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Longest Night / Red Candle

On the longest night, we gathered at Home Street Mennonite Church for an Advent vigil for Palestine.

Church altar table in foreground with twinkle lights and lit candles, a projected lit red candle on the wall behind

The liturgy below was adapted from Preach Palestine 2025: Advent of a revolution and birth of a movement by Freedom Church of the Poor; FOSNA; Kairos - the Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice and Red Letter Christians: God with us: faith in the face of genocide and the service was a response to the Red Candle Advent challenge.

In longing and grief, we also heard about Kairos II, the “Moment of Truth,” whose challenge we took up to name occupation, apartheid, and genocide.

From Preach Palestine, opening reflections included...

“We live in a time of monsters.

“The story and tradition of Advent reminds us that the time of monsters is also a time of powerful expectation. A time when we see the signs of something new breaking through.

“The Advent story was intended to affirm a new way, realized in the lives and struggles of the poor and dispossessed, that seeks peace through justice, that yearns for a world of abundance where all can thrive and live in right relationship.”

Prayer

God of light
God of justice
God of hope

We tune our wills to your reconciling spirit.

We come to you in our grief and rage and our despair.
We gather to find strength together for the revolution.
We seek to interrupt the old ways of power that exploit, dehumanize, dominate, and kill.
We long for the dismantling of systems that oppress us even as they engage us in their oppression.

We ask for humble strength to resist and subvert the powers that divide, shame and wound.

Instruct us in the ways of sumud – of steadfast perseverance – that refuses to accept binary thinking. Help us to fight with gentle but ferocious strength.

Fill us with your love for all humanity that sees a universe in each life and fights to preserve them.
Pour out your Spirit of peace as we seek to walk in light and live with hope in this time of monsters.

Amen.

From Red Letter Christians Advent devotional, reflections on Isaiah 2:1-5 by Rev Dr Niveen Ibrahim Sarras

“Isaiah 2:1–5, ... invites a people in crisis ... to have a holy imagination and to hope amid oppression is itself an act of sacred resistance.

“This prophetic invitation is relevant today.

“This prophetic vision envisions a future that challenges people’s present reality and proclaims that humanity’s destiny is not endless war but transformation....

“Isaiah expresses this transformation through a powerful metaphor: nations turning their weapons into agricultural tools. Isaiah’s invitation is to embody peace even when the world remains unchanged...

“...waiting is not passive. It is active, courageous, and creative.

“In this Advent, we are invited to seek the light of the Lord even amid the ruins ... political division and human despair.

“We are invited to hope.

“Hope ... is holy imagination ... a sacred act of resistance against war and death .... living as though God’s peace is already breaking into the world.”

(by Rev. Dr. Niveen Ibrahim Sarras, Ph.D)

Prayer by Dr Lamma Mansour

“God our Lord,
We come to you in this darkness,
Hard-pressed on every side, but not crushed;
Persecuted, but not abandoned;
Struck down but not destroyed;
Because we carry your sumud (steadfastness) in our souls.

“God who lifts our burdens,
Lift the rubble and rescue those underneath,
With your mighty hand bring them from the edge of death back to life.
Clear the air from the smell of burning,
Infuse our land with your fragrance of salvation.

“God of life,
As we watch our world crumble around us,
As we experience heartbreak and disappointment,
Foster in us a divine imagination,
One that can see the wall come down,
One that can see the siege lifted,
One that can see all inhabitants of the land living in security and peace,
One that can still believe of a life abundant.

(adapted from Dr Lamma Mansour’s “A Prayer of Lament and Hope,” 2023)

A call to action

See other blog posts for many letters and petitions to sign, especially regarding Bill C-233, the “no loopholes” bill. 

Prayer adapted from the Patriarch Emeritus

Let us set forth, carrying one another.

Let us keep hope alive, knowing that peace is possible....

There will be many moments when the way appears blocked. But together we will carve out a path forward, rooted in God’s hope, and “hope does not disappoint us.” (Romans 5:5).

Our hope is in God, in ourselves and in every human being upon whom God bestows some of his goodness.

(From Keeping Hope Alive—A Christian Reflection from Jerusalem, October 7, 2024, by the reflection Group + Michel Sabbah, Patriarch Emeritus)

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