I suppose that there are some moments that stay with you, and acquire the significance of milestones on the journey through life. One of these, for me, was about fourteen years ago, when we had two West Highland Terriers, Topsy and Jenny. Hannah would be about two, and was sitting on my knee. She suddenly started plucking at my beard, eliciting a "Yeow!" and a "What are you doing, pet?"

Still plucking away, she said "Topsy's fur! Topsy's fur!" I put her down, and walked over to the mirror. After a few seconds, I was able to announce, sombrely, "No, pet - it's your dad's fur!" So appeared my first white hair.

Well, last week came another milestone moment. The doorbell rang, and it was the postie. Not our usual postie, who is, I reckon, from the same rich and full-bodied fifties vintage I am. No, this was a young lad I didn't remember seeing before, a cheery young guy, who had a package I needed to sign for. I obliged him, and he responded with a cheery "Thanks, pops!"

Thanks, pops...

Here I am, barely more than twice his age, and he thinks I'm his grandfather...

But then, I was wearing these specs. These "half-moon" specs I thought made me look so distinguished and intellectual. And I was thrown back uncomfortably into another milestone moment, when, about eighteen months ago, I had finally yielded to the accumulating evidence that I wasn't seeing as well as I had once, and went to the optician for an eye test. The young optician was lovely, and clearly very competent, but seemed to be about fourteen.

And she said, without any idea of what such words convey when you're on the receiving end "Well, Mr. Jones, this kind of decline in your eyesight is the result of age..."

And so it is. I know it is. It's called "presbyopia" - where "presby" comes from the same root as "Presbyterian" - the Greek word presbuteros, meaning "old man" or, in our case as a denomination, "elder".

But did she have to be so blunt?

Of course she did. She isn't there yet. Neither is the young postie.

But more than that, they - and I, and you also - live in a very particular culture. There are many reasons for it, but many sociologists have used the expression "death-phobic" for the culture we live in. We are afraid of death. To which a very natural response - and one of which many other sociological pronouncements may be worthy, would be "Well duh..." Who isn't afraid of death?

But this is more than that. It isn't that our society is full of people who are afraid of dying. It's that our culture has no room for death, no way of facing up to it, no resource for integrating it into our understanding of what life is. Consequently, we spend a lot of time, and huge amounts of money, pushing death to the margins, so that we only ever have to look at it through the corner of the eye. We meet death as something alien, something which has no place, and therefore as a monstrous, uncontainable threat to everything that makes sense.

Several scholars of our culture even suggest that that's why so many of our films are full of the most unbelievably gory killing and dying - what one scholar called a "pornography of the dying". Action thrillers take us through a world which is really a distorted reflection of our own social reality, as we fear it is. In our culture, the argument goes, the worst thing you can be, beyond a liar, or a murderer, is a loser - and the ultimate loser is the person who dies. So we follow Arnie or Sly Stallone on a rampage, usually fuelled by some basic justifying urge, often revenge, which involves a ridiculous body count. And the purpose of all this killing is, on this view, to make one simple point. At the end of the film, whoever else has been killed, (even, sometimes, the hero, like Schwarzenegger himself in Terminator II) we haven't. We, the audience, are still alive. We are immortal.

But doesn't the same logic run through adverts - especially adverts for beauty products, and "anti-ageing" creams? "Looked in the mirror recently, and seen those tell-tale first signs of ageing?"

"Turn back time!"

"Grecian 2000 Foam works the way nature does, one day at a time, gradually restoring true colour." (Well, from my experience with the postie, that's the exact opposite of how nature works!)

"Ultralase laser eye treatment is remarkable. For many patients it means a return to the clear vision they enjoyed as a child. For others - those who have had to wear glasses or contact lenses all their lives - it can be a revelation."

Perfection. A return to childhood or youth. Immortality. And that's really what it's about. The only antidote to death-phobia is - immortality. And Woody Allen put it best, and on behalf of our whole culture: "I don't want to be immortal through my work. I want to be immortal through not dying..."

We should never underestimate the importance of films and adverts like these as clues to our society and the way it works. It's often portrayed as "pagan" and "anti-Christian", and as embracing values which are the antithesis of those of traditional Christianity - and often, if we're honest, in ways which suggest Christian interest-groups wingeing about their loss of social power. We really need to be as honest as we can when we look at our culture - does it really look like a collection of happy, sinful people wilfully disregarding the Will of God? Or does it look more as though something has ebbed away, something which people counted on to tell them what made sense, what made their lives hang together, what, even in the face of death, gave life meaning? And doesn't it look a lot like a huge sea of frightened people all just trying to stay afloat, to stay alive as long as they can, because, basically, there is nothing else for them?

Staying alive, not dying, is what makes you not a loser. Staying even slightly ahead of the game, staying ahead even slightly of the others, makes losers of those who fall behind, and makes those who do stay ahead something else, something other than a loser. The only way to be sure not to be a loser is not to be sucked in. Trust in yourself, and - for now - trust in the people who love you. Just for now. Beyond that, don't get sucked in. You can't change the way the world is. Even to think that way is to be a loser. Doesn't this make sense as a way of looking at our culture?

It's interesting what this does to religion. Specifically to Christianity. Because all of a sudden, and to a truly frightening degree, huge swathes, especially of conservative Protestantism are buying into this way of thinking, and what's worse is that they seem genuinely to believe at the same time that they are mounting a huge Christian protest against it all!

But in the end, what they are buying into is the ideology that the really important thing in all existence is not to be a loser. That's why so many modern hymns go a bundle on power and glory.

There is power in the name of Jesus

Like a sword in our hands

We declare in the name of Jesus

We shall stand! We shall stand!

At his name, God's enemies

Shall be crushed beneath our feet

For there is no other name that is higher than Jesus.

© Noel Richards, Kingsway's Thankyou Music

The difficulty for this sort of outlook is that if you read the Gospels according to this cultural logic, Jesus of Nazareth is one of the biggest losers of all time. It isn't just that he himself gets crucified. It's everything that he teaches. The first shall be last, and the last first! Turn the other cheek! If you want to follow me, take up your cross day by day! Don't be angry with your brother. If someone extorts work or service from you, give them double, voluntarily. Forgive to seventy times seven times.As the philosopher Nietzsche saw with absolute clarity, this is loserama! A "slave mentality," he called it.

At least, that's what it is done out of fear. That's what it is when you are so sure that it's what God wants, that you are terrified not to live like this. And we are just at the end of a period of maybe four hundred and fifty years in which people were indeed terrified of a God who was inside their heads, threatening them with hell if they didn't do their "duty".

The sad thing is that, right at the beginning of that period of four hundred and fifty years, right at the moment of the Reformation, people could see things differently. Martin Luther had tried to terrify himself into being a Good Man, and it hadn't worked, because Luther had the clear sight to see this. The more you terrify yourself into trying to do what God wants, the less sure you are that you measure up. God becomes nothing more than terror, fear and repression. And to do these things, to forgive, to do charity, to go the extra mile, because you fear not to, is the royal road to hating God.

And Martin Luther was saddled with a God he hated - until he looked behind Him and found another God, a God of grace and forgiveness and love and life. And he found that to try to embrace the life Christ calls us to, out of sheer love of God, is something we can really have a go at — when God's love and grace set us free to do it.

Of course, when Protestantism appeared in society, its potential for making people behave, and do their duty, was unmissable. And for four hundred and fifty years, a coalition of God, the State and the Law ruled people's lives and kept their noses to the grindstone. And whatever they thought of it, however much they hated it - that was the way things were...

Down to 1963. You can date it as closely as that! And then everything changed. Because we changed. We've discussed this a lot at the Lambs and Elephants Group, and I'm with Betty Clark. The sixties were a Good Thing. But more than that, they were inevitable. They were the beginning of the dissolution of the old order, where Christianity was often turned into nothing but morality, with a ferocious God to enforce it.

But where have they left us? Well - here. In a changed world. A world with no unifying social concept of God, a world in a process of incredibly radical change. This world, the one we all know, from the TV and the papers and films and pop music.

And this, now, is where we have to be the Church. And we have two choices. We can go with the Christian powermongers, or we can follow the crucified Christ. We can look back to the glory-days when the Church was a force in the land, and when religion ruled people's lives, and we can sing dodgy hymns drawn from the Book of Joshua about conquering and subduing people beneath our feet, or we can accept the central dynamic of the Christian faith, which is Crucifixion-Resurrection. We can go along with our death-phobic culture and pretend that we are immortal. Or we can follow our actual Lord, and risk dying for the sake of the life we were always meant to have.

In the end, it boils down to this choice: immortality or resurrection. Immortality is the age-old dream of not having to think of death at all, because it won't touch us. Immortality is having no limits. Immortality is what our death-phobic culture craves - that's why it has no room for the "loser", because the loser is the person touched by death; unemployed people, people living in poverty, people with elevated death-rates as a consequence. Older people, people in whom the signs of ageing, and therefore death, are to be seen. People on the streets, literally "outside". And people from the third world, losers who chose to be born in the wrong country.

But faith in resurrection is to embrace the inevitability of death, and to do so knowing that death is conquered - and yet we must die. Resurrection-faith is to accept, even embrace, our limitations, and even that those limitations increase. Resurrection faith is to choose to stand with the losers - the poor, the unemployed, the marginalized, the excluded - because it is faith in the biggest loser of all, Jesus of Nazareth, and faith that his open, vulnerable life of love, so far from being a nightmare of loserama stupidity in a world that punishes and

destroys losers, is actually the only kind of life that makes sense, if God really is as Jesus reveals him to be.

And the story of Thomas in this morning's Gospel is the story of the awakening of resurrection faith. He cannot believe the great proclamation of the Resurrection until he touches the hands and side. He cannot believe in the Risen One - "My Lord and my God!" -until he has seen the wounds of the crucified loser, who was his Jesus. Thomas's faith, in a strange way, is so true to Jesus, so much invested in Jesus, that it dies with him, and has to be resurrected.

And this is the way it is with Jesus Christ. Faith in him is resurrection faith. And sometimes it, itself, has to die in order to come to a new and astounding and transforming life. Isn't this what's happening in our own experience, as the Church of the twenty-first century? The old ways of "doing Christianity" are dying. Many of what claim to be the new ways are really just the dying protests of the old, connected with ideas of glory and power and - basically -immortality.

The challenge in front of us is to follow Jesus Christ into death and resurrection, to embrace our limitations and even our powerlessness, and to allow ourselves, as the church and as its members, to be remade, reshaped. We are called, the whole Church, to be the Community of the Resurrection. To pass through a death whose power is real, but broken, and not ultimate, to a new life which, as Paul tells us, is as different from what we now know as the life of the full-grown plant is different to the meagre life of the seed.

So I'm not cross with the postie. He made me think about important things this week. Next time I see him, I'll let him call me pops, if he wants to.

I might even give him a Werther's Original...