This year’s Bethel Chapel Church Christmas program (at the corner of “K” and Lycoming streets) is THIS Sunday, December 14th, at 6:00 pm. In addition to some great music, the program will bring to life a famous sermon by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was a German Lutheran pastor who lived during the time of Adolph Hitler’s rise to power. Although he wrote several influential books, Dr. Bonhoeffer is best remembered for his courageous opposition to the Nazi regime’s systematic slaughter of the Jews.
In April of 1943 Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned for the next 18 months. He was then taken to a Nazi concentration camp where he was accused of plotting to assassinate Adolph Hitler. After a very brief “trial,” he was executed by hanging on April 9th, 1945. He was killed just two weeks before the Allies liberated that concentration camp, and just three weeks before Hitler committed suicide.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer highlights an often forgotten miracle related to the Christmas story. The birth of Christ was wrapped up in insignificance. Jesus was born in Bethlehem—a small village in a country the size of New Jersey. His parents were little-known, poor, blue-collar laborers from Nazareth—another small village. The birth took place where animals were born. There was nothing glamorous about the birth of Christ.
The circumstances around Christ’s birth serves as a great encouragement when we feel unnoticed and unimportant. Here is how Dr. Bonhoeffer describes it:
“God is not ashamed of human lowliness but goes right into the middle of it, chooses someone as an instrument, and performs the miracles right there where they are least expected. God draws near to the lowly, loving the lost, the unnoticed, the unremarkable, the excluded, the powerless, and the broken. What people say is lost, God says is found; what people say is “condemned,” God says is “saved.” Where people say No! God says Yes! Where people turn their eyes away in indifference or arrogance, God gazes with a love that glows warmer there than anywhere else. Where people say something is despicable, God calls it blessed. When we come to a point in our lives where we are completely ashamed of ourselves and before God; when we believe that God especially must now be ashamed of us, and when we feel as far away from God as ever in all our lives—that is the moment in which God is closer to us than ever, wanting to break into our lives, wanting us to feel the presence of the holy and to grasp the miracle of God’s love, God’s nearness and grace.”
Paul put it this way: “For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God. But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus… so that, just as it is written, ‘Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord.’” (1 Corinthians 1:26–31).
In other words, we actually belong to the God who made us when we humbly admit that there is nothing good enough in us to please a holy God. We must realize our brokenness and open our hearts to Christ’s offer of forgiveness. That’s all there is to it. Just like Christ’s birth, humility comes before exaltation. This way Jesus gets all the credit for rescuing us from our sinful condition.
“For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9).
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