Easter 5, Year C | Revelation 21:1-6
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
May 18, 2025
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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“I saw a new heaven and a new earth…and the sea was no more.” – Revelation 21:1[1]
Last week we talked about looking past all the noise and distractions modern interpretations of Revelation offer to see the book’s big picture. We need to be able to hear its primary message before we start toying with any details. Most of what we hear about the book today has little or nothing to do with what John of Patmos was actually writing about. Revelation is not about God rapturing or rescuing a select few from a period of “Great Tribulation.” It isn’t meant to teach us secret knowledge that will allow us to “get right with God” or make sure we know we’re going to Heaven before everything around us goes to Hell—literally or figuratively.[2] It isn’t supposed to be the framework for a horror movie. It doesn’t exist to tell us the future. John wrote Revelation for one primary purpose: to remind and encourage us that God overcomes. Goodness, Life, harmony, beauty, diversity, joy—all that makes the trials of existence worth enduring—overcome. Society may struggle. Empire, Despotism, and Desolation may appear to wield all the power. Fear will try to make itself look like the only reality. But God, Love-in-action—the same kind of love that Jesus commands of the apostles in today’s Gospel[3]—will and does overcome.
When we welcomed parishioners as full members of the Episcopal Church on Friday evening, Bishop Hunn told us about a health scare last year, a hospitalization that led to him to face the real possibility of his own death. Imagining death isn’t necessarily something we want to do, but it also isn’t too hard for most of us. Life is remarkably fragile. We know that our end is coming—maybe not right now, but definitely at some point, and likely in a manner we can’t anticipate. But the Bishop challenged us to move beyond thoughts of death and darkness and sorrow, to begin to imagine and embrace what this season of Easter proclaims and what we gather each Sunday to celebrate: Resurrection.
Resurrection—God overcoming; Life overcoming. Life may be fragile, but it’s also remarkably persistent. It might not come back the same—Jesus’ friends often didn’t recognize him after his return—but it does keep coming back. That, in fact, is the point of the short passage we read from Revelation today.
If there’s one detail in the book that seemingly no one knows what to do with, it has to be the statement, “the sea was no more.” With water being fundamental to life as we comprehend it, emphasizing the absence of water in “a new heaven and a new earth” is jarring. Do citizens of this new Kingdom “thirst no more”[4] because water simply isn’t part of the picture? No, that conflicts with the statement we read last week that the Lamb “will guide them to springs of the water of life,”[5] and “will wipe every tear from their eyes.”[6] Tears, which are largely water, have to exist in order to be wiped away. Combine that with the description of a river running from God’s throne, and it would appear the “no water” idea doesn’t hold any water of its own.
This is one of those things we don’t understand because of all that we as a society have forgotten. On Easter I talked about the ancient understanding of the universe as three realms: the Celestial, the Earthly, and the Underworld. Each of those realms is reflected in our physical reality through the sky, the land, and the sea. John sees a “new”—probably better rendered “fresh” or even “refreshed”—sky and land, a remade Celestial and Earthly Realm. The absence of the sea is foreshadowing for what he writes in verse four: “Death will be no more.” There’s no “fresh” sea not because we somehow won’t need water[7] but because there’s no longer anything for the sea to express or represent in the physical realm. With Jesus’ resurrection, the grave began to empty; in the ancient mind, the sea began to drain. By the time all is refreshed, there is no grave. There is no Underworld or Hidden Realm. Celestial light and order flood the entirety of the universe, so “the sea” has no meaning—and therefore no purpose—in that reality.
Taking a slight detour, there’s a large contingent of Modern American Christianity that likes to use this “new heaven” and “new earth” statement as an excuse to continue abusing the Earth we already have. There are some serious problems with this. For one, no Biblical author understood the word “earth” in terms of a planet. For them, planets were living beings managing divine errands in the Celestial Realm;[8] they had no concept of giant orbs spinning their way through outer space. So whenever you see the word “earth” in the Bible, it’s talking about dirt or land. On a related note, whenever you see the word “world,” the author is talking about human civilization—the “inhabited earth” (aka “land”)—not the globe.
Western Christianity has mistakenly interpreted the Bible as saying that humans rule over Creation—that we have dominion, in the sense of “being able to dominate.”[9] We’re wrong. In Genesis, God creates humans to govern the land and animals, a responsibility for their care and well-being that we still carry today. We never received a top-down authority that allows us to do whatever we want with impunity.[10] Revelation is not reaffirming our belief that God’s going to just wipe out our mess and give us a whole new planet to ruin once this one is uninhabitable. That absurd interpretation is based not on reading what the author is saying but reading what we want to hear onto the text. God is the generous source of all that is, but God’s Kingdom will never be built on waste or abuse—whether we’re abusing people or our natural resources.
But back to the text—and Revelation’s main point.
Despite the future-leaning language, the reality John speaks of is not something we still need to wait for. The one seated on the throne doesn’t actually say, “It is done.”[11] They say, “It has become” or “It has happened.” The word reflects childbirth. The pangs are over. The labor is done. The lingering pain needs no longer be remembered, because “it has happened.”[12]
This may not be something we can see clearly. We may not comprehend it. But everything is made new—already. The Underworld, with its chaos, uncertainty, and fear, is gone—consumed by light, love, and life. The Celestial and the Earthly are all that remain. Death as we anticipate or dread it is, for us, imagination. The truth is that in God’s persistent generosity, life leads to life—just not necessarily in ways we recognize, which leaves us with plenty of mystery to explore. Even so, Life is the foundational substance that underlies all Realms, all reality. Death is the illusion. Life—resurrection—is what remains.
“I observed a fresh sky and a fresh land…and the sea no longer exists.”
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSVue unless otherwise noted.
[2] Those ideas are modern variations on one of the Church’s most ancient defined heresies, “Gnosticism.”
[3] John 13:35
[4] Revelation 7:17
[5] Ibid
[6] Revelation 7:17 and 21:4
[7] No one can say what it is that any of us will need, so who know?
[8] Or at least reflections of those beings
[9] Genesis 1:26
[10] God created Adam to be a gardener, not to pillage the land. – Genesis 2:15
[11] Genesis 21:6
[12] This is overt clue that the words of Revelation are not prognostication.