In just a few days, we will experience our annual winter solstice – the shortest day and longest night of the year. This Thursday brings a mere nine hours of daylight and whopping 15 hours of darkness.
Our worship this morning is a Service for Our Longest Nights – a time to recognize the darkness that people experience in their lives because of grief, sadness, and loss. For many, those feelings make it hard to “deck the halls,” sing fa-la-la-la-la, and participate in all the usual holiday celebrations. For many, there’s no “joy to the world,” and those “herald angels” can just take all their “harking” somewhere else.
So, we extend particular welcome this morning to all those who are living a “blue Christmas.” We come alongside all of you who yearn for light and hope on these longest of nights. Be assured that you are not alone. The Lord and the community of faith are with you.
On this fifth Sunday of Advent, we stand with the downtrodden and light a candle of comfort – for those bending low under the weight of our grief, exhaustion, and stress. May God’s comfort find them now.
May this time together be our holiday gift to one another – our holy moment to bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the command of Christ Jesus. Praying with or for one another is one of faith’s most powerful experiences. Thus we lift up our hearts to the Lord: In your mercy, hear our prayers. Come, thou long expected Jesus …
A word for the weary, adapted from a poem by the Rev. Sarah Speed:
Weariness feels like an ache in your bones, or a slow leak from the heart — a leak that causes hope to pool at your feet.
Weariness feels like the wind knocked out of you — all of a sudden, it’s impossible to breathe.
Weariness feels like an oversized coat. It catches on door handles and knocks over water glasses.
You turn into a clumsy mess.
Weariness can hit you all at once — when the phone rings, when the bill arrives, when the news outlet pings you with a breaking-news alert.
But weariness can also hem and haw its way into your life, bit by bit, chipping away at resolve.
And one short poem cannot change this truth — the weary state of our grief-stricken hearts.
But one short poem can remind you the one thing we so often forget: that I can wear your jacket for a while.
And we can try to stop the leak in your heart.
And if that doesn’t work, then we’ll stand under the night sky to look at the stars and remember that we do not walk this valley alone.
Thus, the Holy Spirit speaks the groans of our hearts – perhaps giving voice through the psalmist to words too painful to speak:
I lift up my eyes to the hills – from where will my help come?
My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth. He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber. He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.
The LORD is your keeper; the LORD is your shade at your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. The LORD will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life. The LORD will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore. (Psalm 121)
Let us be together in a place of prayer:
God of our joy, God of our weariness, we have brought our worn-down hearts to you this morning — broken hearts full of grief, anxious hearts carrying fear, aching hearts too tender to touch.
We have brought our weariness to you, because we know that you walk with us in the valleys. You make rough places plain and crooked paths straight. We know that you were born into our silent nights, so surely our tears are familiar.
So, remain with us on our journeys. Stay by our side; make low the hills and fill in the valleys. Reach down your hand and lift us from our pits. For we cannot move from weariness to joy without you.
With honesty and gratitude, we offer these prayers of our hearts — those spoken and left unspoken. We give them all to you – by the power of the Spirit, in Jesus’s name. Amen.
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message during worship on the fifth Sunday of Advent, December 17, 2023, at First Presbyterian Church in Waukon, Iowa, USA. In the early Church, Advent, like Lent, lasted 40 days. Known as the “Nativity Fast” or “Winter Lent,” those 40 days began in early November. Drawing on that tradition, our Advent is running for five weeks instead of the usual four.“ How does a weary world rejoice?” is the theme for this year’s Advent and draws on resources from SantifiedArt.org. News photos in the video are among the pictures of the year selected by Reuters. “Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus” is by Chris Tomlin and Christy Nockels.