Incendiary Fragment

In the boiler room of our church we have recently made an epochal discovery. In an old bucket of ancient ash, clearly from before the gas and even oil conversions, we found a partly-burned old document, completely charred all around the edges. After deciphering the old cursive we realized why some old pious faithful might be tempted to destroy this writing from the workshop of the Manhattan Bible of Henry Rutgers. Here is our attempt to reconstruct this single legible page:   

And then I saw a new heaven and a new earth:
for the old heaven and the old earth got reborn;
and all the garbage and pollution were gone.

And I Henry saw the Holy City, a new Manhattan,
coming down from heaven,
dressed up and adorned for a major festival.
And I heard a clear voice saying,
Behold, from now on God will dwell among people.

And I could not but notice some epochal changes,
There were no homeless people sleeping in the subway,
because God herself made their beds for them.
And there were no hungry begging for spare change
because God herself cooked meals for them.
Even overcrowded emergency rooms were no more,
because God herself dressed all their wounds without waiting.
Just note, and know, that many things we consider normal,
are not normal before God.

In that city all banks, hedge-funds
and wealth management firms went out of business,
and bankers and managers disappeared like cockroaches
after the light is turned on.
Because in that city the sidewalks were paved with diamonds
and streets were made of pure gold,
all the wealth was literally just dirt under their shoes.

And divine revolution continued,
I could not find in that city any churches,
temples, mosques, sanctuaries, synagogues,
tabernacles, chapels and shrines.
They were turned into homes for homeless,
into hospitals for the ill, into schools for the children,
into nursing homes for the elderly,
and those with high ceilings were turned into gyms
so that God can play badminton with her followers.
Only few examples of the most pompous sacred architecture
were preserved as museums of bigotry and religious wars.
God now dwelled in the world among people -
and all the religions went out of business,
no more need for all those endlessly feuding cabals.    
 
Now you know, why someone wanted to burn this divine message. As has been noted above, this fragment is, without any doubt, just another example of a very late post-biblical literature. But its close affinity to the last chapters of the Bible (Revelation 21) can hopefully illuminate the radical nature of this otherwise often misunderstood last book of the Bible.
I wrote a several years ago about the historical religious background of this passage here: Sun City Dream.