Rev. Jared Buss
Pittsburgh New Church; June 16, 2024
Readings: Revelation 21:10-21 (children’s talk), 21:22-27; Apocalypse Revealed §§922, 952
The Holy City New Jerusalem symbolizes the New Church—a church that the Lord has made and is making still. This New Church isn’t an organization. It isn’t a building. It is His kingdom on earth. It’s a spiritual community that all people are invited into. It’s also everything that this particular congregation is stiving to embody.
Today I want to focus on two details from the description of the Holy City that help us understand the character and the quality of this thing that the Lord is creating. We’re told that the New Jerusalem is surrounded by a great and high wall (Rev. 21:12); we’re also told that there are twelve gates in this wall (ibid.). At face value, there’s nothing remarkable about this: lot of ancient cities had walls around them, and of course if you have walls, you also have gates. But the New Jerusalem isn’t an ancient city: it’s the spiritual home that all of us are called to. The fact that the Lord’s church has both walls and gates illustrates an important tension. The walls around a city are there to protect the people in the city—and they do this by keeping enemies out. But the gates are there to let people in. So this city is enclosed, and separate from what is around it. Yet the city is open to what is around it.
This tension becomes even more evident when you consider the rest of what’s said in chapter 21 of Revelation, which we’ll read now [vv. 22-27].
The twelve gates of the Holy City are never shut. They’re never closed by day, and there is no night in that place (v. 25). The symbolism of a closed gate, or a closed door, is pretty obvious. Churches and church communities built by people can be closed: they can be suspicious of and hostile to the world around them. But the Lord’s church is open. The Lord’s church is not ruled by a defensive or an exclusionary mentality.
But the New Jerusalem still has walls, and there are things that cannot enter it. “There shall by no means enter it anything that defiles, or causes an abomination or a lie” (v. 27). Now we’ve said two things that might not seem like they mesh very well: the Lord’s church is not exclusive, but there are things that cannot enter it. But both of these statements are true. The gates of the Holy City are always open. All people are invited in. The spirit that fills the Lord’s church is a warm spirit, a generous spirit, an open-hearted spirit. And evil has no place in the Lord’s church or in the kingdom of heaven. Each of these truths is pretty self-evident when it’s the only truth we’re looking at. But when we try to join them together, we can get confused. Trying to build a church community that joins these truths together is hard. It’s much easier to double down on one and ignore the other—to be the church of the door or the church of the wall, the church that has no boundaries or the church that has nothing but boundaries. But the Holy City has both walls and open gates.
We’re going to look a little more closely at what is let into the city; then we’ll look a little more closely at what is kept out. Here’s what we’re told in the Heavenly Doctrine, in Apocalypse Revealed, about the spiritual meaning of the open gates. This is the first of the readings you’ll find printed in the worship handout: [read §922].
As I said before, the gates of the New Jerusalem are never shut—this means that people are continually invited in. That image is so important. After all, we’re told in the Gospel that there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine who need no repentance (Luke 15:7). The joy of the angels is to receive us into heaven (see SH §5992.3). And to receive us into the church, because the Lord’s church is the resting place of heaven on earth. And if that’s the attitude that the angels hold, how much more does the Lord Himself rejoice to receive His children into His kingdom? How could the doors of the New Jerusalem be shut? How could Divine love put up barriers against us?
The reading from Apocalypse Revealed says, at first, that those who are received into the New Jerusalem are those who “possess truths that spring from the goodness of love from the Lord” (§922). In other words, good people. The people who are received into the Lord’s kingdom are good people… no surprises there. But then the reading says, “Its gates not being closed … means, symbolically, that people who wish to enter are continually being let in” (ibid.). That language is important to hear. The Lord gives heaven to those who want it. No one who sincerely seeks out what He offers is ever turned away. Of course, in the end, those who actually want heaven and those who are moved by good loves are the same people.
But what do these teachings tell us about our roles as would-be members of the New Church? First of all, they tell us that we can dial down the impostor’s syndrome by several degrees. We may not be “good enough” for the Lord’s kingdom, but that’s okay—nobody is! We’re allowed to be part of the New Church, as long as we want to be part of the New Church. But these teachings also say that we need to maintain an open door mentality. Who are we to deem anyone unworthy? If someone comes to this building, to learn the truth or to find something good, who are we to put barriers in their path? Who are we to close what the Lord has opened?
But we haven’t talked about the walls yet. You could argue that the walls of the New Jerusalem aren’t really there to keep people out—walls aren’t really barriers if the gates are always open. The function that those walls do serve is to make it very clear what the city is, and what it is not. The New Jerusalem is the kingdom of heaven on earth, and “there shall by no means enter it anything that defiles, or causes an abomination or a lie” (Rev. 21:27). The walls of the city draw a line between light and darkness.
The distinction between what is in the city and what is not becomes even more vivid when you consider the whole description of the New Jerusalem, which fills chapters twenty-one and twenty-two of Revelation. Today’s recitation was taken from Revelation twenty-two; the second half of the recitation reads: “Blessed are those who do His commandments, that they may have their power in the tree of life, and may enter through the gates into the city” (v. 14). The very next verse reads: “But outside are dogs and sorcerers and sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters, and whoever loves and practices a lie” (v. 15). These two verses create a stark contrast. The city is a blessed place, a city of crystal and gold, filled with the glory of the Lord. But outside the city—forever outside—is the darkness of evil.
Many of the evils in that list are self-explanatory—murder, for example. Others, such as being a “dog,” are not. Here’s what the Heavenly Doctrine has to say about this verse: this is the second reading printed in the handout [read AR §952].
To put it simply, those who are outside the city are those who do not keep the Ten Commandments. The categories of people who are said to be outside the walls line up with the things that are forbidden by the Ten Commandments. The sexually immoral are those who break the sixth commandment, the commandment against adultery. Murderers are those who break the fifth commandment. Idolaters break the first commandment. Those who love and practice lies break the eighth commandment. “Sorcerers” is a little harder to make sense of, but in an earlier passage in Apocalypse Revealed, we’re told that sorcerers are those who break the seventh commandment, since sorcery symbolizes spiritual theft (§892). And dogs, as the reading explains, symbolize those who break the ninth and tenth commandments—the commandments against coveting. As an aside, this passage is not here to tell us that our pets are evil, or that you can’t go to heaven if you own a dog, or any such nonsense. The Lord created dogs, and for a dog to be like a dog is just fine. But for a human being to hunger like a dog is not good—and that’s what this passage is talking about.
The point is that we can’t take evil into the Lord’s kingdom. We can’t take it into heaven, and we can’t take it into the church—at least not into the true church. Not into the New Jerusalem. On paper, this makes total sense. The whole point of heaven is that it’s a place where there is no evil. But in practice, people often have trouble with boundaries that are drawn against evil. To hear the Lord say that certain kinds of people are not allowed into His city can strike our ears as stern, and even harsh. But evil is evil because it hurts people: it hurts the perpetrators, and it hurts those around the perpetrators. The Lord doesn’t want us to be hurt. He can’t save us from the harm we do to ourselves, if we don’t want to be saved—but that doesn’t mean that we’re entitled to inflict harm on those who make better choices. Those who are willing to be saved are taken to a place where evil is not welcome—a city that is guarded by shining walls.
Something that’s very important to say, at this juncture, is that it is way more useful for us to focus on the evils that we can’t carry into the New Jerusalem than to focus on the evils that someone else can’t carry into the New Jerusalem. It is true that if this congregation is to be a congregation of the New Church, then the people of the congregation must strive, collectively, to make it a place where evil is not welcome. That means that if someone tries to bring a flagrant evil into the midst of this community, they probably need to be asked to leave. But it can be hard to figure out where to draw that line, since everyone is a sinner. A church is meant to be a place of healing for flawed human beings. The Lord did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance (Matt. 9:13; Mark 2:17; Luke 5:32).
Still, the Word makes it clear that setting boundaries is not an evil thing. The New Jerusalem has boundaries. The passage I read earlier about the open gates of the Holy City says that those who possess truth from good from the Lord are continually let in—and then it makes this statement: “If any others enter, they are not welcomed, because they are of a discordant character, and they then either leave of their own accord because they cannot endure [the] light, or they are sent away” (AR §922).
But again, it’s way more useful to focus on the things that we can’t carry into the Holy City than on the things that someone else can’t carry in. Only God knows how hard someone else is trying. What we can know is that the gates of the New Jerusalem are open, and that we are free to go in—and that there’s stuff we can’t bring with us. So is the city open to us or closed? The answer is simple: it’s closed to everyone who clings to their baggage. It’s open to everyone who puts their baggage down.
According to an old fable, the way you catch a monkey is by getting a big jar that has a small opening, and filling it with something tasty while you know the monkey is watching. Then you go away. The monkey will come and reach into the jar and grab a big handful of the stuff inside—and then it will be caught, because its loaded fist will be too big to fit through the opening of the jar. It could get free just by letting go of the handful of stuff, but it won’t, because it wants that stuff. This may or may not be a true story about the behavior of monkeys, but it illustrates a spiritual truth. Sometimes we get stuck because we’ve grabbed a big handful of anger, or lust, or entitlement. And we feel that we’re stuck—and we also hear the Lord, in His Word, telling us that we can have heaven if we want it. And we might tell Him, “that sure doesn’t feel true to me!”
But the gates of the Holy City are open. Heaven and the church are never shut against anyone. There are things that we can’t carry into it—but from God, we have the power to put those things down. “Blessed are those who do His commandments, that they may have their power in the tree of life, and may enter through the gates into the city” (Rev. 22:14).
Amen.