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Every day could be a new Christmas somewhere (published in Church Times, 2012, and updated) It is about time we got properly acquainted with cosmic Jesus. Leave it much longer and the almost certain reality of extra-terrestrial life will leave our theology, our preaching and our credibility in the dark ages. Planet hunting has become a serious business. So far more than 2,325 planets have been found outside of our solar system, mostly very big ones, but only because they are easier to spot. The European HARPS project looks for the small wiggle of a star as a planet obits it. The NASA Keplar project looks for a drop in the light from a star as a planet passes in front of it. The PLANET (Probing Lensing Anomalous NETwork) project relies on the earth being exactly in line with two stars. Earth is at one end of the line and the nearer star’s gravity bends the light from the farther star like a lens. If there is a planet close to the lensing star then that anomaly can be measured and the planet size and position estimated. Daniel Kuba, one of the authors of a recent article about PLANET in the journal Nature (11th January), concludes that there are “.. literally billions of planets with masses similar to Earth orbiting stars in the Milky Way”. Combine that with results from the NASA Keplar study where 4.4% of its candidate planets are in the Goldilocks zone and you have mind-boggling potential for life. Goldilocks, you may remember, liked her porridge not too cold and not too hot. So the Goldilocks zone is the distance from each star where water is water, and is neither ice nor steam. If a planet of about the right size is lucky enough to be there, with water and an atmosphere, then life can happen. The evidence is mounting. In many such planets, evolution must be an event waiting to happen, or, most likely, is already happening. Although the probability of that first self replicating molecule is incredibly small, given the enormity of a planet and the vast number of possible initial evolutionary events over hundreds of millions of years - life on the earth-like planets is pretty much guaranteed. Earth, for example, measured on a cosmic timescale, began to evolve life almost as soon as life was physically possible. And that’s just our galaxy. Best estimates are of more than 100 billion galaxies, each one containing maybe a billion life supporting planets. How many such planets in the universe? Potentially 1 with 20 zeros after it. Creation cannot be human-o-centric. We cannot be alone, though we can only imagine the nature of life elsewhere. And what of Jesus of Nazareth, is the world his limit? Yes it is – at least in the sense of an incarnation here. It is theological sophistry to talk of the Jerusalem cross saving some random other advanced species the other side of the universe when no one there knows nor can ever know about it. It is the knowing what God has done for us, here, that makes it so wonderful. A loving God keeping it a secret from the rest of the universe is not an option. So, without being regarded as a crackpot, please, or someone who has read too many Iain M Banks Culture novels or watched too much Star Trek, can I predict some silicon based, hairy-hoofed tetrapod with inbuilt radio communication and a single honeycomb of eyes to be Jesus, albeit with a different name, bursting, right now, into the poverty and religious bigotry of some other planet becoming as one of them. Jesus brings God and them - whatever they are - together for the much the same reasons as God incarnate here. And why only once on each planet? Planets live for billions of years, time enough, maybe, for a sequence of evolutions on each, for dinosaurs to be followed by humans and then...? And, of course, the universe is not static. NASA estimates seven new stars (with planets) in our galaxy every year, that’s about 22,000 every second, across the universe. Many will support life, evolving beings in the image of God and with that freedom and opportunity for failure, I guess every such world needs the Jesus intervention. This all implies a new incarnation happening somewhere maybe many times every day over much of the last 10+ billion years. It means that God in Jesus is continually giving himself/herself/itself to recover swathes of lost creation. Every day is probably a new Christmas somewhere. Like many I know, you may choose not to bother with such theo-boggling, but some will be ‘Star Gazing Live’ with Professor Brian Cox, or following the debate between Dr Rowan Williams and Professor Richard Dawkings. If you, like me, nurture a faith underpinned by reason, we need a church that answers the atheists not only in the dusty corridors of universities, but is fearless of advertising the reality of God continually creating, loving and living locally in planets across the universe. This is the most astounding rational truth of all. So let it sink into your thinking. It means the transcendent God is, even more, beyond anything we can imagine. We each walk with a Jesus who is being born again into other societies on other planets; Jesus whose cross is yesterday, today and tomorrow somewhere; whose body was broken before our world began and whose body will be broken after humanity is gone. For once let the theology be ahead of the evidence. Let the science be what it is - the continuing discovery of God’s amazing design and absolutely never a threat to faith. Revd Prof Adrian Low Emeritus Professor of Computing Education Staffordshire University