Sermonette: Jan. 27, 2020

This is from the devotional, “God is in the Manger” by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor who was imprisoned and executed for participating in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

In an incomparable reversal of all righteous and pious thinking, God declares Godself guilty to the world and thereby extinguishes the guilt of the world. God himself takes the humiliating path of reconciliation and thereby sets the world free. God wants to be guilty of our guilt and takes upon himself the punishment and suffering that this guilt brought to us. God stands in for godlessness, love stands in for hate, the Holy One for the sinner. Now there is no longer any godlessness, any hate, any sin that God has not taken upon himself, suffered, and atoned for. Now there is no more reality and no more world that is not reconciled with God and in peace. That is what God did in his beloved Son Jesus Christ. Ecce homo (Latin)—see the incarnate God, the unfathomable mystery of the love of God for the world—not the ideal human beings but people as they are, not an ideal world but the real world.

So we humans must be prepared to witness a mystery, to witness God breaking in where we least expect: in our greatest weakness, in our neighbors’ darkest time, in our insecurities, our loneliness, our brain and body health problems. Wherever we think God will not be, or is unwilling to go, we are wrong: God is always there. God cannot next exhausted but our ideas about him, but he is everywhere suggested. He cannot be comprehended, but he can be touched. His coming in the flesh—this Mystery we prepare to glimpse again—confirms that he is to be touched.