Christmas reflections on death, resurrection and the future of the church.

I've written this this afternoon in a few hours. It is not polished. It is about chapter length, and I am vaguely wondering about it being the first chapter of something rather longer. I'm thinking the final 'book' might look at how we got to where we are, how we might understand that theologically, what it might mean for the church to embrace death, what that might do practically in terms of our worshipping, meeting, witnessing and for our ministry. I'm posting this here to initiate comment and thought that might help me redraft something. My initial problem with what I have here is that it ignores the vital role of the Spirit both in terms of John's gospel, and in terms of the life of the Church. Anyhow - for anyone who takes the trouble to look at it and comment, thank you in advance. All thoughts welcome...!

 Christmas, Jesus, John and the Church

I’m not quite sure why I’ve suddenly been drawn to John’s gospel. I’ve always been slightly suspicious of it – John’s Jesus is just a little too able to walk on water. I’ve always preferred the social and political robustness of Luke. But none the less, this Christmas it is to John I am drawn. I suppose we are surrounded by John at Christmas – one cannot but be moved by the reading of John 1:1-14 from Kings College on Christmas Eve, or in our Christmas services. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”. The prologue to John opens wondrously the amazing reality of what God is doing with the world in Christ. God making Godself known to us – “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart who has made him known.” In these lines of John, our illusions about God are shattered. Everything we think in our human form that God is, turns out to be subverted. God is like the one who comes as God the only Son. The Church has always found this on the verge of the impossible to believe. In the early Church, the debates that raged around this point were many and varied – but centred around the figure of Arius who thought that Jesus being ‘of the same substance’ as God prevented God being God. God could not come amongst us as a human being, for that was to reduce the dignity of God. The truth of the gospel, however, was not to be determined around human definitions of God. God, rather, was to be determined by the truth of the gospel that is that Jesus reveals to us who God is.

I am, however, somewhat running away with myself. We will need to think more carefully about the ramifications of all of this as we go along. That it is radical, however, we need to take note of.

There are various thoughts that have prompted this writing. Some of them deeply personal, that perhaps cannot be poured easily onto the page, some of them more circumstantial. The biggest circumstantial issue is the death of the Church. The Church in western Europe is dying. Everywhere church membership has plummeted, and average attendance at Sunday worship is falling radically. My own church, the United Reformed Church, seems particularly to be disappearing at speed. When I talk about the church in this essay, I speak particularly out of that context. I suspect that the URC is something of a paradigm for most of the main-stream churches in Europe, and others who read this may find my reflections helpful as they understand their own denominational traditions situation. I can only speak out of the situation I find myself in, though: a minister in a church that will have died, according to the statistics, before I am due to retire. How are we to understand this? What are we to do with this fact?

There are many things I am finding deeply difficult to live with in my own denomination at the moment – and the URC is not so different as such that I would not find very similar things difficult elsewhere. I find it deeply disturbing that a huge number of churches I’ve engaged with in various capacities in my ministry speak of the need to attract new members ‘or else there will be nobody to do the jobs’, or ‘or else we will die within the next few years’. These sentiments are true. However, if that is what is driving our mission, it is no longer Good News that is driving us, rather it is the desire for institutional survival and the fear of death. We are deeply condemned by such statements. One finds a similar thing going on throughout the wider church as a whole. The recent debacle about an advertising campaign for the whole URC seems, in part at least, by a sense in which ‘we must do something or we will not be here’, a sense that we must, somehow ‘save’ the URC. The way this has happened has felt like some to be the most appalling walking all over our basic principles of how we work as a church, and has caused deep offence and division. And yet this has been done by people who genuinely want to make a difference, genuinely want to help the church, genuinely want to stand up for the things that they believe in. How is it that this can happen? Merely blaming people won’t do. We must indeed do something, and yet clearly what we are doing is not working, and stands the danger of actually making all kinds of things even worse.

What I want to do is to think about the death of the church – and what it might mean to be faithful in the context of a dying church. What is personal discipleship – what is institutional discipleship in the midst of this context? How are we to understand theologically the situation we find ourselves in. How, even, might we do the prior thing of even describing the situation that we are in? This is, once again, to get ahead of myself. Firstly, I want to turn to John’s gospel.

Grace and decision

‘But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man, but of God’. The sentence opens up for us on of the most significant theological debates that has raged throughout the life of the church. John blatantly seems to contradict himself in this sentence, in ways that I suspect most of the time we don’t even notice. He speaks of ‘all who received him, who believed in his name’ – this seems straightforwardly clear. We are to believe, we are to receive him. This is a human action, a human decision for Christ and to follow in his way. The human decision to receive and believe in Christ stands central to the call to faith. And yet, he then goes on to say that those who do this, ‘were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God’. So it is not our will, our power as human beings to make this decision to believe in Christ and to receive him – for if we have done that it is clearly not us that have done it, it has come from God. We are ‘born’...’of God.’

How are we to understand this tension? How is it that simultaneously John speaks of the need for human decision and response, and then to say that it is never human decision or response, for our human will cannot take that decision, it is something that only happens in the power of God? The Church has, from the beginning, grappled with this question. It comes to the fore powerfully in St.  Paul, particularly as he grapples with the fate of the Jews in his letter to the Romans in Romans 9-11. God has made promises to the Jewish people, and God ultimately will keep them even when the Jewish people have rejected God in Christ. For, ultimately, it is not our human decision, for Paul, that is of significance, but God’s election of us. That means, God decides, not us. This, in many ways is the only thing that can make sense. If we can decide for ourselves, and God cannot decide for us, we can do something that God cannot – and that is very odd. God is sovereign over all things – including whether we receive and believe in Christ.

Thus the mainstream Christian tradition has always argued. It is not only Calvin who has a doctrine of predestination. One finds it too in Thomas Aquinas’s (perhaps the key Medieval theologian influencing the Catholic tradition) doctrine of election, and one finds it in perhaps the greatest of the Early Church Father’s, Augustine. Ultimately, of course, one finds it in scripture. Abraham is elected to become the father of a great nation for no apparent reason at all in the Genesis accounts. He simply is – and that nation is Israel. Not because he earned it, or decided for God – but simply because God decided for him. This is the logic too of John’s ‘born of God’, not of ‘human will’.

And yet, too, we find in John’s account the ‘to all who received him, who believed in his name’. Human response is necessary – demanded even. And yet, how can that be so if ultimately all of this is the work of God? Jesus calls his disciples of ‘take up your cross and follow me’, the epistle of James (famously disliked by Luther for its dangerous ‘works-righteousness’) speaks of the need of good works, without which our faith is nothing. And parts of the Christian tradition have held this to be central. Wesley got most upset at some of the implications of the doctrine of double predestination as he saw it. Primarily because of the idea of God damning some people out of pure capriciousness, which was not worthy of God and was unjust – and it also meant, of course, that Jesus had not atoned for all on the cross, only for some. And then there was the missionary argument – why would you do mission and attempt to convert people, if their response was irrelevant because God decided anyway?

It is interesting that this debate largely just went away – people stopped worrying about it. This is, perhaps, both a good thing and a bad thing. A good thing because it might mean that we have begun to be willing to live with the tension that scripture gives us. A bad thing, because I suspect it is simply a sign too that we stopped worrying. Full stop. We stopped grappling with some of these tensions which scripture has gifted us. God has gifted us, even. And to stop worrying about them is perhaps to stop engaging with the things that God has called us to grapple with.

So how are we to read this tiny bit of John’s gospel? And does it matter at all for the life of the Church or understanding the predicament that we are in? I suspect it might actually matter. I suspect it might matter because there is indeed a tension in the text. It is a tension between the work of God, and human work. Both seem totally bound up together in this text. John seems to see no either-or about this, there seems to be a total presupposition that it is absolutely fine to write just as he does and imply both the human decision and action, and the divine origin of all of this. I suspect that the Church has lost sight of living with this tension. Some of the great figures within the history of the Church live with this tension very overtly. For Calvin, nothing at all must undermine the sovereignty of God over salvation. And yet, human works mattered massively. He sought to bring about an entire Godly society in Geneva. He set up consistorial courts to maintain discipline. He controlled behaviour and encouraged human learning and godliness to the nth degree. Wesley, on the opposite side of this tension speaks in the most moving of terms about how he did not choose God, and did not choose to do what he was doing and could not do it in his own power. It was entirely God calling him on, something that he was entirely powerless to resist. God is God, and ultimately will have God’s way!

Part of what we are called to do is to live this tension. And I wonder whether the church has forgotten to live this tension. Are we so busy trying to save the church in our own human power that we might have forgotten that God is sovereign over the church too? Have we forgotten that perhaps God is doing with the Church whatever God will, in causing it to die? After all – God has a bit of history on this one. The chosen people were taken into slavery, they were sent into exile. Is that perhaps what is going on with us? Alternatively, are we in certain places being so quietest – so willing to sit and let whatever happen to us, that we’ve entirely forgotten that we must receive and believe in Christ? That we are called to follow? How do we live this tension? How do we live this tension in the midst of the call to be the church in the 21^st century?

The Way of the Cross

John’s gospel takes us on a journey. In fact, much of John’s gospel takes place on a journey. I heard a couple of years ago a remarkable dramatic performance of John’s gospel. Someone had memorised the NRSV version of it, and gave a dramatic reading of it. One of the most striking things about this was the fact that at the moments that Jesus is heading towards Jerusalem, a drum beat symbolised the progress that was being made. It made one realise just how much of the gospel in Jesus heading to or from Jerusalem. And of course, in John’s gospel a huge proportion of it is directly Jesus heading to, and being in, Jerusalem prior to the events of the crucifixion and the resurrection. And of course, this is all to do with the all-pervasive sense of what is about to happen in terms of crucifixion and resurrection.

Right from the earliest part of John’s gospel, we find that Jesus speaks of what is to happen. And of course, what we know from literally the first sentence, is something of the one who is doing this speaking and something of the one to whom this is going to happen. This is happening to ‘God the only Son’.

In chapter two, after the miracle of the turning of water into wine (surely speaking volumes to us of what it is the kingdom will ultimately be like – intoxicating and abundant!), Jesus heads to Jerusalem. We see something of the divine passion and anger as he overturns the tables in the temple. In dispute with the ‘Jews’, Jesus has this short exchange, which John then comments on:

“’Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ The Jews then said, ‘This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?’ But he was speaking of the temple of his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered tat he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken”

From the very outset of his ministry, Jesus seems to know what is going to happen. Throughout John’s gospel (in fact, throughout all the gospel accounts) Jesus seems to know that he is heading to the cross. From the middle of the gospel (chapter 12 where John has the triumphant entry into Jerusalem) we are very definitely heading directly to the cross. Jesus speaks directly about this on many occasions, in such a way that seems to disconcert those with whom he is. When Philip and Andrew challenge Jesus after the Triumphant entry, Jesus says:

‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who live their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honour’ (John 12:23-26).

John goes on, however, and in his account Jesus then says:

‘Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say – “Father, save me from this hour”? No, it is for this reason that I come to this hour. Father, glorify your name’

We are faced yet again with something of a conundrum. Is the cross inevitable? It is a question related very clearly to the tension we identified in the opening of John’s gospel – the tension between grace and decision. Is it inevitable that Jesus would die on the cross? It is an interesting question – but more than that, one that takes us to the heart yet again of some of the tensions that are inherent within the Christian life. Jesus seems very clear that he knows that he is to die on the cross. At the same time we do see something of the human dimension. Earlier, we have heard that “After this Jesus went about in Galilee. He did this because the Jews were looking for an opportunity to kill him.” (John 7:1). Clearly, Jesus is not actively seeking his death. It may be an inevitability – but he is not going to court it. And we see in the passage above, that Jesus has the instinctive human reaction to say ‘Father, save me from this hour’, even though he recognises that this is actually not the way. Jesus does not want to die, does not want to be crucified. And yet, at the same time he knows that this is what is to happen. In fact, at the time of his arrest we are told most clearly that he knows what is going to happen:

Then Jesus, knowing all that was to happen to him, came forward and asked them ‘For whom are you looking?’ They answered, ‘Jesus of Nazareth’, Jesus replied, ‘I am he’. (John 18: 4-5).

Jesus knows, and does not resist. At the same time he has not sought this out.

It is as if there are two simultaneous dimensions to what is going on here. There is the dimension of eternity. The one who ‘in the beginning was the Word’, was always going to come to this moment. If we believe that the cross was of eternal significance, it is, as it were, equally significant to all times and places. The question as to the fate of those who lived before the cross is entirely irrelevant if it is indeed an eternal event.

Eternity is not simply a great deal of time that stretches on indefinitely (though that might well be the best attempt we can often rustle up to think about these things), but if we believe that God created time as well part of all that is, and if we believe that God will ultimately bring all that is to consummation, then eternity is both before and after time, as well as including time itself. We find this almost impossible to think of – that is inevitable as we are part of time as things that have been created. We can’t think of what things look like from God’s place, by virtue of the fact that we are not God. There is a massive and overwhelming difference between being created and being the creator. We might be in the image of God, but we cannot imagine reality as God sees it because we only see it as those who have been created. In eternity – in God, as it were, in the before, during and after of history, the cross stands absolutely at the centre of all of this. It is truly eternal. It was absolutely, therefore inevitable. In this sense, when people speak about such things as God ‘taking a risk’ in becoming incarnate, I become entirely uneasy. God know exactly what God was getting Godself into! God is, after all, God! This stuff is eternal – not dependent of human whim and will! At the same time, though, there is this other dimension going on.

Jesus also experiences all that is going on as fully a human being. Now, at this point one can get totally bound up into lengthy and abstruse theologically conversations about divine and human wills in Christ and so on and so forth. I’m not sure they are going to help us. But simply reading the story of John we see the human Christ who does not go to the places where people are wanting to kill him. We see the one that wants to ask the Father to spare him what is to come. We see history unfolding, cause and effect at work. This is the kind of history from this perspective which feels like it could have had a different outcome. Jesus decision not to turn away from Jerusalem, but rather to head to Jerusalem is significant. Equally, Jesus decision to hand himself up to the authorities when they come along with Judas is significant.

Somehow, both things are going on together. What is going on was always going to happen, in fact, one might almost say that it always had happened when viewed from the perspective of eternity. And yet, at the same time is dependent upon the decisions and actions of Jesus within history who experiences the pain and the fear of what is unfolding. The tension is exactly the same tension as the one we noted above between grace and decision. Scripture speaks of both of them alongside one another. We live, somehow, in the midst of both the entirely free grace of God that has brought us into the midst of God’s story, and the requirement to believe and to respond, just as Jesus lives in the tension of being fully human and fully divine:

I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed. (John 17:4-5).

The Way of Resurrection

Of course, to the disciples, all of this as it unfolded must have seemed most extraordinary. How on earth could something that was of God end up in the disaster of the crucifixion? What sense can be made of that? It is perhaps no wonder that Peter ends up denying Jesus – who would not, when the movement that had meant so much ends up in the place of a common criminal. But of course, in the Christian story, the crucifixion is not the end. This too, we see that Jesus is aware of. He speaks of the rebuilding of the temple in three days, referring to himself. Jesus speaks of the unfolding of a reality, it is not simply his own story that will unfold, but a story that patterns reality itself. The passages in which Jesus speaks of such things are frequently complex and difficult – to the point that the disciples themselves often feel like he is speaking in riddles. That, though, is how it seems before the experience of the ending of the story. Who could (God aside...) have predicted the resurrection? And yet, resurrection is the other intrinsic part of the story of the cross. Jesus says:

‘Are you discussing among yourselves what I meant when I said, “A little while, and you will no longer see me, and again a little while, and you will see me”? Very truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will have pain, but your pain will turn to joy. When a woman is in labour, she has pain, because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world. So you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you. (John 16:19-22)

Jesus is pointing to the full story – cross, Holy Saturday and Resurrection. This is the pattern of life as Jesus is living it. This is the pattern of God’s ways with the world. And this indeed has a dimension of the whole of life in the world attached to it. Jesus speaks of the consequences of his death, and consequently his resurrection as being for the whole of the world:

And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself’. He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die. (John 12:32).

I love the fact that one of the footnotes in the NRSV suggests an alternative reading to the above. Apparently in some sources, it is not ‘all people’, but ‘all things’ that will be drawn to Christ. This is big stuff! This is something which has universal significance – this affects all people, possibly all things.

And when resurrection comes, it comes in surprising ways. It strikes me that one of the besetting sins of the church of recent times has been debates about the resurrection: was it physical or bodily? This takes us to the heart of so much agonising about the nature of scripture and what we are supposed to have to believe in a supposedly scientific age or not. We will need to return later to think about how we make sense of living out and proclaiming our faith in the contemporary world which gives us these challenges, but that is not quite where we are at at the moment. What we need to realise at this point is that resurrection, as we hear about it in this gospel (or the others, or experience it!) cannot be contained by these kinds of categories. As we read the story (in fact, why don’t you go and read John’s account of it now – it is remarkable!), we are struck by so many parts of this story that won’t allow this kind of categorisation. The resurrected Jesus is both entirely unrecognisable by Mary at the tomb, and entirely recognisable by the disciples at the lake. This is a Jesus who appears behind locked doors suggesting a kind of bodiliness that we do not have, and yet the wounds can be touched and felt and who can eat a fish breakfast. This is not a ghost walking the earth, neither is it a body come back to life. I am taken with Rowan Williams’ case that resurrection simply is its own category – it can’t be subsumed into other human categories. And it is about transformation. This is something unlike anything else, and cannot be put into categories like other things. Resurrection brings life from death, hope from despair, and transforms reality beyond anything that previously was imaginable. Resurrection begins to make sense of the seemingly senseless things that went before it.

The Church, the Cross and Resurrection

So, what does all of this pontificating about the cross and resurrection, and time and eternity, and whether or not Jesus knew what was happening to him have to say to the Church and about the Church in its current situation? Well, the thing seems to be to me that the Church is entirely and totally bound up in this story of Jesus. St. Paul’s favourite metaphor for the Church is as the body of Christ. The Church is bound, almost as a continuation of Christ in the world (a difficult thing to say, and something we will need to come back to – we must equally not confuse the Church with Christ). The Church is the body of the one who has set the pattern of cross, Holy Saturday and Resurrection within the life of the world that Christ is lifting up to himself.

Right at the end of John’s gospel, we have the remarkable story of Peter and his final conversation with Jesus before the ascension. I love the character of Peter. Throughout all the gospels he is pretty hopeless. If it is possible to get the wrong end of the stick, he will. If it is possible to be hot-headed at the wrong moment, he will. He is totally and utterly hopeless, really. And yet, somehow or other he is equally the most extraordinary disciple – he really is rock like in certain respects. How I love the fact that if Jesus managed to use someone like Peter (well, like most of those early disciples really, who are all far from being saints), he might just be able to use me too! And Peter seems to function at this moment in this gospel precisely as a representative disciple. Which of us does not fail in our discipleship? Which of us does not protest the most extreme loyalty to Christ, only in the midst of changed circumstances to turn around and deny that we have anything to do with him at all? Peter is, indeed, something of the ‘generic’ disciple. We are all like Peter. The Church, is , in fact, rather like Peter.

And what do we find, in this remarkable exchange between Jesus and Peter at the end of this gospel? Jesus asks three times whether Peter loves him, and tells him three times to tend and feed his sheep. The final time, when Peter is somewhat despairing of Jesus, we get this exchange:

‘Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Feed my sheep. Very truly, I tell you when your were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.’ (He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.) After this he said to him, ‘Follow me’. (John 21:17-19).

Peter’s life too, is going to be cross shaped. Cross shaped to the extent that he too will end up dying, like Jesus, of crucifixion. And is this not, perhaps, a little scary – that this representative disciple, representative of the church as a whole and of us as disciples is told that he is to follow the way of Christ to the extent that he will share in the cross? It should perhaps come as no great surprise.

Jesus sees himself and his disciples as intrinsically linked. The extraordinary ‘farewell discourses’ of the latter parts of John’s gospel before the account of the crucifixion and resurrection are quite amazing. In them we read of the most extraordinary relationship between Jesus and his disciples, and we, of course, are his disciples. We, the church, are called to this relationship. Let us listen for a moment to how Jesus puts this: “And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you” (John 17:11). Somehow, we are to continue Jesus work in the world. This line of thought Jesus continues a little further on, “As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world”, discipleship is about being in the midst of the world. But it is about far more than that. For Jesus too, has talked in the most extraordinary way about the relationship between himself and his disciples:

“As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world”. (John 17:20-24).

There is a connection between Christ and the disciples, Christ and the Church – Christ and us, dare we even say, that so fully joins us to Christ that we become him. We are engrafted, as it were into his story, so that the glory that is his becomes ours. We are engrafted into that story such that cross, Holy Saturday and Resurrection becomes our story. It becomes reality.

Just as elsewhere in the gospels Jesus tells his disciples to take up their cross and follow him, so here we see the way in which this relationship with Christ works out. It is for the sake of the world, not simply for the sake of the disciples and the Church. It is rooted in Jesus and his story; his story of death on a cross and the utter transformation of reality that is resurrection. That is the story that we share in. Cross, Holy Saturday and resurrection are not only the story we proclaim – they are the story that we live. We are called to take up our cross, just as Peter, the representative disciples, is told that his journey too will end in the cross. Just as the seed must die to become the crop, just as Jesus must die to bring new life and transformed reality in resurrection – so too the church must die, so too the individual Christian must die. What this means in reality will vary. For some, it has meant very literal death. For others it means death to an old self, and old way of being. For some it means, even, standing against the very church that they have emerged from.

The death of the Church

 The church is dying. In Europe, which is where I am trying to minister anyway, the Church is dying. And yet, so often I am told that I am not allowed to say this. This is being defeatist. This is to lack faith. Well. Enough – I say. I won’t live with that argument any more. To state that the Church is dying is to live in the midst of Christ’s story of death, Holy Saturday and Resurrection. It is to say that death is not the end, but the beginning. The Church is being called to its death. That is absolutely not to say that the there will not be the Church. There will be followers of Christ who together are greater than the sum of their individual parts. There will be the body of Christ on earth. There will be those who do not belong to the world called into the world. Whether there will be a United Reformed Church around to pay my pension, however, I doubt very much. But at the moment we seem to be denying this. We seem to be flailing around attempting anything and everything, and blaming everyone else in horrible ways. It is the fault of Church House. It is the fault of the gays. It is the fault of the Evangelicals. It is the fault of ministers. It is the fault of congregations. We all have our favourite scapegoats. Stop! I say. Stop! “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have send me.” (John 17:20-21)

It is not them over there. It is us. You. Me. All of us. We are a faithless people. We have wandered into the wilderness – we might even have been led their by God. Our sin is collective. We stand accused together. Why is it that our churches are far emptier on Good Friday than Easter Sunday? Can we not cope with the message of the cross? And yet, are we not called to ‘proclaim Christ, and him crucified’ (1 Cor: 1:23). Why do so many people go to church or get involved in church activities because they think someone else is getting something out of it, even though they are not being fed? Why do so many ministers run scared of preaching the gospel as they truly understand it because they are scared of upsetting peoples faith (and I suspect we all have our moments we have done that)? Why do so many people in our churches think that the gospel can roughly be summed up as ‘if I’ve been good enough my soul will go to heaven when I die’ when scripture knows nothing of this message? Lord, have mercy.

What if, just perhaps, maybe, the Church was called to be Christlike as it faces death? We stopped along the way to think about the way in which Christ faced his journey to Jerusalem. He did not seek it out – in fact at times he stayed out of the way of those out to kill him. He did not want it, and desired to ask the Father to relieve him of this (in fact, in other gospel accounts he actually does do this). And yet he equally does not turn his back on Jerusalem. And we noted that strange relationship between time and eternity that runs at the heart of all of this. God is indeed sovereign over all things – over the life and death of the Church even. And yet, the human Jesus in heading to Jerusalem plays his part in the outworking of that which always had been within eternity. We noted too, that incredible tension between standing in God’s grace, and our decision for God. What if our decision for God has to be a decision to face the death of the Church in the sure and certain hope of resurrection? What if that is what is written in the book of life for our institutionalised Churches within Europe?

We seem, somehow, to be living at the moment on one side or another of the grace and decision tension – rather than living with the tension. Some churches and movements within the church are simply leaving this in the hands of God. God will do what God will do, seems to be the feeling. ‘It will see us out’, is sometimes said (Lord, have mercy). Well. It won’t see some of us out – of that there is little doubt. And yet, on the other side are those running around busily trying to save the church. Schemes and programmes galore. New appointments, mission development officers, evangelistic programmes, advertising campaigns. And what is all of that about? – trying to save the Church. Trying, in my own denominations case, to save the United Reformed Church. And the danger in saying all of this is that I end up scapegoating  too. I don’t want to do that, even though I fear I do (Lord, have mercy).

But just imagine. What would happen if we decided to face death squarely? What would happen if our faith in resurrection was so strong that we could indeed walk our own way to Jerusalem? What would happen if we lived that way? What would happen if we embraced the death of the institutional church? What would happen if we truly believed that in baptism we were joined to the story of death, holy Saturday and resurrection that is the pattern of reality that we see in Christ? What would happen if we believed in baptism that we really were joined to God’s people such that we really were Christ’s body in the world?

Just imagine. What would it be like if we found a way to recognise our common collective guilt and faithlessness? What if it were possible to recognise that in so many ways we have been attempting to keep a particular culture of the non-conformist chapel alive, rather than the gospel? What would happen if we recognised that the form of church life we have received and still often live was about giving people something to do in their free time when they had no money to pay for anything to do? What would happen if we recognised our colossal failure to teach a gospel of grace and decision, and had replaced it with fear of eternal punishment of the soul after death if you’ve not been good enough, and that we have often used this as a means of social control? What if we acknowledged that our own existence has become paramount – and often that amounts to keeping our building open? What happens if we acknowledge our sin that so often our church life has indeed been nothing other than an opiate, a pain killer that stops us complaining about the reality of life in the world as it really is, when Jesus seemed to be deeply concerned about life in the world as it really is? What happens if we acknowledge that so often our faith has been a way of allowing us to behave like spoilt little children that believes that everything must be for their benefit from the big Daddy in the sky? Marx and Freud were onto something, you know. And what would happen if we managed to do all of this without blaming you over there, or them over there? What would happen if I said that I was to blame? What would happen if I acknowledged that it was my sin, my desire to place myself in the middle of things rather than God that had led to this situation? What would happen if we were willing to acknowledge that it was us? Lord, have mercy.

What would it be if we were to think that we need now to discern that God’s plan for us is indeed that the institutional church as it is, certainly the URC, is not destined to survive? What if we turned to face Jerusalem and sought to find a good death? It is one of the saddest things I read once (heaven only knows where) that in a survey it had emerged that people of faith (so-called) found death far more frightening than those without. This is often anecdotally the experience of hospital chaplains too. How terrible is that (Lord, have mercy)? Why are we so scared of death? Why can we not die with hope? Why can the church collectively not seek to die well?

And in practical terms, what might this mean? Well...to some extent heaven only knows, but together I think we need to begin to think about it. What if we actively sought to help local congregations die well? It’s possible – people can worship elsewhere. People can feel actively freed from the dead weight of buildings and processes that can’t be sustained any more. What if we gave up on many of our prized structures? Can we really die well with Synods that hold 54 million pounds of unrestricted reserves between them? What if baptism and church membership began to mean something? What if we covenanted together that we wanted to hear the really difficult things about the gospel, rather than seek reassurance all the time? What if we simply shut up shop completely to see what would happen next? Something would. If no URC was open next week for worship – who would be found worshipping elsewhere, or have gathered in a house or a pub and carried on worshipping there? Perhaps there one might find the seeds of resurrection hope.

But let us no longer seek to say that dying is bad. It is not bad. Let us not say that to think about the way in which we manage decline is sinful and lacking in faithfulness. Let us live resurrection shaped lives that believes that quite literally at times the church needs to take up its cross and head for Jerusalem. It needs to realise that in God’s eternity where all things already are possible, sometimes our decisions for death are required for life.