I’m sure we’ve all come across these words:

“The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth:
one is nearer God’s heart in a garden
than anywhere else on earth”.

They’re part of a longer poem by Dorothy Frances Gurney who also wrote the hymn “O perfect Love, all human thought transcending” which is often sung at weddings. As far as I can make out Dorothy lived her entire life in London, born in the City and ending up in Notting Hill; although she was a Vicar’s wife and possibly lived in a spacious house, I’d like to think that she regarded gardens as a welcome refuge and escape from the noise, smoke and filth of city life.

Other writers have extolled gardens in similar terms. This is what the philosopher Francis Bacon write in around 1600 AD: “God Almighty planted a garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the spirit of man; without which buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks”. Three hundred years later, in “The Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God” George Bernard Shaw stated, “The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there”. The great garden designer Gertrude Jekyll wrote, “A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust”; while the Roman scholar Cicero declared that someone who has a garden and a library has everything they need. Clearly all these people – and many others – saw gardens as good, at least until they had to do the weeding (perhaps they had servants for the hard work!)

When it comes to cities, comments are much more mixed. Although more and more of the world’s people live in cities, they are often seen as dangerous, polluted, unhealthy and hotbeds of crime, places in which extreme and poverty are located side-by-side, concrete jungles and human zoos where individuals can easily become lonely and lost in the crowd. As the essayist William Hazlitt wrote two hundred years ago: “The confined air of a metropolis is hurtful to the minds and bodies of those who have never lived out of it. It is impure, stagnant, without breathing-space to allow a larger view of ourselves or others, and gives birth to a puny, sickly, unwholesome, and degenerate race of beings”. The poet and hymn-writer William Cowper was equally definite: “God made the country, and man made the town”.

But there are other views. The artist Michelangelo said (presumably in Italian): “I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all”. The anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote: “A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again”. The architect Daniel Liebeskind says, perhaps unsurprisingly, “Cities are the greatest creations of humanity”. And of course William Wordsworth declared that “Earth had not anything to show more fair” as the early morning view from Westminster Bridge.

The passage we’re looking at this morning comes from the second-to-last chapter of the entire Bible. I deliberately set it beside our reading from Genesis because, as has often been said, the Bible begins in a garden but ends in a city. This may come as a bit of a surprise if we think of cities as noisy, busy, dirty and even frightening places. It’s nevertheless clear that the Bible’s vision of glory isn’t a “green and pleasant land” with verdant hills, trickling streams and beautiful wild flowers; it is in fact a city, descending from heaven. Many people may dream of “escaping to the country” – but even if the realities of muddy and possibly snow-blocked roads, non-existent bus services, poorly-stocked village shops, frustrating Internet speeds, the smell of next door’s pig farm and the noise of cattle clattering past their front door before dawn – don’t soon make them wonder whether they’d have been better staying put, the fact is that the ultimate environment for Christians is not rural but urban. For, as the writer to the Hebrews significantly states, “We are looking for the city that is to come”.

Now of course cities – here on earth, that is – can be awful. Life in places such as Manchester, Glasgow and Swansea was grindingly hard for many people well into the twentieth century, with large families crammed into tiny, dark rooms with no sanitation, poor healthcare and inadequate nutrition. The crowded area of Temperance Town in Cardiff was demolished in the late 1930s, to improve access to the railway station as much as to benefit its residents. (Today the area is unrecognisable as Central Square). We can easily decry the slum clearances, tower blocks and housing schemes of the 1960s (and the poem we heard satirises that optimism) but the planners of the day genuinely thought that they were improving life for millions. What’s so sad is that the pattern of life we saw here in the 1800s is being replicated in the favelas of Latin America and the shanty-towns that surround cities such as Nairobi. We can only imagine the horrors of life in such places, the sheer struggle for survival. Those cannot be the kind of cities that God wants to create.

Over the years many people – in Britain, at least – tried to improve the quality of life for city-dwellers. Charles Dickens published several articles on the subject in his magazine Household Words, made a speech to The Metropolitan Sanitary Association condemning both slum landlords and local politicians, and wrote in the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit: “In all my writings, I hope I have taken every available opportunity to showing the want of sanitary improvements in the neglected dwellings of the poor”. William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, stunned Britain with his book In Darkest England and the Way Out which provided shocking facts and statistics about England’s poor and claimed that the subhumane living conditions in English urban slums were no different from those in Africa. Booth made several proposals for eliminating squalor, destitution and vice from congested slum districts and invited donors to give £100,000 to establish city workshops and farm colonies to help London’s poor.

Some industrialists realised that the provision of good housing would benefit their workers and also increase productivity and profits. Robert Owen, originally from Newtown, created New Lanark around the mills on the River Clyde; unlike other philanthropists he was not motivated by religion which he felt was based on “a ridiculous imagination” and turned people into “imbecile animals, furious bigots or miserable hypocrites”. Later on William Lever the soap magnate and Cadburys, the chocolate manufacturers created their own “garden suburbs” of Port Sunlight and Bourneville while Joseph Rowntree built the lesser-known New Earswick in York.

Ebenezer Howard took a more idealistic: in his 1898 book To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform he offered a vision of “garden cities” free of slums and enjoying the benefits of both town (such as opportunity, amusement and high wages) and country (such as beauty, fresh air and low rents). Two such cities were actually built, at Letchworth and Welwyn in Hertfordshire; they are still pleasant places to live. One might say that these people were all seeking to create a little bit of heaven on earth. Their legacy lives on – many of Llanedeyrn and Pentwyn’s houses are ‘little boxes’ but just think how much green space there is around them (a headache for the Council!). I despair when I take the train into London and see all the new, tiny and no doubt pricey high-rise flats that are being crammed into every available space. They may be marketed as “luxury apartments” but one has to wonder what long-term quality of life they can offer.

Well, we’re not talking today about any city here on earth, but what John Bunyan called the “Celestial City”, the new Jerusalem which, we are told, God will create at the end of time. It’s not clear how literally we should take St John’s vision here in Revelation as his prophecy deals with images, myths and mysteries. (And, by the way, Ezekiel gives us a lengthy Old Testament parallel, which ends by naming the city “The Lord is there”). Clearly we are looking at some kind of Utopia where the evils of poverty, misery and war have been eradicated, where people of all races and creeds happily live and work together, and where believers enjoy perfect freedom and relationship with their God: a destination which attracts crowds of hopeful people towards it.

This is a wonderful, even inspiring, picture. But it seems to have little relation to reality. Even though we know that this vision of God’s new city descending from heaven is an integral part of the Christian hope, we have little faith that we shall ever see it realised. Of course we’d be delighted to see a new and perfect society being created on earth; we might well long to see all people worshipping Jesus; we certainly want to see the huge inequalities and injustices of today’s world abolished – together with the pain and suffering which is so many people’s daily lot. Yet, if we’re honest, we don’t really think that this will ever happen in any meaningful way. Despite the efforts of the greatest prophets and social reformers, our world rarely seems to improve all that much.

And cities, of course are in trouble. You don’t need to tell me of the destruction and loss of life in Ukrainian cities such as Kharkiv, Mariupol, Borodyanka and even Kyiv itself – most of them places we hadn’t even heard of two months and which we certainly couldn’t have placed on a map. Residents say they want to return once the war is over – but to what? We might ask the same question of Syrian cities such as Aleppo and Homs. Then we have the burgeoning cities of the developing world, an irresistible magnet to folk from the hinterland but with basic infrastructures that are totally overwehelmed. Here in Britain we have the problems of city centres, already affected by the move to online retailing and exacerbated first by the Covid pandemic and now by the cost of living. Just this week the Government admitted that “levelling-up” would be far more difficult and costly than they had first estimated. Newport has the highest ratio of empty shops in Britain and, although valiant efforts are being made to revitalise its indoor market, many retailers are saying that they can see no future.

But the Bible tells us that there is a future, albeit not in the short term. For John has given us a glorious vision of an idealised city: a place of prosperity and happiness, a place which is healthy, beautiful and clean, a place where there is no crime, injustice or pain, a place which has an abundance of food and water which constantly flows, a place of sanctuary whose gates are never closed, a place where people from all nations will mix in perfect harmony, above all a place full of clear divine light because God himself is to be found dwelling at its centre. We will never see this city realised on earth – although, as Christian people, we will do all we can to seek the health and happiness of our own city of Cardiff (which, in places, could do with a bit of TLC). But when, on a cold and drizzly day in November, we’re waiting for a bus that never seems to come and thinking, “If only I lived in the country” – let’s count the many blessings that urban life does offer and let’s look forward to that “city without foundations” which will be our eternal home.