The Meaning of the Advent Candles

A church member asked me once, “Pastor, what do the 4 Advent candles mean?” I might have said that there is nothing in the Bible about it as there is nothing about Advent wreathes. Nothing wrong about them and some good as a wreath is without beginning and end and so is the Lord, the four candles signify time, God entering time, the right time for us all.  I told the fellow member I don’t know and she rather dogmatically stated what they stand for… well, I forgot the answer.  The answer usually go along this route:  the Advent Candles  stand for  Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love, or something like that.  Hope, peace, joy and love are the first things we all want. But on a blog, a Roman Catholic priest, looking at the superficial slappy-happy, sentimental time that Advent/Christmas has become, suggested that the candles should stand for Death, Judgment, Hell, and Heaven!  The last things.  We want the first things first…without pain or struggle, without the Cross, without judgment, without His hard birth.  As Reformed theologian H. Richard Niebuhr wrote, 

“A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.”

But we are not without sin and that’s the point.  The Lord must reckon with that and He has.  The last things do come first, then in joyful repentance we accept our death sentence as true and see the true Lord born in a feeding trough (manger) through His death on the Cross. Only then do we receive the gifts of Peace, Joy, Hope and Love. The Lord went through the last things and will in the end of all things. The Lord’s last things make the first things last, otherwise it’s all tinsel, and Santa and sleighs and chimneys.  A fantasy Santa comes the chimney but the real Lord came down from heaven and went up on the Cross.  Feed on His Word in His feeding trough, manger, this week in the Church.

 

Read Full Post »

Worship Matters: 4 Advent Wreath Candles

There is an old saying in congregational and church life:  “Do things twice in a row and it’s a tradition!”  We regard tradition as almost sacred, even among Protestants.  Tradition gains the patina of divine.  There is only one yardstick to see if our man-made traditions are acceptable:  the Bible.  Advent wreathes are not necessary but they do serve a teaching purpose and teaching the truths of God’s Word is always important.  The teaching here?  The Lord entered time as Emmanuel, literally, God with us.  The wreath is a circle and circles have no beginning or end as the Lord God, yet 4 candles, again the Ancient of Days was born an infant entering real-time, the mean time.

Now one of the questions I have fielded is, What do the 4 candles mean?  I answered:  There is nothing in the Bible about it as there is nothing about Advent wreathes. The fellow member questioning me dogmatically stated they stand for…I forgot the answer.  The usual interpretations usually goes this route:  they signify Hope, Preparation, Joy, and Love, or something like that.  On another blog, a Roman Catholic priest, looking at the superficial slappy-happy, sentimental time that Advent/Christmas has become, suggested that the candles should stand for Death, Judgment, Hell, and Heaven!  The last things.  When we look at the lessons, and as indicated on an earlier posting here on John the Baptizer, the priest is not far off the mark.  Pr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his book, The Cost of Discipleship, written in the ’30s in Nazi Germany, commented on the beatitude, “Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted” (Matthew 5:4) and he observed:

“By “mourning” Jesus, of course, means doing without what the world calls peace and prosperity:  he means refusing to being tune with the world or accommodate oneself to its standards.  Such men mourn for the world, for its guilt, its fate and is fortune. While the world keeps holiday they stand aside, and while the world sings, ‘Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,” they mourn.  They see that for all the jollity on board, the ship is beginning to sink.  The world dreams of progress, of power and of the future, but the disciples mediate on the end, the last judgement, and the coming of the kingdom.  To such heights the world cannot rise.”

But why can the Lord’s disciples so mourn?  They have already accepted the just sentence of God’s righteous judgment on their own guilt.  Repentance does not mean feeling really bad about a bad habit or two, but accepting the just verdict is as the thief on the cross repented and accepted the just judgment of God in His Law (see Luke 23:38-40).  “Proper repentance is not a sorrow or a terror or a vow to change, so that we can escape the divine death sentence. Proper repentance is to accept the rightness of the death sentence and to submit to it; to submit to being put to death under the law. And without the real Gospel that is never done.” (Pr. Louis Smith)  The Law kills us.  The Gospel makes us alive through the working of the Holy Spirit.  We must contemplate Death, Judgment, Hell and then, and only then is heaven, the Kingdom come utterly good in the hands of the Lord born of Mary.

Read Full Post »