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Usually, I write “Psalms on Saturday,” focusing on an individual psalm. It’s taken a little over three years, but I now have only five psalms I haven’t written about. I’m postponing “Psalms on Saturday” till the beginning of 2026. Instead, I’m writing on Detrich Bonhoeffer’s Christmas thoughts, and then after Christmas, spending two Saturdays on developing New Year’s Resolutions according to our calling.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor and theologian living in Germany before World War II, delivered a radio broadcast two days after Adolf Hitler seized power. His message included this quote: “Leaders of offices which set themselves up as gods mock God.” But Germany never heard the message because his microphone had been switched off.
Bonhoeffer spent the last two years of his life in prison. During this time, he wrote many Christmas devotions. I’m sharing quotes from these writings in my “Bonhoeffer on Saturday” series in Interruptions.
His biographer writes …
“For Bonhoeffer, waiting — one of the central themes of the Advent experience — was a fact of life during the war: waiting to be released from prison; waiting to be able to spend more than an hour a month in the company of his young fiancée, Maria von Wedemeyer; waiting for the end of the war.
“There was a helplessness in his situation that he recognized as a parallel to Advent, Christians’ time of waiting for redemption in Christ. ‘Life in a prison cell may well be compared to Advent,’ Bonhoeffer wrote to his best friend Eberhard Bethge as the holidays approached in 1943. ‘One waits, hopes, and does this, that, or the other — things that are really of no consequence — the door is shut, and can only be opened from the outside.’”
On “waiting” by Dietrich Bonhoeffer …
“Celebrating Advent means being able to wait. Waiting is an art that our impatient age has forgotten. It wants to break open the ripe fruit when it has hardly finished planting the shoot. But all too often, the greedy eyes are only deceived; the fruit that seemed so precious is still green on the inside, and disrespectful hands ungratefully toss aside what has so disappointed them. Whoever does not know the austere blessedness of waiting, of hopefully doing without, will never experience the full blessing of fulfillment.
Isaiah 9:6-7
“It is still seven hundred years until the time of fulfillment, but the prophet Isaiah is so deeply immersed in God’s thought and counsel that he speaks of the future as if he saw it already, and he speaks of the salvific hour as if he already stood in adoration before the manger of Jesus. To Isaiah, a child had been born!
“What will happen one day is already real and certain in God’s eyes, and it will be not only for the salvation of future generations but already for the prophet Isaiah who sees it coming and for his generation, indeed, for all generations on earth.
“Advent can be celebrated only by those whose souls give them no peace, who know that they are poor and incomplete, and who sense something of the greatness that is supposed to come, before which they can only bow in humble timidity, waiting until He inclines himself toward us — the Holy One himself, God in the child in the manger. God is coming; the Lord Jesus is coming; Christmas is coming.”
Amen, a child has been born for us!