The image is of the Christmas tree at 1881 Canton Road, Tsim Sha Tsui. The original site was the headquarters of the Hong Kong Marine Police from the 1880's to 1996. The buildings' unique Victorian architecture symbolizes its colonial background. But in the middle of the small square that’s been created is this shiny ornate metal cone that you see in the image on the right above. When I saw it I was honestly astonished. I couldn’t really believe what they had done. So I took out my cell phone and took a quick photo and I hadn’t been able to get this image out of mind, since.

First, let me describe to you what you’re seeing. There appears to be a real tree behind that bright aluminum cone which looks like an upside down Hagen Daz ice cream cone. If the tree is real its’ probably a pine or spruce tree, a conifer, and they grow about 1 foot a year under ideal conditions. They are some of the oldest trees in the world and can be found as high as the Arctic Circle. This tree is probably about 30 feet high. And if it’s grown from a seed it’s probably taken 50 years to grow to this height, and was probably cut down in less than a minute by someone with a chain saw. But before it made its way to HK, its endured 50 seasons of snow and sun, rain and wind. It’s grown straight and tall and green despite the threat of forest fires and infestation of insects. It’s been the house of countless birds and squirrels and bugs providing food for as many with its seeds and bark. Its roots have held the soil together and provided habitat for literally millions of organisms. This tree is a remarkable achievement.

And if it’s a real tree, its been breathing for 50 years, breathing in and breathing out. Trees breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen. Trees are the lungs of our planet. Trees release oxygen into the atmosphere for other organisms like you and I to breathe in. Without trees we die. A single mature tree can absorb carbon dioxide at a rate of 48 lbs./year and release enough oxygen back into the atmosphere to support 2 human beings.

And planting trees remains one of the cheapest, most effective means of drawing excess CO2 from the atmosphere. If every American family planted just one tree, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would be reduced by one billion lbs. annually. But did you know that just being around trees makes you feel good. Yet trees, especially in urban areas, have numerous social benefits. In fact, the University of Cambridge did a study on job satisfaction of employees of businesses with a view of trees from their office. They found that these employees suffered from fewer diseases than workers without a view of trees.

Another example is children with learning disorders. As a form of therapy, children that suffer from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) can benefit from the presence of trees and other greenery. Kids with ADHD have been proven to be calmer, more responsive, and better able to concentrate when in a space with lots of trees. Yet if the tree behind our metal cone is real, it’s beauty and benefits did not stop someone from first cutting it down and then hanging brightly colored balls on it and then encasing it in a full metal aluminum and glass jacket.

Now here’s my question: why did they do that? Whose idea was it to enclose what appears to be a living green tree in this metal case? What were they thinking? What were their reasons? Let me venture some ideas and then let me tell you what this tree tells us about the Jesus of the gospels and importantly ourselves—those whom he loves.

First, I don’t think they valued the original tree. They did not value its beauty or its benefits. They thought perhaps, ‘Hey it’s only a tree.’ There are countless millions of trees on the earth. Who will miss one? Secondly they didn’t like its color, but valued more the shiny silver; they liked shiny silver over dull green. Fancy and flashy is better than green.

Three, they were probably mathematicians and they liked geometry a lot because they valued the perfect form of the metallic cone over the less than perfect cone shape of the tree. No tree in its natural state is perfect. Its not that they disliked the tree completely though, they did use a tree and you can see it peeking out from behind the metal jacket, but they used the tree for their own ends. A natural green tree was a means to their shiny artistic ends.

Four, I think they thought their design was an improvement on the original. They obviously thought that if they encased this ordinary, 50-year old tree in this bright metal jacket it would look better than the original tree. And my guess is that I think they thought this was an improvement because the original tree tends to be messy. Trees are not neat. They attract bugs and other critters, the needles are pointy and fall off, pine cones drop, birds get attracted, pooping on the people with cameras; and the tree’s blood, its sap, is also messy and sticky and can get on your hands and clothes if you’re not careful and its hard to get off.

So you are now asking yourself, where is Jones going with this? Well, lets suppose that the tree hiding behind all that steel and glass represents the gospel-the Jesus story, ‘that old, old story of Jesus and his glory’ as the old fundamentalist hymn goes. The tree is not gone, its still there, still visible, it’s just hard to see, but trees are persistent, stubborn, still growing, still green, because the present English word for ‘green’ comes from the old English word, ‘to grow’. So this Jesus of Christmas is living; the one who, “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all people”. Jesus the light and life of all that lives-people and plants.

And lets suppose that the shiny metal cone have been our attempts to improve upon this original story; to shape a Jesus more to our understanding, a Jesus more to our liking and to our tastes; a Jesus more in our image. And after all, which Jesus and which Jesus story do I pick anyway? Matthew, Mark, Luke or John? Can’t these people make up their mind?

For some a ‘new and improved Jesus’ has meant rejecting a Jesus who is too human, too much like a man, this eating and drinking with peasants and prostitutes and then being tortured and dying — very un-god-like. And after all he’s so, well, Jewish, too 1st century. He’s just too local. He’s not cosmic enough; he’s more a man than a beautiful universal ideal; a philosophical concept.

Or others say, ‘No, he’s too much like a god.’ This healing of disease, forgiving people like he’s God; this raising people from the dead, turning water into wine; the whole one-man bakery thingyou know bread for 5000; and this talk of a virgin birth and then a resurrection-after all that’s a little much too swallow don’t you think? I mean really. God? So we try to improve on this Jesus in various ways, offering our shiny bright alternatives. These alternative stories don’t quite live, don’t quite convince, but they look nice for a while if you protect them from the wind, rain and sun of the evidence of the original documents we call the NT, as they were written and intended.

But suppose that what the early eyewitnesses wrote about Jesus of Nazareth are taken as reliable. And that what they said about Jesus was true and that this Jesus is somehow the God-man is very much tree like Isaiah the prophet said in the 8th century B.C. “He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him”. Ordinary, common unspectacular. Jesus himself referred to his word and to Himself as scattered seed; fragile, easily trampled underfoot, subject to the soil of the human heart to reject or to receive Him.

Peter one of the earliest followers of Jesus wrote, “For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God. For, "All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord endures forever." And this is the word that was preached to you; Jesus, a word both fragile and yet living; a forever-word both proclaimed and alive. Jesus the bread of life, Jesus the tree of life, crucified on a tree.

There is an implication here for people and their life and worth: we’re more like a living tree than the bright shiny alternative that encloses it. People are more like the tree that the cone. We are not shiny and bright and easily cleaned up, because we’re simply alive. That aluminum and glass does not breath. We’re living because we’re made in the image of a living God.

Secondly, like the tree in that we too are not very hygienic; we’re not very clean. Ask any doctor or nurse. We have all sorts of bodily fluids and discharges. And lets admit it, we smell. Even though we try to cover our smells up with perfumes, deodorant and toothpaste, leave us alone for a few days and we smell. And that pine tree smells a lot better than we do! Like that tree, we’re messy and we’re a mess. We’re born messy and inconvenient and we die messy and inconvenient; and in between birth and death we get sick easily and when we do get sick we can die from various diseases-just like a tree. The line between life and death is a fine one and there’s a fine line between that tree and us. We live precarious existences; we live on the knife-edge of life and death.

The Christmas story itself tells us something about how God thinks of us as people when it’s the shepherds who first get the ‘good news of a great joy, which will be for all the people’. Shepherds-at the bottom of the social ladder. They were the untouchables; if you were Jewish you’d never raised your kids to grow up to be shepherds. Shepherds were not romantic; they were unclean religiously and socially; even those pagan Magi who were into astrology for heaven’s sake-the movement of the stars and planets to determine fate and fortune-get in on this Jesus life: shepherds and scholars an odd congregation. The shepherds find their Shepherd as G.K. Chesterton writes and the Magi find the desire of all peoples; they meet their end and purpose in this stable.

This is clearly a God who’s comfortable with the uncomfortable; the outcast and the outsider; even animals-you can’t get more basic than a stable. We may not like the story we find in the gospels. It may offend our sensibilities. We may wish it were something else. But its this story that protects us as human beings and elevates us as princes and princesses; even sons and daughters of God if we are willing to receive him as he comes to us. We are taken in as we are; in all our messiness and yet we don’t remain as we are as we begin to take into our lives-this living Christ-this life-giving tree, through the power of his life-giving Spirit.

GK Chesterton wrote, ‘The place that the shepherds found was not an academy… it was not a place of myths… it was a place of dreams come true.’ Dreams come true for both shepherds and scholars, the low and the high. The place the shepherds found is not to our liking; the revelation of God was not according to our expectations. But, be that as it may, the shiny, but dead alternatives to the original Jesus story will die and are deadly. They will kill us. The Tree still gives life.