The Mercy of God Directed Toward Us
“We cannot approach the manger of the Christ child in the same way we approach the cradle of another child. Rather, when we go to his manger, something happens, and we cannot leave it again unless we have been judged or redeemed. Here we must either collapse or know the mercy of God directed toward us…
The throne of God in the world is not on human thrones, but in human depths, in the manger. Standing around the throne there are no flattering vassals but dark, unknown, questionable figures who cannot get their fill of this miracle and want to live entirely by the mercy of God.”
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God is in the Manger
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Image above taken at Lethbridge Mennonite Church, Christmas Eve 2014.
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Rumblings 
“…either collapse or know the mercy of God….”
Over against a NYTimes op-ed piece on Christmas Day, how welcome !
T. M. Luhrmann writes of God-neutral faith, “Religion without God,” desire for community with each other and to be thankful but not to God – ritual only as structure and finding it in Sunday assemblies.
But “The throne of God in the world is not on human thrones.”
We are very confused people. We are hungry, this we know. But we have little idea where we might find bread.
Thanks for the post and the Nativity photo, Love it!
“The throne of God in the world is not on human thrones, but in human depths,..”
This post along with mmartha’s wonderful comment concerning the growing phenomena of “Sunday Assemblies” made me recall a profound You Tube video featuring Dr. C. Baxter Kruger and Paul Young(The Shack) titled: “The Trinity and Evangelism”. In it, Dr. Kruger seeks to dissolve the notion of the sacred/secular dichotomy and explains how that many of our inherent impulse’s and individual drive’s for expression (ie. the “desire for community with each other” EVEN in godless Sunday Assemblies) is actually a manifestation of God, by way of Holy Spirit, expressing Himself through them….it just hasn’t been explained to them OR us in that way…no one told us it was God coming forth in us.
I love the way you put this, Mike, “No one told us it was God coming forth in us.”
Let me agree briefly with Mike’s well taken point and that Augustine made, that we are restless until we rest in God. I follow closely all the news of Richard Dawkins and often believe he has seen much more light than he acknowledges.