For Advent, I’m reading a book of sermons preached by DietrichBonhoeffer, mostly during the Advent season.
To sum up this extraordinary man: Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran minister and
theologian in Germany. Before the Second
World War, he and other Christians rejected Nazi efforts to use the Christianfaith to support their hateful ideology.
During the war, Bonhoeffer joined the covert German Resistance movement
against Adolf Hitler.
He even knew of
the plot to assassinate Hitler that failed in 1944. After two years in prison, Bonhoeffer was
eventually hanged in 1945, just days before his prison camp was liberated by
American soldiers.
Advent is a season of waiting, and no one ever had to practice
Christian waiting more than Bonhoeffer. On
the first Sunday of Advent in 1931, he preached, with the Nazis rising in
popularity. He preached on Jesus’ words,
“Be dressed ready for service and keep your lamps burning, like men waiting for
their master to return” (Luke 12:35).
His sermon was an extended meditation on “waiting,” the waiting most of
us do, and Christian waiting:
“This is a waiting within us for nothing less than that this world will
be redeemed through and through—not by this or that political means, but by
God. When God himself comes to us, then
Advent truly begins to be real…We cannot wait for God so ready to resign
ourselves to his not coming, so indifferent, so foolish, as we might wait for
an increase in salary…Then our waiting and hoping is not like a piece of
wishful thinking, or a fantasy, but life itself. Then we live only because we wait for God.”
What are we waiting for this Advent?
A Christmas present? An “increase
in salary?” A favorable decision of some
kind? For the “axe” to fall? I think that Bonhoeffer would say that all
those are temporary things that aren’t worth half the mental wear and tear we spend
on them. The only thing worth waiting
for is God, who is coming this Advent, as God came some 2,000 years ago, and as
God comes again and again and again, every year, in helplessness, trust, and
peace.
Perhaps God will come, through that increase in salary, or that
favorable decision. But if not, it
simply means that we keep waiting for nothing other than God himself, who has
come and who will come, again and again and again. Happy Waiting to each of you this most
blessed Advent.
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