Sunday 30th November – Waiting

30-11-2025, Advent 1A, God is in the Manger, Isaiah 2:1-5, pastor adrian kitson

This is what Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem:

²In the last days

the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established
as the highest of the mountains;
it will be exalted above the hills,
and all nations will stream to it.

³Many peoples will come and say,

‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
    to the temple of the God of Jacob.
He will teach us his ways,
    so that we may walk in his paths.’
The law will go out from Zion,
    the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

⁴He will judge between the nations
    and will settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into ploughshares
    and their spears into pruning hooks.Nation will not take up sword against nation,
    nor will they train for war any more.

⁵Come, descendants of Jacob,
let us walk in the light of the Lord.

I have never thought of Advent being like a prisoner staring at the cell door waiting for someone to open the door from the outside to set him free. After listening to Bonhoeffer, I now see it.

“Life in a prison cell may well compare to Advent: one waits, hopes, and does this, that, or the other – things that are really of no consequence – the door is shut, and can only be opened from the outside.” (God is in the Manger, Letter from Bonhoeffer at Tegel prison to Eberhard Bethge, November 21, 1943)

Bonhoeffer lived for two Advent and Christmas seasons in Tegel prison (1943 and 44). In the suburbs of Berlin, not for from his parents, his best friend and his fiancé, Maria, and yet a ‘million miles away, he waited and waited, and all the while never knowing if any day would be opened by someone from the outside but not to set him free but bring his end.

He saw things of God in that cell as he waited. My hope is that he helps us see some things of our God as we enter this Advent waiting season and enjoy Christmas – if we are even waiting for God at all?

Bonhoeffer is clear: Advent is all about waiting. Waiting for something big, momentous, world-changing; soul-changing but not being able to speed its coming or even influence its coming. Like him, locked in that unjust prison cell just having to wait for someone else to free him – powerless, incapable, at the mercy or lack of mercy of another.

He stands in a long line of faith-filled people who know all about being powerless in the face of overwhelming foes; about waiting for God to do something big and good and life-changing in all their waiting suffering.

Isaiah uses all his words to try and reveal what he sees seven hundred years before it came to be.

He sees a peace that no one believed was possible. As you listen to Isaiah’s long words you can hear that God’s people tried to make that peace. They tried militarily and politically to manufacture some kind of peace with the Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians….. All to no avail.

Isaiah condemns them for even trying since all their efforts were in fact a lack of trust in the lord’s promises and best judgement.

But then Isaiah also sees a new thing, a new hope rising. He sees people of all nationalities and persuasions flowing en masse to the great city of God atop God’s holy mountain. All discord and dispute settled and accounted for. All free; all in awe and wonder of God’s goodness and power now revealed after all the suffering of defeat and exile and human arrogance that led to those things.

Isaiah sees a new day when no community has a need for weapons that maim and kill. There is no need to even think about fighting and winning. There is just leaving the judgement of all disputes to the Lord as we walk together in his presence.

There is just light; the light of peace resting across the planet. There is hope in our war; in our aloneness; in our disunity; in our hopelessness.

Bonhoeffer sees that same lack of faith at work in a subservient church trying to survive under National Socialism and then the same light and life in that Christ-child coming at Christmas.

Bonhoeffer says that the Advent season is a season of waiting, but our whole life is an Advent season, that is, a season of waiting for the last Advent, for the time when there will be a whole new heaven and a new earth.

Like you and me, Dietrich sees the One Isaiah spoke of as “The Servant”, as Jesus – Jesus is the one coming and he is the one standing at that cell door and at the door of your life today. He is the one who has opened that cell door.

“Jesus stands at the door knocking” (Revelation 3:20) quotes Dietrich in his Advent cell.

But where is he for us who are not in Tegel prison in 1943?

“… he comes in the form of a beggar, of the dissolute human child in raged clothes, asking for help. He confronts you in every person that you meet. As long as there are people, Christ will walk the earth as your neighbour, as the one through whom God calls you, speaks to you, makes demands on you….Do you want to close the door or open it? (God is in the Manger, Day One).

That is the Advent waiting question. As you sit in the cell of the people and the work and the family and community and needs that surround you this year, and you know Jesus is always standing close and knocking on your door, do you want him to open that door or do you want him to leave you alone in your bubble?

I think Isaiah sees a person like Bonhoeffer from Tegel prison inviting you to let Jesus open that door.

³Many peoples (like Bonhoeffer) will come and say,

‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the temple of the God of Jacob.

Sounds easy. Open the door. Let’s go!

But this waiting and trusting the Lord to open the door to new things is not everyone’s cup of tea.

Dietrich can see from his prison cell experience that waiting is an art that is hard to master because everything inside of us wants what we want NOW. Things that seem so precious to the eye eventually disappoint. So, if you constantly stay busy in life getting what you think you need or they need, you will ‘never experience the full blessing of fulfillment’, he says.

He sees not allowing Jesus in to those big question you are facing, those anxieties you feel, those worries you have at this of year or have had all year and instead just searching for quick things, other things, more thing now, is like it like constantly picking the new fruit only to find out that it is not ripe and being constantly disappointed with that fruit. Because you cannot stay still, stay listening; stay waiting and you move to find and fix you can never get to the joy of a question fulfilled, and thing understood, a new hope revealed to you:

“Those who do not know how it feels to struggle anxiously with the deepest questions of life, of their life, and to patiently look forward with anticipation until the truth is revealed, cannot even dream of the splendour of the moment in which clarity is illuminated for them.

In his many letters to his dear Maria, somehow in this forced waiting, Bonhoeffer can finally see God at work in it all.

“Be brave for my sake, dearest Maria, even if this letter is your only token of my love this Christmastide. We shall both experience a few dark hours …We shall ponder the incomprehensibility of our lot and be assailed by the question of why, over and above the darkness already enshrouding humanity (National Socialism), we should be subjected to the bitter anguish of a separation whose purpose we fail to understand … And then, just when everything is bearing down on us … the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger, wealth and poverty, light in darkness, succour in abandonment. No evil can befall us, whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the Go who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives”

“Our eyes are at fault, that is all”.

Maybe this Advent is Isaiah, Jesus and Dietrich calling you to not trust your eyes but follow that voice in your ears – that voice inviting you to let him into your questions and struggles and lead you somewhere you have not seen yet.

It seems that your anxieties, worries and weaknesses are useful at Advent. Useful to the Lord. He is in those prison walls because he will be in that manger.

The only ones who can wait are people who carry restlessness around with them and people who look up with reverence to the greatest in the word.

Advent is for the

… souls who have no peace; who know they poverty; their lack of progress; people who sense that greatness is coming – God in that manger is coming …’.

Strange how the waiting gives you new vision …

I used to be very fond of thinking up and buying presents, but now that we have nothing to give, the gift of God gave us in the birth of Christ will seem more glorious; the emptier our hands, the better we understand what Luther means by his dying words, ‘We’re beggars; it’s true”. The poorer our quarters, the more clearly we perceive that our hearts should be Christ’s home on earth”.

Why so? Because;

“The Lord of the ages is God. The turning point of the ages is Christ. The right spirit of the ages is the Holy Spirit. And he is in the manger”.

May your heart be Christ’s home on earth and in whatever binds you at the moment.