BEING HUMAN

I invite you to share this and to join us at your Christmas meal, whether with your church or with your family.

A Christmas table set and waiting. A traditional Ukrainian embroidered cloth with red ornamental patterns stretches beneath ceramic dishes of untouched holiday food. Empty chairs, plain and black, each draped with military fatigues, and each uniform silently waiting for its owner to come back.

This table stands for our waiting and our loss. As Rachel wept for her children in Bethlehem and refused to be comforted because they were no more, families across Ukraine are waiting for thousands held in russian captivity, for more than 50,000 missing in action, for the countless dead whose number we still cannot state with certainty, and for more than a million people now serving, hundreds of thousands of them at the front.

This pain reaches well beyond Ukraine’s borders. From Israel to Gaza and Lebanon, from Syria to Sudan, empty chairs at family tables tell the same story of separation. As Mary and Joseph found no room in Bethlehem, millions are displaced from their homes this Christmas, and as the Holy Family fled to Egypt, countless others are seeking refuge in foreign countries.

So we invite you to an act of remembrance this Christmas: set an empty chair and an empty plate at your table. Let it stand for Ukraine’s missing and fallen defenders, and for everyone who cannot be home this Christmas because of war, persecution or displacement.

Let that empty space speak of those in captivity, like Paul writing his letters from prison; of those missing, like David lamenting Jonathan; of those serving far from home, like Daniel in Babylon; and of those who have given their lives, like Stephen, killed in the name of traditional religious values.

As we celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, may these empty chairs remind us to pray for those who cannot come home, to work for justice, and to hold space in our hearts for reunion.

Will you join us in this act of remembrance? Will you help keep alive the hope that these chairs will be filled again? Will you challenge the silence?

For in God’s kingdom every empty chair is waiting for the person who belongs in it, every missing person is known by name, and every tear will finally be wiped away.

Peace be with you, and keep your children away from war. Taras Dyatlik, Ukraine
1033rd day of the full-scale russian war, and of the dead institutional silence of russian evangelicals and of many Global Church structures

P.S. The photograph is by Yurii Diachyshyn, from the event in Lviv on 21 December 2024, where a Christmas table was set and left waiting for prisoners of war and the missing.