Christmas - "What if God were one of us?"

TROWEL & SWORD

Rev. John Westendorp

At the Grammy Awards earlier this year Joan Osborne performed her hit single “One Of Us” for a worldwide television audience of nearly 2 billion.

This song from her ‘Relish’ album begins:

If God had a name, what would it be
And would you call it to His face
If you were faced with Him in all His glory
What would you ask if you had just one question...
What if God was one of us
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Trying to make His way home

This song raises the possibility of God taking on human form in a contemporary setting. However if we think that this popular singer is about to tell us the good news, that in Jesus Christ God did become ‘one of us’, we are sadly disappointed.

We might almost have expected that Joan Osborne would indeed zero in on the Christmas message and Christ incarnate. She was raised in a Roman Catholic family, in a country where the celebration of the birth of Jesus is a deeply entrenched socio-religious event. However Osborne’s family renounced its Christian roots and stopped attending church when she was 10 because, as she told one interviewer, “my dad... saw that there was a lot of hypocrisy in it.”

Yet Osborne has not denied religion and spirituality. Her songs are full of religious themes: Eve in the garden of Eden, in “Lumina”; falling from grace in “Dracula Moon”; and climbing a “Ladder” to redemption. Like the Roman Catholic, St.Theresa, whom she sings about, Osborne demonstrates a drive to know the divine and is fascinated with mysticism. In interviews this Kentucky bred singer/songwriter has indicated she was profoundly influenced by soul and gospel music.

It becomes obvious, however, that the religion of her songs is not the Christian and Biblical faith. Faith in Jesus as God in the flesh seems to be a problem for her. For Osborne an answer to the possibility of God becoming ‘one of us’ is not to be sought in the Christmas event. In a later verse of ‘One of us’ she asks:

If God had a face, what would it look like
And would you want to see
If seeing meant that you would have to believe
In things like Heaven and in Jesus and the Saints
And all the Prophets and...

At the end of her song Osborne’s god is a disillusioned god...

Tryin' to make His way home
Back up to Heaven all alone
Nobody callin' on the phone
'Cept for the Pope maybe in Rome

Looking a little further at Osborne’s spirituality one discovers that her most prominent teachers have not been the Christian teachers of her childhood, nor the gospel and soul singers of her Kentucky years but the Hindu teachers, the Pakistani Qawwali masters. Hence it is not surprising that the Hindu deity, Krishna, makes an appearance in her ‘Relish’ video “Right Hand Man,” a giddy, streetwise tribute to the one night stand. Not surprisingly then either that for Osborne spirituality and sensuality become intertwined: “Sexuality and spirituality are so closely related to me that to put the two right next to each other in the same song isn't a contradiction.”

All of this raises questions as to why Joan Osborne’s songs have hit the top of the charts around the world this year. Apart from the appeal of the music a key reason must surely lie in the fact that she appears to articulate the spiritual vacuum of contemporary society. One commentator suggested that her “conjunctures of mystic vision with the down and dirty details of daily life make ‘Relish’ a remarkable series of postmodern morality tales for born again pagans, cracked plaster saints and garden-variety Eves.”

Our post-modern world is a world devoid of meaning - there are no ultimate answers. Nevertheless people are frantically searching for something to fill the God-shaped space at the core of their being. Osborne articulates the questions many feel but can’t express: we need a God whom we can relate to, who became ‘one of us’, and who will fill our emptiness with His fullness.
The good news of Christmas is that God did indeed become one of us, and if not a ‘slob like one of us’ at least a human being in all His frailty and vulnerability.

Yes, Joan Osborne, this God does have a name. His name is Jesus!

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