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This Advent and Christmas we have been hearing two voices shedding different light on the stunning reality that Christians hold in their hearts – God is in the Manger.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer reflects on this good news of which Isaiah speaks hundreds of years before it came to be. They are the voices.

Isaiah is the speaker of God’s truth long before it comes to be and Bonhoeffer is a Christian in extreme circumstances in which he would eventually lose his life for his faith in WWII. He writes from Tegel prison in Berlin in 1943-44.

In a Nazi military prison cell with no presents to give, no Christmas turkey to eat, and no gathering of faith in which to participate, Bonhoeffer likens the whole Christian life to the season of Advent – a life of waiting with alertness and trust in the coming promises of God. That gift of Jesus – Saviour – God in that manger is the only thing that counts.

Isaiah’s words speak of all those promises in grand style – water in the desert, justice for the poor, celebration in the land, no more crying anymore…

The promises are more real than ever now that God has delivered himself into our human hands and cleanses our dirty hands of sin and guilt and shame once and for all.

We pray that this God in the manger gives you what Isaiah foretold and Bonhoeffer clung to – hope – hope in our troubled families, relationships, loneliness, grief, marriages, work-places and wide world.

God is in the Manger – light is here in our darkness, hope is here in any despair, joy is here in all circumstances.

Merry Christmas and happy New Year!

- Pastor Adrian