This photo was taken in Back Wynd, just a few yards from the Oxfam Book shop and the Mcbean Coffee shop. I was heading for my usual quick browse in the book shop. It had been raining, and the wetness had highlighted the different tones of the stones.
The cobbles were refurbished some years ago, but the street itself is one of the oldest in Aberdeen. Along its side for its complete length is the high stone wall that separates Back Wynd from St Nicholas' Kirkyard. For centuries folk have walked along that street, and for at least a couple of those centuries that wall has been a borderline, a clear division between the Kirk and the city at whose heart it sits.
The Kirk of St Nicholas is not used any more as a regular place of worship. This massive and dominant building now has no continuing purpose, other than as a monument, an architectural memory of a faith diminished in its social and cultural influence. But the decline of the influence and visible presence of the Church is not the only disconcerting perception. Back Wynd itself, like the heart of the City of Aberdeen, has fewer people walking through it, and has a much reduced sense of vibrancy, community, commerce and what I would call the social economy of relationships, conversations, and even that basic urban and human interchange of negotiating space on the pavements.
For a brief moment I had a surprising sense of sadness. Not so much nostalgia for what used to be; I think it was more like an anxious uncertainty in facing the question, "What now?" Not primarily, and not only "What now for the Church in our land?" More a feeling that we are living through historic changes in city, country church and world. Such feelings invest the question "What now?" with a combination of low-grade but persistent uncertainty, but also with an inner defiance of hopefulness. It may well be that what is being asked of us as Christians at this particular moment in time, this kairos moment, is renewed resilience of faith, a defiant hopefulness and a determined refusal to let the seeds of resignation take root in the soil of despair.
I happen to be spending time with that enigmatic, but emergency tract for the times, the Letter to the Hebrews. One of its texts spoke powerfully into my uncertainties, and my hoped for resilience. "Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our God is consuming fire." (Hebrews 12.28-9) My friend and mentor for many years, used to use that word 'shaken', in a particular way. If someone acted in a totally unexpected or hurtful way, or said something shocking, or powerfully challenging, he would say "I was shaken to the core."
What if God should also speak in an unexpectedly shocking and powerfully challenging way? And what if the language God uses is historical contingency, the things that happen, the changes in circumstance we can't control, the happenings around us that alter our sense of security, continuity and cultural stability. Hebrews was written to people whose faith was seriously shaken, whose inner core was being destabilised by events around them, and often against them. The preacher-pastor who wrote this long letter of encouragement and warning, aimed at hope building, faith strengthening, with the goal of instilling community resilience in the face of threatening change and felt inadequacy.
In the midst of all that is shaking, "we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken…" To put it in the equally astringent words of Jesus, "I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it." T. S. Eliot echoed these words in The Rock:
There shall always be the Church and the World
And the Heart of Man
Shivering and fluttering between them, choosing and chosen,
Valiant, ignoble, dark and full of light
Swinging between Hell Gate and Heaven Gate.
And the Gates of Hell shall not prevail.
Darkness now, then
Light!
(From 'The Rock.')
The future of the church, as the Body of Christ, as the community built on the Rock of faith in Christ crucified and risen, is not in our all too human hands. A week after his death, I recall the first three volumes of Jurgen Moltmann's theological contributions. Taken together the titles, despite our legitimate questions about how he spells out his experiments in theological construction; taken together, those three titles are deeply embedded in the New Testament, and woven throughout that letter sent to the struggling-to-hang-on-in there Christians, and the great cloud of witnesses into which we ourselves, here and now, are incorporated: Theology of Hope, The Crucified God, The Church in the Power of the Holy Spirit.
These are the things that cannot be shaken, in all the changes with which we are forced to come to terms. A theology of hope in the God of hope; a trust in the crucified God, the crucified and risen One whose purpose to renew and restore was unleashed into the cosmos in resurrection power; and an openness to the call and the cost and the consequence of a life to be lived in the community of Christ, the church in the power of the Spirit.
How does all this happen? The encourager of those long ago discouraged Hebrew Christians was no sentimentalist. "Our God is a consuming fire." (12.29) Fire cleanses, purifies and energises. God is not our pal, our buddy, and certainly not our ultimate back-up position. Awe and reverence are demanded and required. And from awe and reverence, worship that is so genuinely self-forgetting, that we bow and we wonder, we praise and pray, we surrender our own agendas, and we seek the wisdom and the energy, the life and the light, to act as who we are – children of the kingdom that cannot be shaken.
We are called to be those who hear in our hearts the reverberations of the Word of God in Christ. We are called to be self-evidently those who bow before the consuming fire of God's holy love, and emerge tempered and toughened, shaped and reshaped to whatever purposes God has for each of us and for every community of this coming and becoming kingdom that cannot be shaken.
Or so it has seemed to me, as I've reflected on Back Wynd, the Kirk of St Nicholas, and that unknown but brilliant pastor who some time after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, wrote 'Hebrews' to struggling Christians to rebuild their hopes, lift up their hearts, and forge in them and in us, a more resilient faith.
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