Praising a Plastic Jesus...(I know that's a snowman!)

I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen the magazine programme “the one show” on BBC 1 every night at 7pm. It contains an eclectic mix of magazine type material that you tend to find on breakfast television, only it’s on in the evening; if you’ve never seen it before, think Blue Peter – but for adults.

There was an article on just before Christmas (I know that's long gone now, but I just remembered about it, and it upset me), featuring Carole Thatcher interviewing different people who made up her modern day nativity scene. One example was a farmer, a modern day shepherd, who still had to get up at 5am on Christmas day to milk his dairy herd. This countryside connection naturally struck a chord with me, but I have to say that after the doctors for wise men who also still had to work Christmas day, I was weary after a few minutes, and grew somewhat agitated. Right at the centre of the scene sat a plastic model of Jesus. This I thought, was typical of our western worldview (which I do incidentally love - lest I would be carving this in stone tablets, not posting it on my blog.)

We make Jesus into a girl, we make him into a white American from the 1970s and worst of all we make him into a powerless plastic model, an inanimate object incapable of anything vaguely like humanity or divinity. In fact it seems that we make him into everything but the transformational Middle Eastern refugee human yet God that he was, who came to heal the world through his life, death, resurrection and spirit. Please- don’t make Christ into what you have made his world of.

the mormon on market street

A couple of weeks ago, as I wandered around Manchester City Centre with bags full of Christmas shopping, I came across a conveniently placed bench to sit and eat my Boots Meal Deal Sandwich at.

As I sat there, devouring my two crusted triangles, a young woman from the church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints approached me. She was young, not more than twenty years old with brown hair and an empty expression on her face.

With a brief and polite "Excuse me", she began to tell me about what she believed. My expectation was that I would hear nothing new and we had a discussion about prophets and authority. I told her that I was a Christian; I was surprised that she not attempt to define herself at all. This disappointed me. Eventually I told her that I was not interested in a home visit, but would like to know more about what mormons believed. I asked her for the web address.

I came away feeling challenged, not because my faith was floundering, because it was not, nor because I wanted to become a mormon, because I did not. Rather, I was concerned that this person was allowing herself to be treated like a catalogue. She was just there to sell something. Amidst the flurry of consumerism occurring that day, their existed another instance of buying and selling, but this time it was ideas, and not socks from primark.

Throughout our conversation, I was continually bombarded by questions in my own mind; who was this person? What was her name? What were her experiences? How had she gotten involved in Mormonism? What was her Job? What was her family background? Had she, like me, fallen over when she was a child, and scraped her knees.

Of course, she must have had an answer to all these questions, but I chickened out and didn't ask her the one question that would sum all of these up:

Who are you?

The experience was full of emptiness; I felt that her life reflected the expression on her face, but could not quite get my head around what was happening here. I was also challenged by my own lack of courage. Why didn't I ask the question that would have undermined the script, and engage this person in truly life changing conversation? It was, I felt, a challenge from God.