Something greater than the temple is here

Here's the sermon I shared at St Andrew’s Basildon this evening:

When his disciples were criticised by the Pharisees, Jesus responded by saying “something greater than the temple is here” and “the Son of Man is lord of the sabbath” (Matthew 12: 1-21). What did he mean?

The Temple in Jerusalem was the dwelling of God with his people. Biblical Scholar Margaret Barker writes that: “A temple stood in Jerusalem for over a thousand years. According to the biblical account, the first temple was built by Solomon about 950 BCE and was severely damaged by the Babylonians about 350 years later. It was rebuilt towards the end of the sixth century BCE by people who returned from exile in Babylon, and was rebuilt again by Herod the Great at the end of the first century BCE. The structure was finally destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, but the influence of the temple and its world has far outlasted its physical existence.”

Barker says that: “The Temple was a model of the creation, and the liturgy of the temple preserved the creation. Genesis 1 was not an account of the historical process of creation, but a record of the great vision granted to Moses and others of how the world is made. In the six days when Moses was on Sinai, before the LORD called to him (Exod. 24.16), he saw the six days of creation, and was then told to replicate these when he built the tabernacle …

The holy of holies represented Day One, the state of the angels … The veil of the temple represented the second day, and the table with bread, wine and incense was the third day, when the plants were created. The seven branched lamp represented the lights of heaven created on the fourth day, the altar of sacrifice represented the non human creatures, and the High Priest was the human, male and female as the image of God … The Second Adam [Jesus] was the Great High Priest, and if we are the body of Christ, we all have this high priestly role.”

What happens with the birth of Jesus is that God himself lives with us in our world. God moves into our neighbourhood and, as a result, the Temple is no longer God’s principal dwelling on earth and the meaning of the Temple is comes to be expressed through Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.

Barker explains it like this: “… the world of the temple was the world of the first Christians, and they expressed their faith in terms drawn almost exclusively from the temple. Jesus and his followers opposed what the temple had become; they identified themselves as the true temple, with Jesus as the great high priest.

When Jesus was arrested by the temple authorities, one of the charges brought against him was threatening to destroy the temple and to rebuild it in three days (Mark 14. 58). Another was claiming to be the Messiah (Matt. 26. 63-64). These were two aspects of the same charge, as can be deduced from the Book of Enoch, a text which the early Christians regarded as Scripture. The Book of Enoch described the judgement of the fallen angels, and then how the Lord of the sheep would carry away the old temple and set up something greater in its place (1 Enoch 90. 28-29). This is the reason for the two questions at Jesus’ trial: Did you claim that you would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days? Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One? This same passage accounts for the exchange between Jesus and the Jews recorded in John 2. 19-21: ‘Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?”’ Later reflection led the evangelist to add, ‘But he spoke of the temple of his body’. Jesus was claiming the prophecy of Enoch, that he was the Lord of the sheep who would destroy and rebuild the temple …”

“Jesus was … [the] great high priest (Heb. 4.14) … raised up by the power of an indestructible life (Heb. 7.16) who had offered the final atonement sacrifice to fulfil and supersede the temple rites (Heb. 9.1-14).” Atonement was the ritual self offering of the Lord to renew the eternal covenant and thus heal the creation. This is what Jesus’ death achieved and is the covenant renewed at the Last Supper.

In this way the New Testament reverses the story of Eden and brings Christians back to the original Temple meaning that the “kingdom of which Jesus spoke was the state of the holy of holies, the unity at the heart of all things which secured the eternal covenant … This must be the original context for ‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ and for ‘This is my blood of the covenant, poured out for many for the putting away of sins’ (Matt. 26. 28).”

It is for this reason that Jesus is able to call himself the Lord of the Sabbath because at his death the veil of the Temple was torn in two opening the holy of holies to all people everywhere. Meaning that, through his death and resurrection we can enter into the unity at the heart of all things and the rest that God experienced on the seventh day, which the Book of Hebrews tells us, we are still to enter and which is symbolised for us in this life by the sabbath.

Jesus speaks of something greater than the temple being here and the Son of Man being lord of the sabbath almost as asides in his response to the Pharisees. It is easy to overlook the significance of what he says as a result. I hope, in sharing these brief thoughts, I have wetted your appetite to go away and discover more. Amen.

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Neal Morse - Inside His Presence.

Church Times - Art review: Judy Chicago: Revelations at Serpentine North, London

My latest exhibition review for Church Times is on Judy Chicago: Revelations at Serpentine North, London:

'A final recent drawing And God Created Life, sums up Chicago’s belief, as described by Martha Easton, that a “united humanity” through “the blending of genders in the very body of God anticipates the reclamation of Eden and the resultant peace on earth” as envisaged at the end of Revelations. This fascinating exhibition and Chicago’s body of work challenge us to consider how we might “imagine a more equitable and inclusive world”.'

Other of my pieces for Church Times can be found here. My writing for ArtWay can be found here. My pieces for Artlyst are here, those for Seen & Unseen are here, and those for Art+Christianity are here.

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Judee Sill - The Kiss.

Tending the world

Here's the sermon I preached at St Andrew’s Wickford this morning:

Animals and plants were first domesticated across a region stretching north from modern-day Israel, Palestine and Lebanon to Syria and eastern Turkey, then east into, northern Iraq and north-western Iran, and south into Mesopotamia; a region known as the Fertile Crescent. This was in the Neolithic Period, also known as the New Stone Age.

It is arguable that this is the period of human history that is described by the creation story told in Genesis 2.4b-9, 15-17. Ernest Lucas notes that Eden is located at the place where the Tigris and Euphrates rise – which is in the upland plateaux of Turkey and that the word ‘Eden’ may come from a Babylonian word meaning ‘plateaux’. He also notes that Genesis 4 tells of a descendent of Adam called Tubal-Cain, who was the first person to use metal to make things. That means that Adam must have used only stone implements. Genesis 2 tells us that Adam was a gardener and that he tamed animals. All of which adds up to a picture of Adam as what we would call a ‘New Stone Age man’.

This is the point in history when human beings begin, by a combination of social organisation (sociality) and individual creativity (development), to have a choice about how we behave ethically. Prior to this point human beings had been hunters, migrants dependent on the movements of their prey and participants in the natural ‘kill or be killed’ processes of a nature that is ‘red in tooth and claw.’ However, as human beings developed agriculturally and socially, the killing of animals and other human beings was no longer essential and ethical choices become possible.

So, the biblical creation stories locate the image of God in the ability of human beings to be consciously social and creative. Albert Wolters comments that: “Adam and Eve, as the first married couple, represent the beginnings of societal life; their task of tending the garden, the primary task of agriculture, represents the beginnings of cultural life." (Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview)

In speaking of Genesis 1, Wolters suggests that: ‘There is a process of development and evolution as the earthly realm assumes, step by step, the contours of the variegated world of our experience. On the sixth day this process is completed with the creation of [human beings], and on the seventh day God rests from his labors. This is not the end of the development of creation, however.’

Creation, once made, is not something that remains a static quality. ‘There is, as it were, a growing up (though not in a biological sense), an unfolding of creation.’ ‘Although God has withdrawn from the work of creation, he has put an image of himself on the earth with a mandate to continue. The earth had been completely unformed and empty; in the six-day process of development God had formed it and filled it – but not completely. People … now carry on the work of development: by being fruitful they must fill it even more; by subduing it they must form it even more. [Hu]mankind, as God’s representatives on earth, carry on where God left off.’

Human development of the created earth is societal and cultural in nature. We are to use our organisational abilities in community and our creativity to cultivate creation (to make it fruitful) and to care for it (to maintain and sustain it), just as God told Adam to work the ground and keep it in order. As God’s image bearers we have a responsibility to care for and work with the good environment God has created.

God’s first words to men and women, were that they would rule over ’the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground’ in a way that reflects his own image. Not just God’s power, but his unselfish love, mercy and tender compassion. We have been given a special task – to look after the rest of what God has made (Genesis 1: 26–28; Gen. 2:15). This is not an optional extra for a few keen environmentalists, but a fundamental part of what it means to be human.

Today we are seeing massive climate change and increased destruction and pollution of creation. We are treating God’s gift badly and it is the poorest in our world who will suffer most from that reality. Tragically, our rule over creation has been characterized by cruelty, greed and short-sightedness, but this was clearly not God’s intention. If we desire to obey God, then we must look for ways in which we can be good and responsible stewards of the natural world by reducing our environmental impact and raising awareness of the environmental challenges we face today as a global community.

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Bruce Cockburn - If A Tree Falls.

Poem: A second Adam lifted up

This poem is based on today's reading from the Hebrew Scripture - Numbers 21.4-9:

Fatal snake bite inflicted in a garden;
serum spreading through the human
body, poison inflaming man
to be a wolf to man - vampiric
predator normalizing evil, unthinkable
terror routinely inflicted by militant
ignorance, the disease of legion.

Brazen serpent on a pole, innocent victim,
scapegoat, a second Adam lifted up. Venom
taken into God initiates immune system response;
antibodies - taken intravenously - bind and
neutralize. The form and flowers of evil
assumed, embraced, transformed
as antivenom, for the purposes of healing.

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Carleen Anderson - Leopards in the Temple.

Creation care

Here is the reflection I offered at St Martin-in-the-Fields during yesterday's Choral Eucharist:

Animals and plants were first domesticated across a region stretching north from modern-day Israel, Palestine and Lebanon to Syria and eastern Turkey, then east into, northern Iraq and north-western Iran, and south into Mesopotamia; a region known as the Fertile Crescent. This was in the Neolithic Period, also known as the New Stone Age.

It is arguable that this is the period of human history that is described by the creation story told in Genesis 2.4b-9, 15-17. Ernest Lucas notes that Eden is located at the place where the Tigris and Euphrates rise – which is in the upland plateaux of Turkey and that the word ‘Eden’ may come from a Babylonian word meaning ‘plateaux’. He also notes that Genesis 4 tells of a descendent of Adam called Tubal-Cain, who was the first person to use metal to make things. That means that Adam must have used only stone implements. Genesis 2 tells us that Adam was a gardener and that he tamed animals. All of which adds up to a picture of Adam as what we would call a ‘New Stone Age man’.

This is the point in history when human beings begin, by a combination of social organisation (sociality) and individual creativity (development), to have a choice about how we behave ethically. Prior to this point human beings had been hunters, migrants dependent on the movements of their prey and participants in the natural ‘kill or be killed’ processes of a nature that is ‘red in tooth and claw.’ However, as human beings developed agriculturally and socially, the killing of animals and other human beings was no longer essential and ethical choices become possible.

So, the biblical creation stories locate the image of God in the ability of human beings to be consciously social and creative. Albert Wolters comments that: “Adam and Eve, as the first married couple, represent the beginnings of societal life; their task of tending the garden, the primary task of agriculture, represents the beginnings of cultural life." (Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview)

In speaking of Genesis 1, Wolters suggests that: ‘There is a process of development and evolution as the earthly realm assumes, step by step, the contours of the variegated world of our experience. On the sixth day this process is completed with the creation of [human beings], and on the seventh day God rests from his labors. This is not the end of the development of creation, however.’

Creation, once made, is not something that remains a static quality. ‘There is, as it were, a growing up (though not in a biological sense), an unfolding of creation.’ ‘Although God has withdrawn from the work of creation, he has put an image of himself on the earth with a mandate to continue. The earth had been completely unformed and empty; in the six-day process of development God had formed it and filled it – but not completely. People … now carry on the work of development: by being fruitful they must fill it even more; by subduing it they must form it even more. [Hu]mankind, as God’s representatives on earth, carry on where God left off.’

Human development of the created earth is societal and cultural in nature. We are to use our organisational abilities in community and our creativity to cultivate creation (to make it fruitful) and to care for it (to maintain and sustain it), just as God told Adam to work the ground and keep it in order. As God’s image bearers we have a responsibility to care for and work with the good environment God has created.

God’s first words to men and women, were that they would rule over ’the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground’ in a way that reflects his own image. Not just God’s power, but his unselfish love, mercy and tender compassion. We have been given a special task – to look after the rest of what God has made (Genesis 1: 26–28; Gen. 2:15). This is not an optional extra for a few keen environmentalists, but a fundamental part of what it means to be human.

Today we are seeing massive climate change and increased destruction and pollution of creation. We are treating God’s gift badly and it is the poorest in our world who will suffer most from that reality. Tragically, our rule over creation has been characterized by cruelty, greed and short-sightedness, but this was clearly not God’s intention. If we desire to obey God, then we must look for ways in which we can be good and responsible stewards of the natural world by reducing our environmental impact and raising awareness of the environmental challenges we face today as a global community.

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Bruce Cockburn - If A Tree Falls.

Andrez Kuhn and Dora Holzandler

Goldmark Gallery have announced the death last week of gallery artist, Andrzej Kuhn. They write, 'His paintings, deceptively naive yet highly sophisticated, have brought warmth and comfort to all those who have set eyes on them. He will be greatly missed by all of us at the gallery and all who knew him.'

In the essay 'Kuhn at Eighty' his work is described as follows: 'Flat, mythical scenes, in a rich palette of colours and subtle textures, are always peopled by strange and wonderful characters; weary travellers, resting angels, benevolent moons, lions, lovers, fishermen and musicians. For Kuhn, these are real people, real events, their images arriving, fully formed, in his imagination pulled from the reservoir of human experience.'

The Gallery's current exhibition is Dora Holzhandler A Celebration. Philip Vann writes, 'A mystical note resounds in her vibrant portrayals of lovers emparadised in each other’s arms in opulently patterned bedrooms, of mothers and children in Eden-like gardens, of families endearingly observed as they gather in celebratory attitude, and in ethereal, luminous images that capture everyday life with spontaneous joy and clarity.'

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Jon Foreman - Southbound Train.

My Greenbelt 2012 journal (2)

Saturday 25^th August

A hot shower, cooked breakfast and good conversation at the Rectory where I staying provide a great beginning to a day that will see torrential showers and the resulting quagmire.

John Polkinghorne highlighted the particularity of our universe by means of the specific conditions which created carbon. The universe was pregnant with rich potentiality and possibility from the very beginning but in very short spaces of time finely tuned chemical reactions were required for life to emerge; slight differences would have meant that the carbon necessary for life could not have developed. At the opposite extreme, a very large universe is required for life to emerge and our universe is sufficiently large. The particular conditions for life met within our universe point to a fine tuning of the laws of nature - creation. This is an enduring condition with new things coming into being under particular circumstances at the edge of chaos where life is neither too ordered or too haphazard. This is the snake in Eden – evolution comes at a cost; ragged edges and blind alleys. Creation has to exist at a distance from the Creator for free will to genuinely operate. Therefore, the mutation of cells at the edge of chaos has a shadow side; cells can mutate in ways that are malignant (cancerous) as well as benign. This is the inevitable cost of a world able to make itself through an evolving chemistry of life.

The universe is expanding and cooling; the eventual result will be its end in futility and decay. “The more I understand the universe, the more it seems pointless,” says Stephen Weinberg. Christianity speaks, however, of the faithfulness of the Creator and a destiny after death. Continuity and discontinuity is therefore implied. The constantly changing atoms of our bodies carry the information, pattern or structure of our character and memories. This pattern is the real person and could be preserved in the divine mind to be resurrected in the different matter of a future different body and world. New matter transformed from the old. Jesus’ resurrection is the seed event for this possibility and sacraments are occasions when the veil between this world and the next is thinned.

Based on this I write:

In the tension of the now and not yet,

between order and disintegration,

between anarchy and regimentation,

in between, the broken middle,

the crack where the light gets in,

is the edge of chaos where life evolves,

where change occurs not free of cost –

ragged edges, blind alleys, the snake in Eden –

evolution into consciousness, falling up.

Diarmaid MacCulloch spoke about his attempt to show the wider public the importance of Church history by reshaping the way the story is told. Christianity is a personality cult as Jesus is the one constant in the diversity of the faith. Christians tell stories about Jesus in which audacious claims are made about his divinity and continuing presence. The Bible is a diverse library of books. The ideas at the heart of all world religions are flexible and change as the religions mutate and change to survive.

Christianity has unstable roots are it has two different sources; Judaism and Hellenism. Judaism speaks of a passionate, angry God while the Greeks spoke of a perfect, unchanging God. The first four centuries of Christianity are trying to reconcile these two dichotomies. Christianity, therefore, is essentially a question. A key moment is this debate comes with the Council of Calcedon in 451CE. The compromise worked out there has come to characterise Roman Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox expressions of the faith but at the time it was a disaster as it was not accepted by two-thirds of the Church. It was only because of the growth of Islam and its later development of a missionary aspect which caused the fading of the influence and ideas of that two-thirds Church which had rejected Calcedon. This was historical accident which could easily have been different if the influence of the Church of the East had been maintained. Historically, it is clear that the Church has always been diverse.

McCulloch was asked about accessible Early Church histories and didn’t provide much in the way of ideas but could have pointed to the excellent Video Timeline Project by Tim Hull at St John’s Nottingham which was being promoted in G-Source.

The rains came while Pádraig Ó Tuama, who seems to be the unofficial poet laureate of Greenbelt, was entertaining us with lengthy comedic introductions to the short depressive ‘Reading from the Book of Exile’ poems (his description). There were more poetic songs from Bruce Cockburn in an unplugged session at the Big Top. “I’m thinking ‘bout eternity. Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me,” lines from ‘Wondering where the Lions are’, which could sum up the GB12 content thus far.

My own poem seems to have reached what may be a realised final form:

There is no culmination, no end to need or greed,

no resolution - the need to dim the lights never ceases.

Your people age and fail and demand unless I cry,

‘No more, no more,’ and die. When will the culmination come?

When needs are met? When work ceases? When demands are done?

Always more, more, more. Human selfishness calls love without limits

into being –the tap of love turned full on – ever-flowing.

No end, no culmination, no resolution.

Take up the cross, become the host;

continually broken, consumed and re-membered.

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Pádraig Ó Tuama - Readings from the Book of Exile.

Floral stained glass

Kasey-Rae Passfield is currently studying photography at Norwich University College of the Arts. For her current project she has been looking at contemporary stained glass windows in order to create stained glass windows using flowers and repetition.

In her final image pressed flowers are collaged on paper to create the impression of stained glass windows. She has created a design with five lights using her black backing paper to give a sense of lead lines. The lights on both the left and right of her design balance each other by means of repeating images while the central light contains its own balanced design.

Passfield's windows depict a garden with dense foliage and the impression in the central light of sky and sun. This image works firstly as a decorative evocation of a well planted garden in full bloom but also, given the prominent use of stained glass within an ecclesiastical setting can also prompt thoughts of that most famous of gardens, the garden of Eden as mentioned in the book of Genesis. The role of human beings in Eden was to tend and care for this garden within which God himself walked. Here Passfield creates a well tended garden through which, as with stained glass itself, the light of the divine can be seen to shine.

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Gungor - You Are The Beauty. 

Exhibition reviews

Today I was fascinated to see, and a little underwhelmed by, Michelangelo Pistoletto's The Mirror of Judgement at the Serpentine Gallery.

Pistoletto is a leading figure in the development of both Arte Povera and conceptual art and this installation has had rave reviews, including the Guardian calling it "a beautiful and mind-expanding experience." As in much of his work, Pistoletti has here made use of religious concepts, imagery and phrases together with his repeated use of labyrinths and mirrors. He has written that "the mirror is the mediator between the visible and the invisible, carrying sight beyond it's normal possibilities" but has also stated  that the "image in the mirror is objective; there is no interpretation.”

Pistoletto argues that at "the beginning of our century, the avant-garde made art again autonomous." "Art ceased to be a symbol of religious and political power" and "actively takes possession of those structures such as religious which rule thought; not with a view to replacing them itself, but in order to substitute them with a different interpretative system, a system intended to enhance people’s capacity to exerting the functions of their own thought." This is where Pistoletto's labyrinth is intended to lead us. We move past symbols of four religions (a prayer mat, statue of Buddha, prayer stall, each before mirror, represent Islam, Buddhism and Christianity respectively, while a pair of large arched mirrors stand in for the Jewish Torah), to a central chamber containing a mirrored obelisk and the New Infinity sign (Pistoletto's symbol for the Third Paradise; a fusion between the first paradise in which terrestrial life is completely regulated by nature’s intelligence and the second Artificial Paradise which is developed by human intellect).

All this background information seems necessary in order to relate to Pistoletti's intent for this work; meaning that the work relies on a literary interpretation. The ambience at the Serpentine, at least as I experienced it, is not particularly contemplative as notices ban the touching of the work (due to its fragility), gallery attendants chat in corners, and there is no sense of the prayer objects inviting use. Visually, the concept is literal; mirrors judge us each time we use them and Pistoletto's installation doesn't alter that experience significantly without knowledge of the literary concepts that underpin the work.

Also at the Serpentine currently is this year's Gallery Pavilion designed by Peter Zumthor. Zumthor's pavilion as a "hortus conclusus", an enclosed garden, also relates to concepts of Eden or paradise. In Zumthor's essay about the pavilion, he begins by writing: "We come from nature and return to nature; we are conceived and born; we live and die; we rot or burn and vanish into the earth."

Out of Australia at the British Museum begins with the opposite; the wilderness inspired expressionism of the ‘Angry Penguins’ group of artists – Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker and Joy Hester. Arthur Boyd is a favourite artist and his prints do not disappoint formed, as they, through their fevered, passionate mark-making, echo the strength of the content. The exhibition includes an early work in Boyd's highly original Nebuchadnezzar series. Boyd and Tucker both address the passionate and predatory aspects of eroticism, something that also features in Eric Gill: public and private art, the other British Museum exhibition that I visited today. Gill combined sensuality and spirituality in images such Divine Lovers, which forms the centrepiece of this small review highlighting the wide range of his work. The effect that knowledge of the abusive element of Gill's sexual practice has on our response to the sensuality of his work is rightly noted but the primary focus is on his art and ideas.

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The Smiths - Cemetry Gates.

Eden at the Serpentine

Kieran Long has written a very interesting piece in the London Evening Standard about this year's Serpentine Gallery pavilion created by Peter Zumthor.

Zumthor has referred to his pavilion as a "hortus conclusus", an enclosed garden, and Long notes that  the reference inherent in this garden/cloister hybrid goes "to the very roots of Western culture, the mystical Christian tradition of the inviolate Eden that the Latin words call to mind":

"It is not simply a monastic kitchen garden; it has to do with how gardens connect us to the most universal of themes. In Zumthor's essay about the pavilion, he begins by writing: "We come from nature and return to nature; we are conceived and born; we live and die; we rot or burn and vanish into the earth." These are not the words of an artist merely engaged in the manipulation of sensory effects.

Perhaps death, life, religion and the mystical universals implied by walled gardens are taboo at the press conference of a fashionable art institution but it is undoubtedly in the background of Zumthor's thinking, even if he doesn't quite make it explicit. He has spent the past few years working on projects deeply connected with the Catholic Church. The first, a modest chapel in a field in Germany (Bruder Klaus Chapel, 2007) is made of the roughest concrete blackened by intentional charring, with a poured lead floor. The second is the beautiful Kolumba museum in Cologne, run by the catholic Diocese of Cologne (2008), which works with existing historic ruins to make an ambiguous civic monument. Neither of these projects is in any way dogmatic about Catholic faith, but both of them deal with how architecture can help us understand our place in the world."

Long applauds Zumthor's "serious-minded attention to the most universal themes in architecture."

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Ed Sheeran - Wayfaring Stranger.

Bus Stop Nativity

This Christmas, a specially commissioned painting of the nativity, set in a freezing bus shelter, is being displayed at selected bus shelters across the UK. 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.

This bus shelter image reminds us that, in the words of the literary critic, Eric 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’.

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 - leads up to this moment in history when God becomes flesh and blood and enters 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 one of us. He 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.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, when he visited one of the Bus Stop Nativity posters last Christmas made just this 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 out for the image of the bus stop nativity or look it up online at http://www.churchads.org.uk/2009/index.html. 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 does it mean to us that God has become flesh and blood and has moved into our neighbourhood?

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Joan Osborne - One Of Us.