Traditions of Advent - The Advent Wreath

The First Week in Advent
St. John's Lutheran Church, Alexandria, VA
John 12:44-46

“Traditions of Advent: The Advent Wreath”

The days are growing darker as we get closer and closer to the end of the year, with the winter solstice in about three weeks’ time.  When you head to work or school in the morning, it can feel like daylight is still hours and hours away.  Getting back home while there’s still some sunlight in the sky?  Well, that gets to be a pretty tricky proposition: the U.S. Naval Observatory lists the official time of today’s sunset as 4:47 PM!  Now, in these darker days of the year, do you ever wonder how you’ll read a book in the evening, or get your homework done once the sun’s gone down?  Or how you’re going to be able see to shave in the morning, or drive to the office before dawn?  Probably not!  You flip a switch, and you’ve got light: desk lamps and overhead fixtures with halogen and CFL bulbs giving you light to work and play.  If there’s a plug, you don’t have to be in the dark.  Even when you’re outside, you get can get light from a flashlight, matches, or even your mobile phone.  We probably don’t think about what we’ll do when it gets dark because we take the light for granted.

As we come together at St. John’s for midweek services this Advent, we’re going to be exploring some of the different traditions that we observe in these weeks before Christmas.  There are a number of these Advent traditions out there, many of which are kept by Christians and non-Christians alike, but some have a distinctly Christian message behind them.  In this season of preparation, we’ll show how such traditions can help us to make ready for the time to come.  And this week, we look to the Advent wreath.

The Advent wreath plays a very visible role during this season, usually right up in the front of a sanctuary, or at home on the kitchen table.  It often comes in the form of a circle of evergreen branches, with four candles distributed evenly around the ring, similar to what we’ve got here at St. John’s.  The wreath is used to mark the four weeks of Advent: you’ll see that we light one candle in the first week of Advent, then one additional candle each week until all four are burning bright.  As a loop of evergreen, the wreath communicates the images of a crown, everlasting life, God as Alpha and Omega, without beginning or end; still, it’s the candles that really make the Advent wreath what it is.  The Advent wreath came into use among Christians as a reminder of the age before Jesus came into the world.  In that age, the light of prophecy shined through God’s messengers, becoming brighter and brighter until the Messiah arrived[1], Himself coming “into the world as light, so that whoever believes in [him] may not remain in darkness.”

But we Christians don’t always appreciate the Light – you might even say that we’re tempted to take it for granted.  Sometimes, the darkness really has to come up all around us before we’re reminded how we truly need the Light of Christ more than anything else in the world.  In our reading from John 12, Jesus makes plain the reason for Christmas, the purpose for his coming into the world as a flesh-and-blood human being: to show us our heavenly Father and His love, to call us out of darkness into his marvelous light.  Jesus the Messiah is the Light of the World, the light which the darkness cannot overcome.

The Advent wreath stands as both reminder and encouragement.  Some Christians look at each of the four candles on the wreath as a hint of what lies ahead for us as God’s people: hope, peace, joy, and love.  The Messiah, Christ Jesus, is the fulfillment of the message that came through the prophets, the One who would bring hope, peace, joy, and love into the darkness of the world.  These gifts are ours through Jesus’ birth, life, death, and resurrection.  Through them, through him, we live as people of the Light.

So as you look at the Advent wreath in these darker days of the year, may it point you ahead to the brighter light which is to come.

Amen.

[1] Paul H. D. Lang, What an Altar Guild Should Know (St. Louis, Concordia Publishing House, 1964), p. 99.