What I’m Thinking: Clear as Crystal

When John wrote Revelation, he had to describe what the City of God – what a perfect world – would look like. He made sure to include a river bright as crystal flowing through its center.

So why aren’t all of our rivers as bright as God made them?

Here’s a transcript:

We’re completing our transit through the Season of Creation at Church of the Holy Cross this coming Sunday. It will be River Sunday.

The text is found in the twenty-second chapter of Revelation, and so it’s not a river that currently exists, or that is part of the geography of ancient Israel that we’re thinking about, it’s the river that flows through the City of God. Revelation says that it is as clear as crystal.

Well, that has me thinking about all the rivers of the world that are not clear as crystal.

Where I come from back in Connecticut, we spent literally centuries turning the clear and flowing rivers of that state into industrial waste dumps, such that for years, it was poisonous to drink the water or to eat fish that were caught in the river.

We’ve been much better about that here in Hawai’i, but how many rivers all across this country, all across this world, in fact, have been turned by human activity into something that is considerably less than crystal clear. In this look ahead towards what God’s realm is supposed to be like, we see that it is a natural river that is the one that God is calling for and calling for from us.

So I think that if we want to make this world to be more like the one God intended, well, a good place to start would be cleaning of the rivers.

That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear about what you’re thinking. Leave your ideas in the comment section below; I’d love to hear from you.