Advent: 'Blue Christmas'

Kathy Noble

December 2002 brought Nancy Arnold the first Christmas after her husband’s death. She knew “it wasn’t going to be happy.”

Last year she helped Holy Covenant Church in Carrollton, Texas, organize a “Blue Christmas” service to minister to people who were grieving, including herself.

Also called “The Service of the Longest Night,” the worship time is scheduled around Dec. 21. The Christmas music is soft. There are prayers, scripture reading and reflection. Many services include candle lighting. Some offer Holy Communion. There may be anointing with oil for healing.

“Oftentimes the joy of the season is difficult for people who have lost loved ones, who are going through divorce, who have lost a job,” says the Rev. Paul Morris, minister with older adults at Peachtree Road Church, Atlanta. “We recognize that there is darkness involved in the light of the season.”

The service “works from the assumption that people are grieving,” says the Rev. Don Lee, Holy Covenant senior pastor, but also “gives a sense that there is at least a glimmer of hope.”

Whether their grief was still new or decades old, “Blue Christmas” provided worshippers with “someplace safe with some friends and (where you did) not have to feel (the happiness) everybody else was feeling,” said Arnold.

Learn more about the service at www.gbod.org/worship. Scroll to “Advent-Christmas-Epiphany Worship Planning” under “What’s New.”

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Order of Worship for The Service of the Longest Night

Courtesy of the Rev. Paul Morris, Minister with Older Adults, Peachtree Road United Methodist Church, Atlanta, Ga.

GATHERING
Prelude

Welcome and Invocation

Hymn: Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus

LIGHTING THE ADVENT CANDLES
We light this Advent candle to remember those persons who have been loved and lost. We pause to remember their names, their faces, their voices. We give thanks for them memory that binds them to us this season, which anticipates Christmas.

May God’s eternal love surround them.

We light this second candle to redeem the pain of loss: the loss of relationships, the loss of jobs, the loss of health. As we gather up the pain of the past, we offer it to You, O God, asking that into our open hands, You will place the gift of peace.

Refresh, restore, renew us, O God, and lead us into your future.

We light this third candle t remember ourselves this Christmas time. We pause and remember the past weeks, months and, for some of us, years of down times. We remember the poignancy of memories, the grief, the sadness, the hurts, the pain of reflection on our own mortality.

Let us remember that dawn defeats darkness.

This fourth candle is lit to remember our faith and the gift of hope, which God offers to us in the Christmas story. We remember that God, who shares our life, promises us a place and a time of no more pain and suffering.

Let us remember the One who shows the way and who goes with us into our tomorrows.

Hymn: O Come, O Come Emmanuel (verses 1 and 2)

HEARING THE WORD
Reading: Psalm 139:7-16

Responsive Prayer
God, we come to you in this Christmas season with the pain growing inside us. As the nights have been growing longer, so has the darkness wrapped itself around our hearts. In this season of our longest nights, we offer to you the pain in our hearts, the traumas that some of us cannot put into words. Loving God, hear our prayer.

And in your merciful love, answer.

Compassionate God, there are those among us who are grieving over what might have been. A death or loss has changed our experience of Christmas. Once it was a special day for us, too, but someone has died or moved away. Or we have lost a job, a dream, a goal, a cause, we find ourselves adrift, alone, lost. Loving God, hear our prayer.

And in your merciful love, answer.

The Christmas season reminds us of all that used to be and cannot be anymore. The memories of what was, the fears of what may be, stifle us. All around us we hear the sounds of celebration, but all we experience is a sense of feeling blue. Please be near us this night. Loving God, hear our prayer.

And in your merciful love, answer.

Reading: “Direct Us, Lord, through Darkness.”

Reading: John 1:1-9.

SPEAKING THE WORD
Meditation

RESPONDING TO THE WORD
Lighting of Candles

Solo: In the Bleak Midwinter

Prayer of the People

CELEBRATION OF HOLY COMMUNION (optional)

SENDING FORTH
Hymn: Hymn of Promise

Benediction

Postlude

--Kathy Noble is editor of Interpreter.

This story appears in the November / December 2004 issue of INTERPRETER Magazine.