Welcome to another Week on Things Unseen. Perhaps like me you have a fairly eclectic

taste in music. Often that's related to our upbringing and I know it can be a very

generational thing. I was actually slow to appreciate what everyone calls classical music.

But I remember one of the first pieces I enjoyed was Pictures at an Exhibition, but the

Russian composer modest Muzorsky. It's a suite of ten piano pieces with a recurring

melody that conveys the sense of walking from one picture to another. Maybe you've

heard Revell's adaptation of it for a full orchestra. It's a clever idea actually,

to try to convey the theme of the picture through music because it makes an appeal to

the imagination. The reason all this comes to mind this week is not to encourage you

to listen to Muzorsky, but as a lead-in to a different set of pictures. Pictures the

Bible uses that appeal to our imagination and help us to see what God intends the church

to be. I have a book at home entitled Images of the Church by an American scholar, and

if I remember correctly, he suggests there are actually over 90 images or pictures of

the church to be found in the New Testament. I think actually that's squeezing out every

last drop of juice of it, but certainly there are several pictures in the New Testament

that help us to admire and meditate on the wonder of the church. What picture first

comes to your mind? I suspect that if you were to ask that question of every Christian in

the past two thousand years, the central answer would probably be the church as the body

of Christ. We're all familiar with the way Paul uses it, and perhaps especially a statement

in Fist Corinthians chapter 12, verse 27, you are the body of Christ and individually members

of it. I suspect more essays and books have been written on this picture of the church

than on any other. In scholars, today still discuss where Paul got the idea. I remember

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