“We can, and should also, celebrate Christmas despite the ruins around us.” Those words were written on the first Sunday of Advent in 1943 in Germany, from a prison, from cell #92, from the pen of a Lutheran pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a letter he wrote to his parents.

“We can, and should also, celebrate Christmas despite the ruins around us.”

Despite the ruins around us?

That’s not the way we usually think of celebrating Christmas, is it? Christmas is bright and happy. It is! I saw it on a beer commercial! Some well-dressed folks standing around the living room, happily chatting away, a beautiful Christmas tree in the corner, tons of wrapped presents underneath it. Outside, a nice snow was falling, and the camera faded away with warmth and light streaming out the windows onto the snow. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be?

“We can, and should also, celebrate Christmas despite the ruins around us.”

One of my favorite things of Christmas is a nativity set I was given many years ago. It was made in Mexico, with very much of a native flavor. The colors of all the clothing on the characters is bright and happy. The faces on the characters are shining. The animals that the kings are riding in on are exotic…camel, elephant and horse. I love it. It’s beautiful and delicate and happy. Isn’t that the way Christmas is supposed to be?

“We can, and should also, celebrate Christmas despite the ruins around us.”

The reality is that this holy time of Christmas, far from being an idealized Christmas card picture…is often an amazing paradox of joy and sadness, of pain and wonder.

Our world is full of war and rumors of war.

And your sister is making the trip to town for the first time in ten years.

There is injustice and racism and greed and hunger present all around us…and in us.

And your 4 year old for the first time seems to grasp that Jesus is God’s clearest way of saying “I love you.”

You feel lonely and disappointed.

And you hear this wonderful music that seems to draw you on holy ground close to God.

Regardless of exact circumstances, at Christmas we often discover anew that life is not perfect. That relationships and people are seldom the way we would want them to be. That we, perhaps, have devoted less time to knowing the God who came to earth as a tiny babe than we have spent listening to Christmas carols about Him. This is real life.

“We can, and should also, celebrate Christmas despite the ruins around us.”

I think what Bonhoeffer was saying was that the happiness of the moment is not the joy of Christmas. Christmas joy is somehow much earthier than that, without being any less holy.

In 2002 I was in Uganda, in a little village at the end of a highway at the end of a road at the end of a trail at the end of a path, at the far end of the village. We visited Justeen, a 14 year old girl who was sick with malaria, but was raising her siblings by herself because her parents and all of the adults in her family had died of AIDS.

Her little dilapidated house was dirty and empty, and the whole situation seemed devoid of hope, and I went outside to cry a little bit. A friend joined me out in the sun, and he said “Boy, this is where the incarnation really means something.” I wasn’t tracking. He said “Can you imagine…that Jesus came into a world like this?”

That’s it, isn’t it? Into this melting pot of life…comes a Savior. Wherever we have been, wherever we are…whoever we have been, whatever we have done…Christ has come. There. Here. We are not alone. Christ has come.

“We can, and should also, celebrate Christmas despite the ruins around us.”

Dietrick Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor, was captivated by the picture that is on the front of your bulletin tonight. Take a look at it. It’s a painting from the 1500’s by an artist named Albrecht Altdorfer.

Bonhoeffer marveled that Altdorfer imagined the holy family huddled in the ruins of bricks and buildings. He wrote “How could he, four hundred years ago, against all the traditions of his time, show the scene like that?” Real world.

“We can, and should also, celebrate Christmas despite the ruins around us.”

“The ruins around us” were closing in around Dietrich Bonhoeffer in December of 1943. He would have only one more Christmas in prison before being led to the gallows and hanged, his last words being “This is the end…but for me the beginning of life.”

“We can, and should also, celebrate Christmas despite the ruins around us.”

What was it Bonhoeffer celebrated that could bring such a response?

It was the beginning…of his beginning. Christ came into the real world. The world where cattle and shepherds and maniac kings existed, the world where ruthless dictators thrived, the world where you and I live, where everything is not picture perfect, the world that would in fact crucify its own Messiah…it is into this real world that Christ came. Rather than make Christmas less, it is more. Because of its very earthiness, it is holier. It is less about happiness, and more about joy.

• Joy in the presence of God.
• Joy in God’s willingness and ability to absorb the darkness of the world.
• Joy that in Christ, we have a beginning, and we know the end.

God came right where he was most needed. Right here. On this holy night. “The presence of God,” Bonhoeffer once wrote, “in the form of a…child.”

Let us pray.