The Birth of Christ

Oh my God.
I have just seen the most REAL and BEAUTIFUL telling of the birth of Christ.
Wow.
I’ve grown up hearing the Christmas story.
And that can be a drawback, because when I hear “and this shall be a sign to you, you shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger” I don’t visualize an actual Middle-Eastern manger, I visualize a 4th grade girl wearing a white sheet and a silver tinsel halo.
Nothing wrong with sweet 4th grade girls, but that image misses the beautiful reality of what really happened the night of Jesus’ birth. This movie brings it all back and makes it real.
Rent this movie this Christmas!
For me, The Nativity Story was a great way to gently push aside the evangelical traditional pageanty renditions of the story and see it again for the first time.-SW

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 9:27 pm and is filed under Christmas, Church. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

2 Responses to “The Birth of Christ”

  1. Alice Says:
    December 20th, 2007 at 5:59 am

    This movie affected me last year in the very same way. I also grew up doing the Christmas Eve children’s pageants and as an adult, rehearsing and directing them with children. Joseph’s story moved me deeply as it does in the Matthew account, but the movie brought him so to life and caused me to ponder much. I’m glad you shared.

  2. Sensuous Wife Says:
    December 20th, 2007 at 10:46 am

    Thanks, alice. My experience reminded me of a theme that is so common in emergence that of recapturing the essence of loving and living the Jesus way instead of endlessly miming church tradition “just because we’ve always done it that way”.

    It’s a funny paradox isn’t it?
    We have Christmas pageants to remind us of Christ’s actual birth in Bethlehem yet if we tell the story often enough we remember the occasion where he heard the story more than the actual story.

    Being a mom, I understand that kids learn by doing and the roleplaying in a pageant is great way for tactile learners to “go there” and learn. But I really needed to see MiddleEastern Mary and Joseph in an actual stable in a cave to remember that’s the way it really was.

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