June Osbourne’s song is full of questions - just look at the number of question marks in the words of the song as they’re printed on your sheets - but they all point in one direction: they ask ‘Is there a distance between God and us, and what would life be like if somehow we could bridge that distance?’  The song takes up a position where God is outside of our our world and, as a result, we have no experience of God, and God has no experience of what it is like to be us.

The song also challenges the lip service that is often paid to formal religion.  I think the lines, ‘Yeah, yeah God is good and yeah, yeah God is great’ point towards the times when perhaps we say the words of our faith without really meaning what they mean.  

The song points to the fact that, as Christians, we have a massive communication problem.  We struggle to share the message that God is one of us and that God participates in the lives we live.  It seems that most people don’t believe that; and many do not hear it or have it explained to them.  Doesn’t it seem strange that after centuries of theological exploration, and after 2000- years-worth of Christmas festivals when we proclaim quite specifically that God was born into our world to share our humanity, so many of us still ask the question, ‘What if God was one of us’?

So, perhaps the deeper question behind the song is, ‘Why have we lost that connection between Emmanuel - the ‘God with us’ of 2000 years ago, and ‘God as one of us’ today?’  Well, probably part of the reason is that we sometimes find it difficult to make a 2000-year-old story into something which has a contemporary meaning for us.  

Somehow, the story of God becoming one of us gets frozen in its own time period.  To be fair to ourselves, the story is wrapped around by the cultural images of its time and place.  Shepherds, stables, donkeys, oxen, swaddling bands, and astrologers presenting symbolic gifts, are all features which don’t translate easily into a significance for our own times.  The surroundings of Jesus’s adult life and ministry - temples, blood sacrifices, lepers, lakeside fisherfolk, public stonings and crucifixions - also tend to freeze our understanding of his life and ministry into a society which is no longer part of our experience.  We may believe that it happened then, but we don’t know how to connect with the fact that ‘God with us’ is a universal and eternal truth - and as relevant today as it was when Jesus of Nazareth walked the earth.  Or as the song puts it: we don’t see God on the bus finding his way home.

But if God is love; and if the message of Jesus was to love God, to love others, and to love ourselves; then there are times when I travel on June Osbourne’s bus and I do see God as one of us.  

On the bus from Manchester to Chorlton, I regularly see a woman who has some kind of mental illness.  She talks constantly: she will try to talk to the person nearest to her, and if she gets no response, she just talks to the world in general.  She talks about people she likes, people she’s angry with, things that have gone well, things that have become problems for her.  And everyone on the bus just leaves her to her own rather obsessive thoughts.  But sometimes one of her friends gets on the bus, and she immediately shows great affection towards them.  She asks how they have been, she shows concern for their health, for their financial welfare, she advises them on where to go for help and support, and she waves them off with sincere interest in what may happen to them.  I wonder whether the love this woman receives is anything like the love she gives - and yet I see love on the number 86 bus.

Some mornings while I’m waiting for the bus from my home into Ashton, Paul walks by.  I would guess Paul is in his thirties and he has severe learning difficulties.  He lives in a house nearby with two other people and they are cared for 24-hours a day by live-in carers.  Of the three residents, only Paul goes out on his own: the other two only go out with their carers.  Paul has a circular walking route that he seems to cover a number of times each day.  It takes him past a corner shop where, each morning, he buys himself a bottle of Coke and takes it home to drink.  Usually when I see him, he’s either on his way to the shop or coming back.  Everybody knows him; he says hello to everyone he meets, and he can weigh up each situation just enough to make an appropriate comment - for example when he sees me with my briefcase he always says. ‘Going to work?’  This will usually be followed by, ‘What time will you work till?’, then ‘See you’.  Through whatever hazy understanding of the world that Paul’s brain is able to provide for him, Paul shows love towards other people and he receives much love and affection in return.  When I meet Paul I know God is one of us because I see love in the life that Paul lives, in spite of all the odds stacked against him.

We will each have experiences of this kind where love encounters us through the life of another human being.  This is what makes the life and message of Jesus contemporary.  He told us to love one another, and when we show love to others - and when love is shown to us - God is with us and God is one of us.

We encounter God in the unrecognised corners of our everyday lives because we encounter people.  We will only feel that our faith is frozen inside a 1st century AD culture if we fail to see God in people and fail to see people acting in love towards each other in the most ordinary of circumstances.