1. Simply Having A B****y Awful Christmastime

Hello again.  Since it's the last day of November, let me tell you all about my one and only shopping expedition last December.

Against all my instincts, I found myself in Asda.  A man picked some batteries off a shelf and dislodged some others, watching them fall to the floor and then walking away, leaving them for some poor unfortunate employee colleague to pick up.  I was feeling a bit grim and miserable, and on the verge of calling him back to point out his omission, but since so many of these moments either end up with the clergy in question in the Evening News or else me becoming more and more like Victor Meldrew (who at least takes a stand) I just picked the batteries up myself, hoping to pile up burning coals on his head.  It might have worked better if he hadn’t had his back turned already.

me, probably.

But in the aisles of Asda, a worse crime against humanity was being piped out in the strains of Paul McCartney singing that song about “simply having a wonderful Christmastime.”  You know, the one with the offensively cheerful tune that would have even Aqua and the Vengaboys reaching for their revolvers.

In the interests of fairness, I’d like to say that I’d have been more charitably given to Paul McCartney if I’d been full of the Christmas spirit.  But I wouldn’t.  It’s not just me being sporadically Grinchesque.  There’s no excuse for that song.  If you’re actually having a wonderful Christmastime, you don’t need to hear it.  And if you’re having (as I was that afternoon) a b****y awful Christmastime, then it’s the worst kind of rubbing your nose in it.  In short, Paul McCartney: go away.

Christmas Day, all our troubles seem so far away (not).

Or at least be sensitive to people who don’t enjoy Christmas quite so much, because it’s a painful mockery to endure.  By and large, people who find Christmas difficult (and I happily confess myself one of them) put on a brave face for fear of seeming Scrooge-like.  In my book they’re much more like the small boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes who tell it like it is – prophetically even.  Last time I went to a pantomime in Buxton, one of the actors foolishly asked the children, “Are you enjoying yourself, boys and girls?” and amid the chorus of “YEEEEEEES!” there was an audible sigh and a long and low, “Hating every minute.”  I feel for that person.  The truth needs telling, or else some of us will die on the inside.  And no apologies for the swearing.  Sometimes it’s necessary.

Now I probably don’t mean parading our misery, but the truth needs an outlet, and the stifling weight of Paul McCartney having a frankly wonderful (and hugely irritating) Christmastime needs lifting.

Remember Friends?  The one where Joey goes to work at the museum and Ross won’t sit next to him in the canteen?  Their friendship leads eventually to a great outpouring of truth at the lunch-tables:

Ross: Thank you, Dr. Phillips, but I’m having my lunch at this table, here in the middle. I’m having lunch right here, with my good friend Joey, if he’ll sit with me.

Joey: (standing up) I will sit with you Dr. Geller. (He goes over to his table and they shake hands.)

Ross: Y'know, we work in a museum of natural history, and yet there is something unnatural about the way we eat lunch. Now, I look around this cafeteria, and y’know what I see, I see division. Division, between people in white coats and people in blue blazers, and I ask myself, "My God why?!" Now, I say we shed these coats that separate us, and we get to know the people underneath. (He takes off his coat and throws it down.) I’m Ross! I’m divorced, and I have a kid!

Joey: (stands up, and throws his coat on the floor) I’m Joey! I’m an actor! I don’t know squat about dinosaurs!

Another Tour Guide: (standing up and removing his coat) I’m Ted, and I just moved here a month ago, and New York really scares me.

Ross: All right, there you go!

Joey: Yeah, you hang in there Teddy!

Older Scientist: I’m Andrew, and I didn’t pay for this pear.

Ross: Okay, good for you.

Tour Guide: I’m Rhonda, (motions to her breasts) and these aren’t real! (Joey and Ross look at each other, shocked)

Ross: Wow, Rhonda.

Another Scientist: I’m Scott.

Ross: Yeah, okay, Scott!

Another Scientist: And I need to flip the light switch on and off 17 times before I leave a room or my family will die.

Don’t let the truth be swamped.  Don’t bury your profound dissatisfaction with Christmas.  Find a space and a friend to speak the truth with, and then play something that isn’t Paul McCartney.

Oh, as a coda, Asda thankfully followed Paul up with the little-known Pet Shop Boys’ It Doesn’t Often Snow At Christmas, in which: 

“Christmas is not all it’s cracked up to be:

families fighting around a plastic tree.

There’s nothing on the TV that you want to see

and it’s hardly ever snowing the way it’s meant to be…”

hmmm, unexpected.

I like it.  Nice one, Neil and Chris.  Or else put the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl on, and vicariously enjoy two other people having a brilliant row for Christmas.  Best of all, Sainsbury’s (where I was buying many Jelly Babies after 11pm) was playing long excerpts from Jeff Wayne’s War Of The Worlds, including, as a direct stab in the eye to the season, Forever Autumn.

I’m going to play the Pet Shop Boys very loud and then go to bed.  If at any point in the next month you too are simply having a b****y awful Christmastime, find your own favourite and do the same.

As a second coda, Paul McCartney, if you’re reading this, I’m sure you’ve been responsible for some good music...

Gentility And Genitalia

You know what's bothering me this week?

Genitalia.

Yes, that's right.

Chiefly, what irks me about genitalia is the representation of them in graffiti.  I mean, have you seen any lately on your local walls?

Some good graffiti.  Take heed.

It's rudimentary to say the least.  Rude and rudimentary (which is also the title of Jane Austen's unfinished novel).  I worry because the state of art on walls leads me to one of the following conclusions:

1.  Graffiti artists have forgotten what their bits look like.  Fair enough.  You're under pressure in a passageway that already smells of wee, so you can be forgiven just doodling the (ahem) bare essentials.  There's no time to check how close to the subject your art is.

2.  Graffiti artists are in fact all impressionists.  These are Dali-esque representations of naughty bits.  Or somebody in their (ahem) blue period.  Fair enough.

3.  Graffiti artists are actually producing uncannily accurate sketches.  This is actually what their down-belows look like.  In which case, maybe see a doctor?

Anyway.  Point is, please stop drawing your nethers in public places, or I'll start marking them out of 10 for artistic impression.  We don't need the bits that people broadly agree are best kept undercover drawn on walls.  They're called privates for a reason.  Put your pens away, people.  Get thee to Channel 4 if you must.

Where was I?  Oh.  Yes.  I disapprove of public shows of badly-remembered members.

And it may be that some of you out there disapprove of me blogging about it.  This is where the blog title comes in: Gentility and Genitalia (which is also a lost novel from Jane Austen).  

During my last sermon at St Andrew's, I was highlighting the virtues of being as common as muck, on the basis that God was pleased to become common as the mud he used to form humankind in the beginning.  I was briefly mentioning how my mum occasionally looks at me disapprovingly and says, "A vicar wouldn't do that."  Every time, I answer, "Well, a vicar just did."  The example I had in mind was once when I absent-mindedly scratched my bum in public.  And as I told my lovely congregation about this, I was unsurprised to see, among the people delighted that we were talking about real things at long last, a few faces that looked a bit like smacked bottoms themselves.  These would be people who, given the choice between gentility and genitalia, would go for gentility any day.  Genteel souls.

That's fine.  No pressure.  But genteel is more or less the opposite direction to the one taken by God when he came on down to earth to be a mewling, screaming, puking, smiling baby that filled its swaddling clothes repeatedly for the first months of life.  God is anti-genteel.  He's got no airs, no graces, no blinking standards at all from what I can see.  Heavens, he even works with, on and sometimes even through me.  What the heck is that?

The church gathers top its petticoats and wrinkles its nose at the muckier things of this world at its own peril.  We need to take a leaf out of God's book, and not be clothing the savage as our ancestors in mission did when they came across bare breasts in African villages, but instead refusing to be shocked, squatting in the mess with people and talking about the real stuff.  How it hurts.  Who we are.  Living up steps (as one of my lovely ladies describes it) is exactly what God didn't do, doesn't do, and will never do.

A more socially utile example of graffitum.

Polite, yes.  Reasonable, yes.  Reverent, yes, whatever that means.  But not starched or starchy, not prurient, not so heavenly-minded we're of no earthly use.  Songs of Praise needs more rude bits, if you ask me.  We're made of earth, and we shouldn't be afraid of the earthy.  Most of us are only here because of some (imho) unpleasantly squelchy meeting of two people that may well have involved genitalia.  It may not need shouting from the rooftops.  It probably doesn't need drawing on walls or graphically depicting on television.  But this is the world we're called to love, so I'll keep on laughing every time I see some badly-rendered bits in Blackley's passages.  This is the world God wants to save, not some pretend-polite-prurient place.  And it has some rude bits in it.

Genitalia?  In their place, perhaps.

Gentility?  No, never.

Jacky And The Butterfly

You can't overstate the importance of recalling days when we’ve especially seen or felt God being good to us.  You can't overestimate the power and value of telling those stories again and again, especially when the day dawns dark, dreary or desolate and you feel disenchanted, discouraged or distressed.*

With this in mind, let me tell you all about Jacky and the Butterfly.  Jacky lived down in Stoke-on-Trent with her daughter.  She used a wheelchair to get about and was brilliantly honest and down-to-earth.  If ever I went to the loo at her house, she’d joyfully tell her daughter (mid-20s) that the vicar had gone to siphon the python.  And her hospitality and kindness and annoyance were legendary.  

Yes, you’ve spotted the past tense, because Jacky left us for more glorious climes than Stoke (and probably no more wheelchair use) a few years back, in 2008.  Not before she’s joined my church, caused a rumpus or two, ruffled the feathers of some of the more clean-living folk there and sparred with my reader (who sparred back).  Oh, and she was confirmed as well.

We drove a full nine miles through the darkening evening to the confirmation venue in Biddulph (or Biddulph Moor, danged if I know the difference).  And Jacky’s daughter had bought her a brooch in the shape of a butterfly.  54 small diamond-like stones shine in a filigree of goldishness.  The confirmation went well: Jacky had heard the gospel clearly and simply sometime around the minnellium (that’s right, she couldn’t say “millennium”) and a simple faith in a simply brilliant Saviour kept her through illness and beyond death itself.  She proudly pinned on the butterfly brooch with all the connotations of rebirth it brought - here indeed was a new creation! - and we drove home.

Except that a nine-mile drive later, the butterfly brooch had gone.  Vanished.  Disparu.  Jacky was crestfallen in that way that we have when we’re trying hard not to let anyone know just how disappointed we are, when we’re holding down that feeling of a really wonderful day gone badly wrong at the final hurdle.  Her daughter made her hot chocolate and I said I’d better go home.

Home heck.  I retraced the nine miles back to Biddulph (maybe) Moor in the misty midnight.*  Not in an especially heroic way, just with a sense that life has too many sad endings to sit back if there’s a chance of snatching happiness from the jaws of disappointment.  And after all, the butterfly wasn’t in the car, so it had to be on the car park back in Biddulph.  Quite possibly squashed or driven over, but it could only be gone if someone had found it and carried it away.  Monday sun-up seemed to bring greater likelihood of its further removal, so I pulled onto the church car park at very dead of very night.

Ah.  An unlit car park.  An unlit pothole-laden car park of indeterminate size, scruffing away into roughness at the edges.  Hmmmm.  It had seemed like such a good idea.  Now it just seemed hopeless.  The pubs were shut, all decent folk were home and abed and I was a nine-mile drive full of feelings of failure away from anything like sleep.

I left the headlights on a low beam and stepped out.  

And there’s no more suspense to be had, because there it was, scant feet in front of the car, glinting out of the grit.  A quick rub-down (maybe a rub-up) with a rag and it was as good as new.  Maybe slightly askew.  And the fourth nine-mile drive of the day, feeling... well, you guess.

Jacky was still up, talking to her daughter, when I rang the doorbell.  And there are days - and nights - when you suddenly realise how true the parables of Jesus are, when you suddenly find yourself inhabiting a Bible story.  Jacky’s joy at seeing the butterfly that her daughter had picked out for her... it made more sense of the woman with the lost coin (in Luke 15) than any number of sermons.  That long drive back, weary but happy, perfectly inhabited the shepherd who puts a lamb on his shoulder and brings it back to the flock.  

Jacky learned that miracles happen.  I learned that the extra mile is sometimes nine, but who cares if it’s 900 when God’s kingdom and Jesus’ stories leak through into the real real world so well.

We laid the magnificent Jacky to rest.  A service in Stoke, a committal in Stafford, a burial in Stone.  Lots of extra miles that month!  And her daughter pressed into my hand the butterfly brooch in a box, and there were no words for what that whole evening - all the way from Bentilee to Biddulph and back, a Bishop and a brooch like a butterfly* - had meant to Jacky, how far her faith had been fuelled.

It’s not down to me.  I don’t think just going home would be an option for anyone when there was a dying light to rage against.  Other people would have cycled into hell and back, let alone Biddulph, even with a flat tyre and pursued by winged monkeys to reunite those two lovely butterflies.  

That’s my story of faith today - a good good God.  I’ve seen him rejoice when he found what was lost.  He looked a lot like a fifty-five year old woman dancing in a sofa, with a smile that would melt the polar icecaps and a kiss to make you blush until Whitsuntide. 

(reconstruction: not the actual Jacky)

*clergy compulsion: alliteration alert!

Put Away Childish Things?

One of the things that Jesus and Doctor Who have in common is this: they see the value of looking at things like children.  Jesus, guiding a child into the centre of his preaching, told people that unless they became like children, they stood no chance of entering the kingdom of God.  Tom Baker, having a brief sulk, asked "What's the point of being grown-up if you can't be childish sometimes?"

Childish, of course, is bad if you sustain it.  Child-like, however, is good - but again, not in huge huge doses.  You can't be innocent as a dove all the time without being as canny as a snake.

But you can hold on to the advantages of childhood.  What would they be?

Children ask big questions.

Yes, they may be simplistic or silly or out of bounds, but children are relentlessly curious and broadly unbiased.  And that's how they sometimes hit on the right questions, the ones that adults miss.  Grown-up preconceptions lead us to rule out possibilities because they seem silly.  But I point you to that (admittedly fictional but nevertheless true) boy in The Emperor's New Clothes, who doesn't mind that people might think he's thick, and is unafraid to ask, "Why is this dude naked?"

Children share their biggest, wildest ideas.  

And yes, they may be unreasonable, unfeasible and in crayon, but that's fine as long as someone somewhere has a discerning mind to go with them.  A good idea or a good answer is likelier to be found in a child's 101 answers than in the two I might put forward when I'm being an adult and don't want to be laughed at by other adults in the room.

Children have fun.

They're not afraid to like the things they like.  No child says they'd like to go to the opera when they mean they want to play video games.  No child pretends to enjoy PCC when they could be running around.  Children can be entranced by the world, unstoppable in their pursuit of fun.  And when something is fun, it's easier to do.

But honest enjoyment of fun can dry up in adults, often by the age of 21 (be honest, when did you last whoop with joy?).  And adults have generated arenas in which fun is unthinkable.  Politics.  Academia.  Religion.  The hardest thing about churches is when people arrive with a po-face and look down on having fun, or assume that the only good ideas come out of seriousness.

"I'm serious about everything I do," said either the Doctor or Jesus, "just not necessarily the way I do it."  Don't ever assume I'm not involved in a serious business just because I might be enjoying it.

Oh, and there's no correlation at all - at all! - between how serious you are and how good you are at your job!  In fact, there's an opposite correlation.  Research finds that raw talent is overrated when compared with people who enjoy something.  The best violinists aren't the ones who started out best; they're the ones who enjoyed scraping so much, who had so much fun that they kept on practising, that they woke up energised to punish that horsehair.

Have fun.

Children are harder to fool.

Be honest, would you rather try to fool an audience of children, or an audience of adults?

Well, magicians - who fool people for a living - choose adults every time.  Adults can be misdirected at will, but children are harder to shake, harder to shake.  Adults have been trained socially to follow certain cues, which a magician then exploits.  Children are untrained, so they can't be corralled.  Adults can concentrate, but children have a more diffuse attention, which means they'll spot what you're up to when an adult would be looking where you want them to.  Adults may be trying to upstage you as a matter of pride, but children are actually just trying to figure out how everything works, in the same way they're trying to figure out how the whole world works.  Adults - be honest - lose our edge after 18, but children are still sharp.  And adults over think things, whereas children seek out obvious explanations.

I know all this.  School assemblies are full of brilliant, questioning people who figure out my every trick.  I wish they were on my PCC: less prejudice, less straitjacketed thinking, and a hell of a lot more fun than adults.

Have fun with your own thinking, your own problems, your own ideas.  Jesus is constantly being faced with two options and coming up with a third and better (and more fun) one (that annoys the hell out of most of the adults present).  Doctor Who is all about thinking imaginatively.

Somewhere, Isaiah declares that "a child shall lead them."  Sometimes you need the eyes and the ways of a child to lead anywhere new.  Jesus welcomed a child into the heart of things, and he saw the world through child-like eyes as well.  Have a play yourself, or spend some time with someone who'll remind you how.

Sorry, Lorry

Well, that was the tip of the iceberg of why Doctor Who is important.  This is the tip of a different iceberg about Jesus.

It involves a lorry.

I knew about Jesus.  I got a B in my GCSE Religious Studies.  There was a kerfuffle, because the examining board effectively accused the school (lovely little comprehensive in the West Midlands) of getting an adult in to write our assignments.  Oh, and of using John's Gospel when we were only supposed to have read Luke.  I mean.

Of course, knowing about Jesus isn't the same as actually knowing him.  Gosh no.  And as I proceeded through A-levels life was quite hard.  Teenage disillusion.  Needing to get away but not being sure I'd have the confidence to.  And the first signs of the depression-stuff that has intermittently poked its head over my banisters.  

Onto the lorry.  Or indeed under it.  For one day I was making my way home from school, across a pedestrian crossing on the junction of Tynings Lane, Paddock lane and the Walsall Road.  It must have been after 4, because the usual lollipop lady - Gloria, fantastic woman - had gone home.  But traffic was light, so I didn't wait for the green man.

A wiser man than I...

This turned out to be quite a revealing mistake.  

I must have been tired, or down, or something.  My footsteps must have been dragging.  Or maybe I didn't care much.  Whatever, as I crossed the second half, there was suddenly a lorry bearing down on me like a wolf on the fold, honking its horn like there was no tomorrow.  Which there may well not have been if I didn't move sharpish.  And I didn't move sharpish.  I sauntered.  I have a vague memory of the face of the man at the wheel, but I may have made that up since.  I was aware of suddenly being the centre of attention of all the people waiting at the bus stops on either side of the road.

Good advice...

Did I die?  Was I squashed to a stain on the asphalt?  Smashed to smithereens?

[Spoiler, sweeties: I'm still here, and still in one piece.]

I made it.  I probably gave that poor driver a heart attack.  But as I'd been sauntering across the road, looking quizzically at the lorry as I went, I realised that my weariness wasn't the weariness of a hard day at maths.  It was world-weariness.  It was the notion that if life ended here, it wouldn't be such a terrible thing.  Make no mistake, I'd never step in front of a lorry, then or now.  Life is precious!  People would be sad!  It would be selfish!  But.  But but but.  If a lorry were to be bearing down on me like a wolf on the fold and I didn't move out of the way, and I was squashed to nothing… well, these things happen.  I wouldn't put on a spurt of speed to escape the thundering wheels of the juggernaut of fate.

So that was me in the early 1990s.  The crystallisation of the idea that I didn't care much for life, and it didn't care much for me.  I was probably listening to too much Marc and the Mambas as well.

A few weeks later I met Jesus.  At a carol service, which is a deeply unlikely place to find Jesus, behind all the carols and stuff.  But I did.  I found Jesus, and he made sense, and his story made sense, and the only possible response was to bow the knee.  To become a Christian on the spot.  

And things began to change.

Make no mistake, there was no rainbow, no dancing Care Bears, no sudden transformation.  The old was gone.  The new had come.  I was forgiven, adopted, welcomed home.  The effects have taken longer.  And I still feel sometimes that I haven't the energy to move, but not with a lorry in the offing these days.

And a part of my conversion, a part of my life with Jesus is that I had a favourite verse for a long time.  It's in John 6, after Jesus has fed 5,000 or so people with the contents of a Transformers lunchbox, but then when he talks about being the bread of life, people abandon him in their droves.  They just walk away.  And Jesus turns to his friends and he asks them - in who knows what tone of voice - "What about you?  Will you be going too?"

Simon Peter - for it is he - is honest.  He doesn't deny the difficulty of the things Jesus teaches and claims and recommends.  He doesn't pretend this is an easy road he's taken to follow Jesus.  Instead, he says:

"Where else would we go?  You alone have the words of eternal life."

Again, the Bible is maddeningly short on adverbs.  How does he say it?  Resignedly?  Wryly?  Encouragingly?  I don't know.

On my good days, I follow Jesus because he's brilliant.  Compassionate, wise, skewering human experience with his words, forgiving, you know, dying for us.  All that.

On my less good days, I follow Jesus because what else is there?  No-one and nothing else can save or heal or reconcile me, either to God or myself.  So I'm sticking with him.  

Today's a good day.  Great lunch and good company and good prayers and old sermons and a brilliant film at the cinema* and a phone call from a friend.  Today I follow Jesus because he's magnificent and because there are good times with him and his friends.

But who knows about tomorrow?

And who knows about you?  You don't have to follow Jesus for the noblest reasons.  He keeps me from lorry-related squashings.  When I'm down, he's no instant solution, he's the best that I've got.  And even when I don't see it, that's pretty damn good.

And that is the tip of the iceberg of Jesus and me.  I'm sure we'll speak of him more.  Talk to him - or yourself - for a moment or two about why you follow him.  Or why you don't just now or just yet or just ever.










*Scouts Guide To The Zombie Apocalypse, since you ask.

A Teaspoon And An Open Mind

Living between jobs is a good opportunity to refresh your manifesto, to remember:

• why you are who you are
• why you do what you do
• why you do it in the way you do it.

That's tougher than it sounds - I think most of my manifesto reveals itself in actions, and sitting on a  sofa thinking hard isn't my most natural setting.  But I can see much of my ministry and life shaped by two people, one fictional and one factual, one for the first sixteen years of life, one for the second sixteen and then the two of them together for the last ten.

If - like all the children in all my assemblies ever - you guessed that one is Jesus, you're right.

If - like some of my friends - you guessed the other one is the Doctor (him off Doctor Who), then you're twice as right.

And in case you didn't know, the Doctor is fictional and Jesus is factual, actual and historical.  Just in case.

Growing up watching Doctor Who provides quite an interesting template for life.  Let's be clear, I'm not the Doctor, I don't want to be the Doctor, I never dress up as the Doctor, there's no role-playing going on!  And he's not my role model.  If any of them asked me to travel with them, I'd turn down about half of them on the basis that they're too grumpy (Hartnell, Baker T., Capaldi), too garish (Baker C), too patronising (Pertwee) or too likely to engage in a clash of personalities with me (McCoy, Eccleston, Smith).  That still leaves four and John Hurt.

I suspect what the Doctor represents is possibility.  Growing up in the 80s offered role models like the A-Team, Han Solo, Indiana Jones… lots of guns and spaceships and swagger.  That's not for me. My older brother was all about the guns and the horror and I wasn't impressed.  But the Doctor… someone who thinks his way round things, who stands for peace, whose only mission is indefatigable curiosity and who tries to see the best in everybody… that sounds good.  He's imperfect - Colin Baker was full of bluster and Peter Capaldi was briefly saddled with being rather unfeeling - but that's okay, because I'm so imperfect it's almost adorable.

The Doctor usually seeks out a third way of doing things, working not from a position of power but of weakness, instinctively seeking out the underdog and standing alongside them.  He asks, "what's the point in being grown-up if you can't be childish sometimes?"  He claims to have some tools that eluded the astronomers of Chloris: "a teaspoon and an open mind."  In 900 years of time travel he's never met anybody who wasn't important.  He tries to be "never cruel and never cowardly, never give up, never give in."  And yes, he can sulk; and yes, he can unintentionally hurt people; and yes, once or twice he gets a bit pompous.  But he offers opportunities to get through life without just shooting people up or shooting people down.  Might isn't right, and the eccentric and non-mainstream is celebrated.  Doctor Who gives us permission to do things differently (and to learn some science and history on the way).

Mis-shapes, mistakes, misfits: lots of us follow the Doctor.  There's quite a phenomenon of people growing up different - gay, trans, bookish, unathletic - and finding in him someone worth emulating, finding in him the possibility to be true to themselves.

There's something marvellous about travelling not in a Millennium Falcon or Enterprise bristling with armaments but in a shabby wooden blue box that offers advice and assistance free to the public on the door.

There's something brilliant about someone who turns up not with Captain Kirk's shoot-to-kill phasers or a light sabre but a sonic screwdriver, ready to mend things.

And still today, when we need a friend, I'd rather have someone with a phone box and a screwdriver, someone whose name suggests healing.  And that's the first sixteen years of life… next up: Jesus.