Another Pentecost Wish: Bring Out Our Dead

When my dad died, we decided to have a memorial service for him, rather than a formal graveside ceremony.  We gathered, family & friends, in the chapel of the church my dad was raised in, a faith community that his father helped found.  Doug Richnow stood at an altar and spoke this prayer in my Dad's memory:

Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to you our brother Alva, who was reborn by water and the Spirit in Holy Baptism.  Grant that his death may recall to us your victory over death, and be an occasion for us to renew our trust in your Father's love.  Give us, we pray, the faith to follow where you have led the way; and where you live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, to the ages of ages.  Amen.

My dad dying shook me, to my very core.  The boundless sense of power & immortality that blew my sails in my 20s and 30s went silent, replaced by an understanding of how fragile & temporal this life is.  My soul truly got the meaning of this prayer of commendation that is part of the funeral service:

Give rest , O Christ, to your servant with your saints,
where sorrow and pain are no more,
neither sighing, but life everlasting.

The faith tradition I grew up in - a mongrel version of Anglicanism that is 1 scoop Catholic & 1 scoop late 20th century Evangelical - does a lot things well, but nothing better than funerals.  My dad was baptized in this tradition, wondered thru many other traditions all his adult life, but ended up being buried w/in this tradition.  That tension seems to fit some of the arc of his life, his struggle & his joys.

Something that does not fit for me is a simple statistic:

A new study finds that only 1 percent (my emphasis) of U.S. religious congregations go out of existence each year, "which is among the lowest mortality rates ever observed for any type of organization," according to an article to be published in the June issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

More & more, I am struck by how unified Western Christianity can be in our  fear of death, our denial of the natural facts of institutions.  "The denial of death" is a phrase from Ernest Becker, and the title of his most famous book The Denial of Death , which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. Becker's book focuses on how we human beings develop strategies to fend off awareness of our mortality and vulnerability and to escape into the feeling that we're immortal.  Rather invest our hope & work in faith, Becker suggest we are committed to what he calls immortality systems, which we protect  against the exposure of our absolute truth being just one more mortality-denying system among others.  To do this, we scapegoat,  attack and degrade--preferably kill--the adherents of different mortality- denying-absolute-truth systems.

Dave Olson, author of a fascinating new book The American Church in Crisis , obverses an interesting set of implications of this phenomenon:

A "surprising fact" is that mainline churches tend to have lower closure rates than evangelical churches do. He sees an inverse correlation: the fewer churches that close, the more the denomination declines; the more churches that close, the more the denomination grows.

Like so many things in our generational shift, I suspect the Boomers will leave the recognition of death to the generations that follow them.  Boomers seem to value the pretense of immortality above all things, searching for ways to trick decay or distract from the certain signs of expiration.  So the Protestants kill the Catholics; the Muslims vilify the Christians and vice versa; upholders of the American way of life denounce "foriegners";  non-orthoxs are branded as heretics; conservatives branded as bigots; and all good students of the Enlightenment demonize religion as the source of all evil.

Here's a wish for Pentecost, which is just a few days away.  (if you are keeping score, this is my 2nd wish - here is my first). What if we looked in the mirror & embraced the immortality of some of our institutions, what  if we stopped using fear & threats to keep Pastor Enkvest full-time or Sharon as the organist or even the glorious facility that is empty 163 hours a week.  What if we took this day to day to celebrate hope, a hope evoked by the knowledge that God through His Holy Spirit is at work among     His people. As a celebration of newness, of recreation, of renewal of  purpose, mission, and calling as God’s people, what if we starting planning proper funerals from some of our dying churches.  As a recognition that God's work is done through the beloved community as God pours out a certain presence, what if we stood by the graveside, mourning with songs and words and tear.  What if we commended these glorious artifices to God, honored them, as a form of  a celebration of God’s ongoing work in the world.

As is so often the case, my imagination for this hope is captured in a movie clip, one that rather graphically depicts the denial of the death that we churchgoers choose over the joy of resurrection, the promise of new life.  Watch this - then wonder about the refrain "I'm getting much better":