01 December 2015

Waiting in Advent 2015
with Dietrich Bonhoeffer (3)

‘When Advent comes again and we hear and sing the traditional Christmas carols’ ... singing angels in a window in Saint Lachtain’s Church, Freshford, Co Kilkenny (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Advent began on Sunday [29 November 2015], and today [30 November] is Saint Andrew’s Day. Over these few weeks, as we wait and prepare for Christmas, I invite you to join me in my own Advent Calendar each morning for a few, brief moments and to reflect on the meaning of Advent through the words of the great German theologian and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945).

In a sermon preached in Barcelona on the first Sunday of Advent, 2 December 1928, Bonhoeffer said:

“When Advent comes again and we hear and sing the traditional Christmas carols, a peculiar feeling secretly comes over us, and even the hardest hearts are softened; we sense something we felt as children when we were away from our mother, something like homesickness, without hardness, without grimness.”

Readings (Church of Ireland lectionary): Psalm 50; Amos 3: 1-11; II Peter 1: 12-21.

The Advent Collect:

Almighty God,
Give us grace to cast away the works of darkness
and to put on the armour of light
now in the time of this mortal life
in which your Son Jesus Christ came to us in great humility;
that on the last day
when he shall come again in his glorious majesty
to judge the living and the dead,
we may rise to the life immortal;
through him who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

Yesterday’s reflection

Continued tomorrow