OK, they meant well, I guess. But a New Zealand church’s Christmas season attempt to “challenge stereotypes about the way Jesus was conceived” wound up pissing off everybody involved. The St. Matthew-in-the-City Anglican church in Auckland erected, if that’s the right word, a billboard showing an unhappy Joseph lying in bed beside Mary, with the heading “Poor Joseph. God is a hard act to follow.”
Church Archdeacon Glynn Cardy said the sign was meant to “lampoon and ridicule the very literal idea that God is a male and somehow this male God impregnated Mary,” adding that he wanted to “get people talking about the Christmas story.” Did he ever. The topic of Cardy’s billboard took over the Pacific nation’s media, a protester defaced it, and even many of the church’s supporters thought the image was “poorly thought out,” “cheesy,” and, yes, “really stupid.”
This article appears in Dec 15-21, 2009.
