When Dark Clouds Hover Over Christmas....

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Nazi regime on April 9, 1945. He was in prison from 1943 up until he was martyred in 1945. His letters and other writings from prison have been preserved and pieces of them can be found in a small book entitled, God is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas. I am fascinated by this man's ability to look upward in times of crisis and loneliness. I know so many people who feel like Christmas is prison. Without a doubt, the holidays sting with sharp pain and highlight the losses and traumatic events of people's lives. Ironically, Christmas is about Jesus coming to die. It's a sincere celebration for us because we remember our Savior who was tortured in our place. But the details around His story, and the means by which He accomplished this plan, are quite the opposite of how Christmas unfolds today. This is Bonhoeffer's point: "God is in the manger." His strange way is coming low in order to be exalted on high. The dazzle of the world and the chaos of the mall sound nothing like the first Christmas eve. In one of his letters from prison to his fiancee Maria von Wedemeyer, Bonhoeffer writes these words that re-center me:


“Be brave for my sake, dearest Maria, even if this letter is your only token of my love this Christmas-tide. We shall both experience a few dark hours--why should we disguise that from each other? We shall ponder the incomprehensibility of our lot and be assailed by the question of why, over and above the darkness already enshrouding humanity, we should be subjected to the bitter anguish of a separation whose purpose we fail to understand...And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives.” December 13, 1943


To those of you who suffer silently this Christmas,
To those who feel loss so deeply it makes your head ache and your stomach sick,
To those who can't seem to see the light with all the dark clouds falling about you,
To those who are misunderstood, alone and want the season to pass by with haste...
LOOK UP to the One who understands all this pain and more.
Look to Him and know His presence in the stillness of the darkest hour of night.
Wait for Him with expectation that He will deliver us from all that is not right.
Though mourning lasts for a night, joy will come in the morning.

Advent is the season of waiting.

I have come to despise waiting and yet it characterizes my life in so many ways. It surfaces raw angst in me as these gaps seem to shroud His promises, and present as if He is not actually keeping His word. But the great writer Henri Nouwen speaks of waiting as one of the qualities most significant to the Christian faith, so I heed his words with conviction:

"Waiting is essential to the spiritual life. But waiting as a disciple of Jesus is not an empty waiting. It is a waiting with a promise in our hearts that makes already present what we are waiting for. We wait during Advent for the birth of Jesus. We wait after Easter for the coming of the Spirit, and after the ascension of Jesus we wait for his coming again in glory. We are always waiting, but it is a waiting in the conviction that we have already seen God’s footsteps."

In the end, I guess this is the truest evidence of faith: seeing what isn't in front of you; hearing what is silent. May Christmas deliver a message of hope; may it refocus us our attention to the supernatural world that inhabits our true home. In the same way the Israelites waited endlessly for the Messiah to arrive, we also await with expectation His grand return. Let's choose to bank on His words,


"Behold, I AM making all things new!"