ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

Available for over a year

Scottish Readers of the Sunday Herald may have been puzzled by two of the banner headings on its front page this weekend. The one said Hibs (that's short for Hibernian whose home ground is called EASTER Road) - Hibs in Heaven. A larger heading read: Why Christianity is in Crisis? Fortunately the promotion of Hibs to the Premiership league was not connected to the alleged crisis in Christianity. In fact the crisis is not in Christianity but in numeracy, by which I mean that a recent survey of church attendance indicated the number of people regularly worshipping in Scottish churches has halved in the last thirty years – a phenomenon which this nation shares with other parts of the United Kingdom. Perhaps that was not the most cheering news to read on Easter Day. But then, not everything that happened on Easter Day was cheering news. A number of artists including Graham Sutherland have produced paintings entitled 'Noli Me Tangere.' They depict Mary Magdalene meeting Jesus in the garden, Jesus with whom she had a fond relationship and, naturally, reaching out to touch him. To her, as John's Gospel records, he says the rather disappointing words, 'Don't cling to me.' I can't think of that scene without remembering how a good friend of my mother's referred to these very words when she wrote to her after my Father's death. 'Don't hold on to David,' she wrote, 'Don't even keep his clothes. You will only have him if you let him go.' What, you might ask, has that to do with declining attendances at Christian worship? Quite a lot I think. Churches, for good or ill, are institutions. They are not God or the Gospel. And - as with all human institutions - nostalgia for our heritage, a fondness of tradition, and a fear for the future, can make people want sometimes to cling to what has been, rather than be open to what is to come if God is a dynamic presence rather than an historic relic. For me the validation of the church's existence is not whether it is true to the 39 articles, or Luther's 95 theses or Calvin's Institutes of Religion or the second Vatican Council, but whether it offers a foretaste of the Kingdom of Heaven, an experience of what it means to be transformed by justice and joy, rooted faith and radical hospitality. This is not to denigrate every fond tradition, but to ask whether our hands are so tied to the past that we cannot open them to serve God's tomorrow.