, a consumerist paradise. Like a mall with someone else’s credit card and no limit.
In case you haven’t guessed today’s sermon is on heaven. It’s one of the four last things the church taught about in Advent in centuries past: death, judgment, heaven, and hell. Next week: hell. Bring your friends.
I teased y’all Torontonians a few weeks back that you have another word for heaven: Muskoka. Where generations retreated for the summer and stories come back of canoes and grandkids and first kisses and long dreamy summer nights. How could heaven compete with that? Friend of mine who pastored in West Vancouver said the problem with preaching heaven there, was folks felt like they lived there already. It works—if you can afford it.
But is heaven just a fantasy? Karl Marx called religion “the opiate of the masses.” We talk of heaven to drug people, so they won’t take up arms in their own cause, so slaves won’t overthrow their masters. There are slogans making this criticism: ‘you promise pie in the sky when you die.’ ‘You can be so heavenly minded that you’re no earthly good.’ Under pressure from these critiques, we Christians have dropped much talk of heaven. But let’s explore what the Bible says about last things before we abandon all future hope. Because the Bible’s vision may surprise us.
I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples.
And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.”
No hint here of individual souls going up to heaven. Rather, God comes down to dwell with us, in the form of a city, the New Jerusalem. No solo ticket punched for us to go somewhere else. Christian hope, according to the Bible, is God re-creating what God made good in the first place—the creation that we human beings have ruined. There’s no sense here of what I want to make me happy—no consumerist paradise. No. This is God making a whole new creation.
You’ve heard jokes before about the pearly gates? That’s a reference to Revelation. The New Jerusalem has whole city gates made out of pearl. That’s a big oyster. You’ve heard talk of streets of gold. That’s in Revelation too. Our streets are nice smooth asphalt (when the potholes are repaired). Ancient streets were dirt, or with the Romans things got better—cobblestone. In heaven, gold is so plentiful you walk on it. The new Jerusalem is measured at some 1500 miles by 1500 miles—about the size of the Roman Empire, but bigger. But then—top this Rome—it’s also 1500 miles cubed. It stretches into a dimension that human kingdoms can’t go. A cube is also the shape of the holy of holies in the temple, the empty space where God dwells. These are poets’ musings, outlandish and gently comical. Designed to show that our little imaginations can’t conceive.
Notice what isn’t in the story. Talk of reunion with loved ones. That’s animated our talk of heaven the last few hundred years. I like it. I want to see my grandparents again, my friends who’ve died. Here’s the thing. Heaven is timeless. So, it won’t just be my grandparents, right? It’ll be my grandchildren. And their grandchildren. Who don’t exist yet. A friend points this out—think of your favourite fictional character. Gandalf? Anne of Green Gables? Huck Finn? They’re based on real human characteristics, dreamed up by their author. Heaven is the archetype of everything good. So, we’ll meet Gandalf there. The real one. Mind blown yet?
There’s more in Revelation that we don’t consider when we ponder our death. First, Jerusalem. The city of God. Jews call it the navel of creation, the belly button of the universe. I was just there, and can attest, it’s grand, no place like it. Three religions jostling in a square kilometer, an excess of holiness. When Revelation was written, Jerusalem was a ruin. Flattened by the Romans in 70 AD, soon the Jews would be expelled after another rebellion in 135 AD, the temple mount empty of worship. Jerusalem is important not just because it’s the city of David. It's because the temple is there. The very home of God. God lives at One Temple Way in Jerusalem—even if there is no more temple standing there, as there has not been for nearly 2000 years now. The home of God is not a condo or a mansion. It’s a temple. A place for prayer for all people.
Here’s whole story of the Bible: not us going to be with God, like being beamed up in Star Trek. The story of the Bible is this: God comes to dwell with us. First in Israel, in its temple and people, and then most intimately in Jesus Christ. So much spirituality tries to escape, to get away, to leave. I get it, this world can be hard, brutal even. But the Bible tells the opposite story: God comes to be with us in our brokenness. We stretch our imaginations, trying to glimpse what God is like. But then God descends lower than us. Right underneath Mary’s ribs. God crouches lower than our vision and gently washes our feet.
I was just in the old Jerusalem a week ago, visited the old city, love it in there. Those three great world religions jostling for space and supremacy in an old city smaller half the size of Queen’s Park. That old city wall is impressive but it’s only from the time of the Ottomans, just a few hundred years old. Twice as old as our country but that’s young in Jerusalem terms. Here’s the Dome of the Rock Mosque with the western wall underneath it, the last bit of the ancient temple that stands. And we Christians have the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, first built in the 4th century, there in its Easter vigil glory. Six different Christian communions share it not so amiably. In fact, the various Orthodox and Catholic groups dislike each other so much that a Muslim family has the keys to the building: a model for interfaith cooperation. That is the eternal ladder. It’s been there since photography was first taken of the church exterior in the 1840s, it might’ve been there since the 1720s. A quarter millennium! Because no one can agree which church group can go remove it. Remember that hippie song from the 60s? “They’ll know we are Christians by our love?”
But God loves Jerusalem too much to give up on it. So much so that God is going to make it new. Everything good about it established. Everything bad melted away. People there and everywhere as full of love as we are now of hate. And the Bible calls that heaven. A New Jerusalem, a whole new city. Lots of spiritualities think this world will be destroyed. Fundamentalist Christians sound that way, ecological zealots also sound that way. They can exchange sandwich boards. Others spiritualities think this world is all there is, so if it’s going to be fixed that’s up to us. That’s most of modernity: if there’s a heaven, we’re building it by our own efforts. The great William Blake sings this in one of England’s national anthems:
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land.
That’s a great song and a great poet, all due respect. But it’s God who builds the New Jerusalem, not us, not our swords. God alone.
Think of all that we love about Toronto as a city. I know there are nuisances: traffic, construction, a lakefront city with no decent lakefront access, the annual Maple Leaf playoff collapse. But cities are amazing. There’s culture: museums and music and commerce. Hundreds of ethnicities, each bringing their food and festivals and faiths. We all complain about Toronto and idolize the countryside, but move us somewhere remote and we’d be bored in a day, right? Cities are amazing places of human interaction and striving. We have demonized cities at times in our imagination—Babylon the harlot, for example. Blake again, singing about industrial England:
Was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
All the more amazing that heaven is, in the bible, a city. A place for all nations, for songs, for foods, for interchange. When Shad Kabango, our preacher a month ago, released his new album recently, this ad went up in former Dundas square. And Shad posted to social media that he hoped Vladimir Guerrero Jr. would hit a World Series homerun off his face. Shad, a Rwandese-Canadian, Vladdy, a second generation Cuban Canadian—where can that happen except a city as great as Toronto? God, take all that’s good about this city, multiply it infinitely, burn away its flaws, and bring your new Jerusalem.
Keith Green, another hippie Christian singer from the 70s, once sang this: “I can’t wait to get to heaven, where you wipe away all my tears, in six days you created everything, but you’ve been working on heaven 2000 years.”
Let me speak to some oddities you may have noticed. “The sea was no more”: beach bums, sailors, I’m sorry, you’re out of luck. The sea in Jewish imagination is a place of chaos. Can’t build a house on it, monsters live there, invaders come from there. Other ancient peoples loved seafaring—the Greeks, the Phoenicians. Jews, not so much. Israel’s navy is still not really what the place is known for. Other cultures might say the volcano or the typhoons are no more. “I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.” There’s no church in heaven. This might be a bummer for some of us, good news for others. My profession will be unnecessary. The church is a temporary institution. We exist only to bear witness to the kingdom until the king comes. There is no sun or moon, “for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb.” Remember Genesis: God creates the sun and moon as greater and lesser lights. But in the city of God, God is all the light you could ever want. And then I want you to notice this, it’s really important: “its gates will never be shut.” Ancient cities had walls closed at night against intruder or burglar or invader. Not the city of God. There are gates, sure, made of fantastic gems. But there is no more enemy to keep out. There are some notions of heaven that are incredibly pinched off and ungenerous: only me and people like me. But these are not God’s notions of heaven. In God’s city, the gates never shut. You can come on in any time you like. Did you notice an entrance exam? Wait, can you name the books of the Bible in order? No, just a gate with no door, a city without a proper lock anywhere.
A teacher of mine was once asked what we say to someone grieving a lost loved one who’s worried whether they’re in heaven. Simple question: do they want to be with Jesus? Well, yes, they do. Then they’re with Jesus. Full stop, no more discussion. I learned a marvelous Spanish language saying about prayer while in Israel. God answers our prayers Antes, mas, y mejor. That is, before, more, and greater. Antes, mas y mejor. All God is is generosity. Meanness, protectiveness, exclusion: that’s all us sinners, and not at all God.
But here’s a problem. I was talking to a friend back in my North Carolina days who’d given this more thought than I had. He said, ‘we must forget some things in heaven.’ Come again? ‘Think about it. If grandma don’t make it, God must make me forget her, because otherwise I’d be unhappy there.’ We’re back to a consumerist paradise: heaven as whatever I need. Remember: heaven’s not a mall for me. It’s God dwelling with humanity, first in Mary’s womb, then in the church, one day in the New Jerusalem. Do we need amnesia to make heaven heaven? Let me give you a slightly more sophisticated version of the question. Miroslav Volf is one of the world’s great theologians, a Croatian, teaches at Yale, was tortured in the Balkan wars in the 90s. For him, torture has to be forgotten. Can’t be redeemed. As our text says, “nothing unclean will enter there.” But Sarah Coakley, a Cambridge theologian and herself world class, says no. In his resurrected body, Jesus has his scars. They’re no longer wounds. Once sources of death, now fonts of life. Heaven is not a forgetful trip over the River Styx. It’s God making right everything we’ve ruined. The New Jerusalem gathers up the old and doesn’t destroy it.
Our translation says, “the home of God is among mortals,” but the Greek isn’t really home, it’s “tabernacle.” What’s a tabernacle? It’s a tent. This puts us in the position of the ancient Israelites wandering in the wilderness for 40 years. We lived in tents. Temporary dwellings that let you pull up stakes and move on. Our Jewish elder siblings celebrate the festival of Sukkoth this time of year: the festival of booths. They build tents and live in them: temporary shelters to relive those wilderness years of wandering, trusting God rather than any permanent dwelling. God also lived in a tent, a tabernacle, the Mishkan, where the ark was, where the priests served. The gospel of John says this: The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us. Pitched a tent among us. When you think of heaven don’t think of you going somewhere alone. Think of God coming to creation with us. Living in the frailty of a tent. A virgin’s womb. Our frail and frightened little hearts. My favourite riff on that gospel of John verse is this: The Word became flesh and moved into the neighbourhood. Right here in Forest Hill of all places. Wherever you are online, God longs to dwell there too. And one day soon God will, fully.
One last thing. The Bible always has a preference for the unlikely. At Jesus’ table the excluded and marginalized eat first, the rest of us, well, don’t worry, there’s always more. Flannery O’Connor gives the best vision of this that I know. I’ll end with it:
A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black [people] in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.
Let us pray. Lord, burn our virtues away. Our vices too. And leave us with nothing but Jesus. God in our flesh. Amen.