1. Peter Fitch, St. Croix Vineyard Sunday, December 24. 2017
Christmas!
Peter Fitch, St. Croix Vineyard
Sunday, December

2. Last week’s reflections
Freedom to tell the story in new and child-like ways
Freedom to ask difficult questions about traditional stories
Imagining how dis-orienteering the Gospel Story was in its context
Then wondering what would do that for us

3. Joy to the World . . .

4. Mado
Remember the part where one of the children (Liam) says to the baby in the nativity scene manger, “Are you Jesus?” And the baby answers, “I think so.”
What if people could say to each of us, “Have you the Christ living inside you?” and we could answer, “I think so.”
This made me realize we could have had a whole other level of thoughts last week from everyone who watched the children playing in the videos and listened to the adult reflections on what they saw

5. Tanya
Somehow we get such a separation between matter and spirit, as though one is special and one isn’t
Me: “I know. Today’s reflections made me think that every birth is an Incarnation. Every baby is God born into the world”

6. Image of God
There is actually a pretty strong Biblical basis for saying such a thing, although I know it sounds like the height of idolatry
Properly understood, I think it is The height of idolatry
Low idolatry makes too much of something that doesn’t deserve it
High idolatry can exist, too We can make God so high that there’s no connection We can make our beliefs about God into conceptual “graven images”

7. The best kind of idolatry gives honour and worship to something that does deserve it: the best, most life-giving view of God and people
Older versus modern ideas of the Hebrew phrase: “image of God”
Kings were said to be in the image of their deities, their idols were placed around their conquered lands, just as the idols of the gods were placed within their temples
God speaks a different message in Genesis We are all His representatives, we are all His Image

8. John 10
34 Jesus answered them, “Has it not been written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’? 35 If he called them gods, to whom the word of God came (and the Scripture cannot be broken), 36 do you say of Him, whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’? 

9. David Hayward

10. Gerard Manley Hopkins
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;  As tumbled over rim in roundy wells  Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's  Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;  Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:  Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;  Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,  Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came. 

11. Gerard Manley Hopkins
I say móre: the just man justices;  Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;  Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —  Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,  Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his  To the Father through the features of men's faces. 

12. What we learn from every baby
Fragility and strength
Tenderness
Hope
Potential and Risk
Love

13. What we learn from Jesus as a baby
Something about God
Something about ourselves