The Bus Stop Nativity

Here is my sermon from Midnight Mass at St Stephen Walbrook:

Each year the Church Advertising Network creates a new advertising campaign for churches to use at Christmas. Their 2008 campaign featured a specially commissioned painting of the nativity, set in a freezing bus shelter, which was displayed in bus shelters across the UK throughout December that year. The painting is by Royal Academy Gold medal winner, Andrew Gadd and depicts the holy family, with halos, in a dark bus shelter. The shepherds and wise men are replaced with fellow passengers waiting for a bus. Some are watching the nativity intently; others appear oblivious and are checking the bus timetable and flagging down a bus.

Francis Goodwin, the Chair of Church Advertising Network, said: "We are very used to the Renaissance image of the Nativity. But what would it look like if it happened today? Where would it take place? We want to challenge people to make them reassess what the birth of Jesus means to them.” Andrew Gadd answered that question by setting the nativity in a bus stop. He explained that: "At first I didn't like the idea of painting a nativity scene in an urban setting. However, once it was explained that it was to be designed for bus stops, it gave me an idea... this idea. The bus stop when simplified is like a stable. It is after all a shelter; a place people go to but never want to be. So where better to stage a nativity? How unlikely!”

The details of the Christmas story — the visit of the angel to a poor Jewish girl, the humble occupation of the man to whom she was betrothed, the birth in a manger, the visit of the shepherds — are unlikely but not in terms of being out of the ordinary; instead they are unlikely precisely because they were ordinary.

Paul Richardson, writing in the Church of England Newspaper, reminds us that: “In the ancient world, gods were seen as superior to human beings but they remained alongside them, fighting with them, tricking them or sleeping with them ... When Homer wrote his epic poems, he wrote of kings and warriors, not ordinary people. Aristotle admired the kind of superior people who had the wealth and leisure to reflect and take part in the government of the state. Such people did not soil their hands with work. Ordinary, everyday work was left to slaves, an unimportant class of people whose job it was to free the aristocratic elite to get on with things that really mattered. How different the gospels are. In the words of the literary critic, Erich Auerbach, ‘Christ has not come as a hero and king but as a human being of the lowest social station. His first disciples were fishermen and artisans. He moved in the everyday milieu of humble folk. He talked with publicans and fallen women, the poor and the sick and children’.”

The Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, has noted, that “as a consequence of Christianity people began to view the world from the perspective of ordinary human beings. It took time for the implications of this radical development to become apparent (we are still in the process of working things out), but it led eventually to the abolition of slavery, the extension of the vote to all adults, and the view that government should exist for the benefit of everyone, not just of the rich and powerful. Almost immediately in the early years of the church, Christians were known for their readiness to care for the poor and the sick. Hospitals began as a result of the church’s work.”

This focus on ordinary people is what the bus stop nativity reminds us of. It reminds us ultimately that Jesus was born to be Emmanuel – God with us. That is what the incarnation, “the union of the human and the divine in the life of a humble Jewish carpenter,” is all about. As John 1. 14 says, in the contemporary translation of the Bible called The Message: “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood.”

Through Christ’s birth, God has entered our world and moved into our neighbourhood. In Christ, God has identified with us by becoming one of us. The entire movement of the Bible - from God walking with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, through God having a tent (the tabernacle) and then a house (the Temple) so he could live with the Israelites - led up to this moment in history when God became flesh and blood and entered our world. That is why Jesus is also called Emmanuel, which means God is with us.

What does it mean for God to be with us in the way? It means that God becomes a human being experiencing the whole trajectory of human existence from conception through birth, puberty, adulthood to death including all that we experience along the way in terms of relationships, experiences, emotions and temptations. Through his experience as a human being God understands us in ways that he could not if he had remained solely as our Creator. The letter to the Hebrews puts this well: “Since the children [meaning ourselves; all human beings] are flesh and blood, Jesus himself became like them and shared their human nature … he had to become like his brothers and sisters in every way … And now he can help those who are tempted, because he himself was tempted and suffered.”

This is what we find when we reassess what the nativity means. It is what the bus stop nativity reminds us of and, as Paul Richardson, reminds it is a major way in which Christianity marked a break with Greece and Rome: “The message of Christmas is that … it is the incarnation, the union of the human and the divine in the life of a humble Jewish carpenter, that transformed our understanding of the significance of ordinary, everyday life and led ultimately to a world where it is possible to talk of human rights and even of the fundamental equality of all human beings.”

Rowan Williams, when he visited one of the Bus Stop Nativity posters, as Archbishop of Canterbury, made just that point when he said that: "Jesus, the Son of God, … knew what it meant to be without wealth, he knew what it meant to grow up disadvantaged, he knew what it meant to turn to God in prayer, faith and hope.” And so he hoped that this image of the Holy Family, in a contemporary setting, would move those who see it “to stop, pray and reflect on what the birth of Jesus means to them in their daily lives."

Look again at the image of the bus stop nativity. A bus stop is a place that all of us go to. We are there, included in the image. Are we among those who are watching the nativity intently or are we oblivious, checking the bus timetable and flagging down a bus? What, I wonder, does it mean to us that God has become flesh and blood and has moved into our neighbourhood?

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Jon Foreman - Instead Of A Show.