Alternative Lessons and Carols

Here's the liturgy for our Christmas Eve "alternative" lessons and carols. By "alternative," I mean I've been searching for years for a service like the traditional King's College 9 lessons and carols, but something that's a bit less stodgy, a bit more modern. Something that probes a little deeper with language that gets closer to what Christmas means. I like the lessons and carols format very much--the readings and music in dialectical relationship. So, I've been messing with it for years, trying to find the right balance of enough tradition so that the service doesn't alienate people who come looking for "traditional Christmas," but enough novelty so that the radical nature of the event leaps out and surprises. 

Below is the liturgy we came up with this year at NDPC.

I can't, in good conscience, leave out Isaiah 9 and Luke 2 on Christmas Eve. But I loved the way the Catherine de Vinck poem sets a tone of wonder and sets the incarnation "off to the side," as though it creeps in from the "far edges" of both geography and our conscience. The Madeleine L'Engle quote does two things--creates a cosmic scale for Jesus' birth and grounds it in the bodily process of human gestation. Then, the Merton quote also does two things--it brings the incarnation of Jesus into modernity with its familiar alienating systems and processes, and it aligns Jesus with the poor and outcast.

Did the liturgy "work?" That's not for me to decide. But I thought we did a better job this year of bringing the glory and humility of Christ's birth into conversation.

Next year, I don't think we'll sing Silent Night as the candlelight carol. It was the weakest part of the service. The words don't match the theological space we'd created. That will be a "radical" change. But there are better songs.