Serve, Work and Transform: Presbyterian Peace Fellowship

Tuesday, December 2, 2025

Presbyterian Peace Fellowship - Advent Under the Rubble

Hi friends,

As we enter Advent, I keep returning to Kelly Latimore’s Christ in the Rubble. Many writers, artists, and theologians have been naming the same truth: that if Christ is being born today, he is being born among people crushed by the world’s violence.

Womanist theologian Emilie Townes teaches that God shows up where cultural evil does its deepest harm, with those suffering under systemic evil, not above it. God is found with the people the world tries to push to the bottom. When I look at Latimore’s icon, I hear that teaching in visual form.

Advent invites us to wait, but not with closed eyes. It calls us to wait with vigilance, with courage, and with solidarity. Living in Chicago as a Black queer person has always made this real for me. And with heightened ICE and Border Patrol presence these past months, my eyes have been opening wider and wider. People have been taken from corners I walk past every day and families are being torn apart. This advent I have practiced waiting by getting to know my neighbors, checking in on families, joining community patrols near schools, and showing up for PPF’s Flight work. It has meant remembering that Christ is not only in the rubble of Gaza. Christ is also in the rubble of our own neighborhoods, our own systems, our own streets.

This season our theme is Advent Under the Rubble. Each week you will hear reflections from members of our community on hope, peace, joy, and love in the places where they are most needed. My prayer is that these reflections help us see where Christ is being born right now and call us to respond with courage, imagination, and steadfast love in the face of empire.

We are entering this season with a real need. To keep grounding our work in accompaniment, gun violence prevention, abolition, and the daily labor of showing up where God already is, we need to raise $81,000 by the end of the year. If you are able, I invite you to make an Advent gift today.

Thank you for being part of this community and for choosing to wait with your eyes open.

In hope,

Dezi Primous Gillon (They/Them)

Communications and Digital Organizing Manager

Presbyterian Peace Fellowship

According to a recent report by WBEZ Chicago, laminated signs reading “ICE Abducted Someone Here” have been posted around the city to mark places where people were arrested during Operation Midway Blitz-- a painful reminder that many lives and families have been torn apart in our neighborhoods.