Tag: Immanuel

Jesus grew in wisdom and in stature and in favour with God and all the people. Luke, Luke 2:52

Christmas 2020: Week 6, Day 2: Growth

by Christine

Shame. 

People say that shame is the feeling you have when you believe something is inherently wrong with who you are. Guilt, on the other hand, is feeling there’s something wrong with your actions. 

But actually, shame stems from a fear of exclusion. It’s not just about how you relate to yourself, but how you relate to other people. 

I learned about this when I read a definition from a 2003 paper by Thomas Scheff. He wrote that shame is:

“the large family of emotions that includes many cognates and variants most notably embarrassment, guilt, humiliation, and related feelings of shyness that originate in threats to social bond. This definition integrates self (emotional reactions) and society (the social bond).”

Scheff, Thomas J. “Shame in Self and Society.” Symbolic Interaction, vol. 26, no. 2, 2003, pp. 239–262. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/si.2003.26.2.239. Accessed 23 Dec. 2020

Suddenly a whole heap of experiences made sense to me. Including those times when I haven’t felt shame. 

You see, when I felt no shame, it’s because I had no fear of exclusion – even if I was aware that something I had done wasn’t fabulous.

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The Word became flesh and took up residence among us. John the Evangelist, John 1:14

Christmas 2020: Week 6, Day 1: Meeting

by Christine

“I think we’ve found Screwtape’s opposite number.”

In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis imagined the plight of an ordinary Christian man. His story is narrated through letters – written from one demon to another, both trying to ensnare the man’s damnation. 

His ‘opposite number’ is a character in a radio play I wrote a few years ago. I hadn’t been thinking of The Screwtape Letters, but then a friend made the comparison. And I loved it. Best of all, my angels had sass and character; the good guys were savvy and wry. They had the best lines and the best laughs. 

In 2019, I started work on another script. This time, you could say the themes were closer to those in TheScrewtape Letters. A guardian angel has a supervision meeting about his ‘assignment’ — being a Western, white, middle-class, Christian man. Who’s overwhelmed and teetering on depression.

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"The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called the Son of God." The Angel Gabriel, Luke 1:35

Christmas 2020: Week 2, Day 5: Chosen

by Christine

You hear some kinds of stories multiple times. Then they become tropes. Then you get fed up of hearing them. 

Take the whole ‘chosen one’ plot. Something bad needs sorting, but fate or prophecy has decided who will do this. And more often than not, it’s a child. Or a baby. Or a yet-to-be-born baby. Whoever it is, they were born for this. 

And then every now and then, you see the story told well, or in a surprising way. 

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"Listen carefully, the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and she will call his name Immanuel (God with us)." The Prophet Isaiah, Isaiah 7:13

Christmas 2020: Week 2, Day 4: Translation

by Christine

“God lets his children tell his story.” 

Peter Enns, biblical scholar

Today, people believe things are true when the history, facts and science stack up. 

(Well… I mean… most of us do…)

Being people of faith, Christians want to show that things about God are true. And sometimes they do this by showing how the facts stack up. 

Now, I have time for this – up to a point. There is reliable historical information, outside of the Bible, to show that Jesus lived and died. There is science behind the study of ancient texts and earliest the New Testament manuscripts date from very close to Jesus’s time. 

But, trying to prove God or the Bible by using science has its limits. For one thing, history cannot be reproduced in a lab experiment. For another, the stories of the Bible aren’t scientific in that way. 

Continue reading Christmas 2020: Week 2, Day 4: Translation →