On April 9, 1945, the young German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hung by the Nazis for his part in a plot against Hitler’s life. It was just a few days before the end of the war. He had been imprisoned since 1943. Even before his imprisonment Bonhoeffer had already made a significant difference in the life of German Christians in the anti-Nazi Confessing Church. Far from silencing him, his time in prison deepened and enriched his faith and relationships, and so gave us all a gift of understanding who God might be for the modern world. The book The Mystery of Holy Night is a Christmas sermon about the incarnation that draws us into that gift. Bonhoeffer writes: “With God dwells joy, and down from God it comes, seizing mind, soul, and body; and where this joy has grasped a human being, it spreads, it carries away, it bursts through closed doors.”