“How can we know, in this time, make ourselves
ready, so to wait that in the future we may live as we do now? How can we be
sure that we shall not lose our own life in waiting only for God? The only way
is to know that the God who will come in judgment has already come. It is to
know that the same God who came into the midst of our history, in quiet and
vulnerable stillness in Jesus Christ, is the First and the Last. God has come. Therefore all we can do is wait and
watch, praying that he will come again
and again, and knowing that he will eventually come at last, no longer clothed
in our history, with its suffering and death, but seen by all the world as
judge and redeemer at the end of time. It is because God has come that we wait.”—German
theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), Advent Sunday sermon, November 29,
1931, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christmas Sermons, edited and translated
by Edwin Robertson (2005)
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