Candles Against the Wall

Today's Scripture

Psalm 2:1-4 — "Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying, 'Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.' He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision."

Isaiah 40:8 — "The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever."

Matthew 16:18 — "And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."

The Big Idea

In the twentieth century, regimes claiming history itself as their ally set out to erase Christianity from half the world. They had armies, prisons, and secret police. The church had prayer meetings, smuggled Bibles, and candles. The wall came down; the prayer meetings are still going. Today is about why.

Reflection

The empires that declared God dead

Communist governments in the twentieth century did not merely neglect religion; many actively tried to abolish it. Churches were demolished or turned into warehouses. Clergy were imprisoned and executed. Children were taught that faith was a fossil. The project stretched from Moscow to Bucharest to Beijing, and it spoke with total confidence: religion would die within a generation.

Scripture has seen this movie before. Psalm 2:1-4 describes the recurring scene: nations raging, rulers taking counsel together against the Lord, vowing to "burst their bonds apart." And then the camera cuts to heaven: "He who sits in the heavens laughs." Not because suffering is funny — the psalm is deadly serious — but because the project is impossible. Augustine, who watched Rome fall, had already measured such kingdoms:

"Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies?" — Augustine, The City of God

And C.S. Lewis, writing as the Iron Curtain came down across Europe, diagnosed the special menace of tyrannies that claim to be saving you:

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." — C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock

The communist states were exactly that: tyrannies for your own good. Which made the believer — a person whose deepest loyalty sat permanently out of the state's reach — the one citizen the system could never digest.

The pastor who blessed his torturers

Richard Wurmbrand was a Romanian pastor, a Jewish convert to Christ, ministering in Bucharest when the communists took power. In February 1948 he was kidnapped off the street by the secret police. He spent roughly fourteen years in prison across two arrests, three of those years in solitary confinement, and was tortured in ways he carried on his body for the rest of his life. In 1965 he was ransomed to the West, and in 1966 he stood before a United States Senate subcommittee, removed his shirt, and showed the scars. His book Tortured for Christ (1967) told the West what it had not wanted to know about the underground church.

What stuns readers of that book is not the cruelty. It is the tone. Wurmbrand writes about prison evangelism with something close to mischief:

"It was a deal; we preached and they beat us. We were happy preaching. They were happy beating us, so everyone was happy." — Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured for Christ

That is not bravado. It is Acts 16:25 surfacing again, nineteen centuries later: "About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them." Beaten men singing at midnight — the early church's strangest habit, alive in a Romanian cell. During his years in solitary confinement, with no Bible, no paper, and no congregation, Wurmbrand kept his sanity and his calling the same way: he composed a sermon in his head each night and preached it to the empty cell, then filed it away in his memory. He later said he rarely slept a night in prison without preaching. The state could take his pulpit, his books, even his name — he became a number — but it could not make him stop being a pastor. Wurmbrand insisted that the point was not that every Christian must seek a cell:

"Not all of us are called to die a martyr's death, but all of us are called to have the same spirit of self-sacrifice and love to the very end as these martyrs had." — Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured for Christ

He prayed for his torturers by name. He said the underground church pitied the communists, who had to live without hope. Psalm 27:1 was not poetry to these believers; it was tactics: "The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?" A person who has already answered "no one" is, from a secret policeman's point of view, a catastrophe.

And Wurmbrand was one voice among millions. Across the communist world, the faith survived in forms the state could not file: grandmothers who taught grandchildren to pray while the parents kept silent for safety, Bibles copied out by hand or smuggled in by the suitcase, congregations that met in forests and apartments. The governments wrote the reports; the babushkas — the old women the regime dismissed as the last generation of believers — quietly raised the next one.

"Be not afraid": Warsaw, 1979

In October 1978 the College of Cardinals stunned the world by electing a pope from behind the Iron Curtain: Karol Wojtyła of Kraków, John Paul II — the first Polish pope, the first non-Italian in four and a half centuries. At the Mass inaugurating his ministry he preached a sentence aimed, everyone understood, at both sides of the Curtain:

"Do not be afraid. Open wide the doors for Christ." — John Paul II, 22 October 1978

Eight months later he came home. The communist government of Poland could not refuse him entry without igniting the country, so in June 1979 it tried to manage him instead. It failed. In Victory Square, Warsaw, before a vast crowd, the pope prayed:

"Let your Spirit descend! Let your Spirit descend and renew the face of the earth, the face of this land!" — John Paul II, Warsaw, 2 June 1979

The crowd answered with minutes of thunder: "We want God! We want God!" Over nine days, by common estimates, something like a third of Poland's population saw him in person. Nothing visibly changed — and everything changed. Millions of Poles looked around and realized the same thing at the same time: there are more of us than there are of them, and we are not afraid today. Fourteen months later, workers at the Gdańsk shipyard, with a portrait of the pope on the gate and Mass celebrated among the cranes, founded Solidarity — the free trade union that martial law could suppress but never kill. In June 1989, Poland held the elections that began the end of European communism.

This is what 2 Corinthians 10:3-4 looks like at the scale of nations: "For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds." No pope's army marched. A stronghold fell anyway.

Candles in Leipzig

The final scene is the quietest. Beginning in 1982, St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig, East Germany, held prayers for peace every Monday evening. For years the gatherings were small — students, misfits, the worried — under the eye of the Stasi, the secret police. Through 1989, as the regime tottered, the prayer meetings swelled, and marchers began leaving the church carrying candles into the square.

On 9 October 1989, with the church packed and thousands more in the streets, everyone expected the massacre. Hospitals cleared beds; the regime had praised the Tiananmen crackdown months before. Instead, some seventy thousand people walked through Leipzig holding candles and chanting "No violence" — and the security forces, facing a praying crowd that offered them nothing to shoot at, stood down. A month later, on 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. A remark widely attributed to a senior East German official, Horst Sindermann, summed up the regime's bafflement: they had planned for everything — but not for candles and prayers. The line's exact wording is reported rather than recorded, but the bafflement was real, and earned.

John 1:5 — "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." It is hard to find a more literal twentieth-century illustration: candlelight, carried out of a church, outlasting a wall built of concrete and watchtowers. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who died resisting the previous German tyranny, had written the faith that the Leipzig generation inherited:

"I believe that God can and will bring good out of evil, even out of the greatest evil. For that purpose he needs men who make the best use of everything." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

Be honest about the ledger here. Not every story ended in 1989; believers in many countries still meet in secret today, and some Eastern European church figures collaborated with the secret police — opened files proved it painfully after the Wall fell. The church under pressure was not uniformly heroic. But the regimes' own claim — that the faith would be dead in a generation — failed everywhere it was tried. Isaiah 40:8 explains the asymmetry: "The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever." Five-year plans wither. The word does not.

And under it all stands a promise spoken by Jesus to a fisherman: Matthew 16:18 — "I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." Notice who is doing the building. Not Wurmbrand, not the pope, not seventy thousand Leipzigers. Christ builds; his people just refuse to stop gathering. The gospel logic of this whole day is the logic of the cross: God wins not by out-muscling empires but by absorbing their worst and rising anyway. The empires keep supplying the tombs. He keeps supplying the third day.

Going Deeper

The Leipzig revolution began as a small, unimpressive, weekly prayer meeting that simply refused to stop. Tonight, light an actual candle and pray for the persecuted church — organizations like Open Doors publish lists of the hardest countries. Pray for one country by name. Then ask yourself Wurmbrand's implied question: what do I do with freedoms his church would have wept for? Decide on one answer before you blow the candle out.