Whole Lotta (eschatological) shakin'

I was cycling yesterday past the university bookshop, where I have spent many happy hours, since I arrived in London years ago. I stopped at the lights and glanced over to the windows, and saw they were selling everything with a ‘green sticker’ for a pound.

It occurred to me that this is another sign of the crisis facing our retail industry generally, including bookstores, during the pandemic. This is intensifying the problems they faced previously from internet shopping. But how many physical stores will keep going? 

The university bookstore suffers because lecturers and officeworkers aren’t coming in, and although students are beginning their new academic year this month, they won’t be attending many physical lessons. 

There is almost daily news of businesses closing and workers being made redundant.  And churches are not immune. I hear reports of congregations which are in grave financial difficulty, and may have to close down after the pandemic.

Again this is accelerating the rate of religious decline which was obvious before Covid. But it presages significant changes in the spiritual landscape. I read as well about the likelihood of many pastors resigning once the situation stabilizes, because of stress, depression or burnout.

As the realization kicks in, that Coronavirus will not be over this year, and maybe even not next year, the effort to remain positive, anf faith-filled, will become more difficult for many of us. There is a real danger that the church could “dissolve”, as Rod Dreher has put it.

Going online has enabled us to do something at least, but some were never able to master the technology, and many now are fed up with joining Zoom, or watching recorded services. There is a chance some may not return to physical services even once they restart.

Such services will also be entirely different. We cannot sing together, cannot pray, cannot hug. Once they sample these gutted, transformed, services, will some congregants simply not return? The whole concept of ‘sacred space’, never wholly Biblical, is now undercut by social distancing and virtual church.

There are, however, throughout history, many periods of severe “shaking” in the story of the church, and of Israel. The letter to the Hebrews picks up Haggai’s prophecy of a “shaking of the nations” (Hagg. 2.21 & Heb. 12.26-28).

This shaking will reveal what our cultural constructions are made of. Whatever, in our world, partakes of his rule will have its inner nature uncovered.  That which cannot be shaken will remain, and that is God’s kingdom.

And besides his faithfulness to nation, and church, there is also his promise, even faced with an eschatological shaking, of his promise to named individuals, you and me; and also symbolically to Zerubbabel (Hagg. 2.23), as a prophetic pre-figuring of the Messiah.

Since Paul Tillich’s famous sermon, “the shaking of the foundations” has been take as shorthand for circumstances of civilisational crisis (Isa. 24.18-20). But, as Isaiah reveals, amidst the shaking, God’s covenant love will remain for his people, you and me (Isa. 54.10).