Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas, everyone!
Been doing Christmasy things the past week. Some fortunate few (or, as Fenris Ulf points out, maybe not so fortunate) of you will be getting an actual Thames family Christmas letter, which we've risen, "up from sloth," as Ignatius O'Reilly says, to produce for the first time in years. We've also declared a partly-principled, mostly-mandated-by-budgetary-concerns Limit On Gifts, which is going fairly well in reducing the craziness of the season.
So happy to see the peaceful denouement of John Hammett's and Andrew Jones's online discussion of emerging church stuff. Real discussion can be done in a God-honoring way. I hope to follow up my small contribution to that discussion with the mystery of Mark's New Website in January.
Saw "Chronicles of Narnia"; great. Six more just like it, guys.
LGBC had its most hilariously cute Christmas pageant this past week, starring Ali as a baby Jesus about the same size as mother Mary (played with gravitas and slender hips by Judah Rudd).
Pregnancy seems to be breaking out all over. Good thing we got vaccinated some years ago...
Look, I still think that telling the story tells: that Jesus was found by astrologers, whose calculations and whatnot still led them to Jesus; that, as Augustus said, it really was better to be Herod's huius than his huios--his pig than his son; and that, when you get right down to it, an im-manu el, a with-us god, is a dramatically different thing than an against-us god, a not-with-us god, a happy-to-do-without-us god, or even a within-us god. The human reality is that companionship is actually more intimate, because less subject to self-centered counterfeiting, than immanence. God knows this, and, for all the real truth in the God-is-in-you bits, at bedrock came as another person, not as a deeper me, or a depth within me, let alone as something outside and distant. Up close and personal isn't a bad translation of the Hebrew Immanuel. Since I need forgiveness as well as meaning, a right relationship with others as well as a suitable self-concern and identity, a "god who is there" is just what I need right here.
I go to Baltimore and New York on Tuesday the 27th, so I'll try to blog Christmas afternoon or Boxing Day.
Been doing Christmasy things the past week. Some fortunate few (or, as Fenris Ulf points out, maybe not so fortunate) of you will be getting an actual Thames family Christmas letter, which we've risen, "up from sloth," as Ignatius O'Reilly says, to produce for the first time in years. We've also declared a partly-principled, mostly-mandated-by-budgetary-concerns Limit On Gifts, which is going fairly well in reducing the craziness of the season.
So happy to see the peaceful denouement of John Hammett's and Andrew Jones's online discussion of emerging church stuff. Real discussion can be done in a God-honoring way. I hope to follow up my small contribution to that discussion with the mystery of Mark's New Website in January.
Saw "Chronicles of Narnia"; great. Six more just like it, guys.
LGBC had its most hilariously cute Christmas pageant this past week, starring Ali as a baby Jesus about the same size as mother Mary (played with gravitas and slender hips by Judah Rudd).
Pregnancy seems to be breaking out all over. Good thing we got vaccinated some years ago...
Look, I still think that telling the story tells: that Jesus was found by astrologers, whose calculations and whatnot still led them to Jesus; that, as Augustus said, it really was better to be Herod's huius than his huios--his pig than his son; and that, when you get right down to it, an im-manu el, a with-us god, is a dramatically different thing than an against-us god, a not-with-us god, a happy-to-do-without-us god, or even a within-us god. The human reality is that companionship is actually more intimate, because less subject to self-centered counterfeiting, than immanence. God knows this, and, for all the real truth in the God-is-in-you bits, at bedrock came as another person, not as a deeper me, or a depth within me, let alone as something outside and distant. Up close and personal isn't a bad translation of the Hebrew Immanuel. Since I need forgiveness as well as meaning, a right relationship with others as well as a suitable self-concern and identity, a "god who is there" is just what I need right here.
I go to Baltimore and New York on Tuesday the 27th, so I'll try to blog Christmas afternoon or Boxing Day.
posted by Mark at 3:12 PM
2 Comments:
merry christmas to you also
actually, brianna was mary. judah was the hippie innkeeper, but she kept riding the donkey. although,
still. baby jesus did weigh about the same as mary.
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