THE GRINCH WHO STOLE ADVENT
By Rev. Richard J. Serina, Jr.
Just six months into my initial call, the congregation and I had our first major dispute over the most contentious and disagreeable of topics: When we should put up the congregational Christmas tree.
The congregation typically does so around the Thanksgiving weekend, but I suggested we put it of a little longer since, after all, it is a Christmas tree and not an Advent tree. I went on to explain the distinction between Advent and Christmas, the celebration of the twelve days of Christmas between the Nativity of Our Lord and the Epiphany of Our Lord, and the sense of penitence and remorse for sins that historically accompanies the Advent season.
In doing so, however, I had become the Grinch: I was stealing the joy of Christmas.
Changing Colors, Changing Meanings
Maybe I should blame all of this on the liturgical color revisions spearheaded by the Anglo-Catholics and taken from their Sarum Rite, for when they popularized changing the color of Advent from violet to blue, they allowed a shift from the more traditional medieval (and hence Lutheran) emphasis upon contrition for sins to the more ancient and patristic emphasis upon the expectation of Jesus’ coming.
The stated reason for the revision of color in the Advent season, of course, was to underscore the sense of hopefulness and anticipation with which the Prophets of Israel awaited the first Advent and so too should we eagerly await the return of Our Lord promised at His Ascension and confessed in the creeds. This is not a bad thing of course and no doubt Lutherans of all people should welcome such a dual sense of hopefulness and anticipation.
But that shift away from contrition to expectation, when combined with the festivity of the marketplace in the late fall months and the rampant commercialism of the season, leads good parishioners to misidentify Advent with the celebration of Jesus’ birth and not the patient, reflective wait for the coming Messiah of Israel. The hopeful tone of Advent melds together with the exclamatory tone of Christmas, ringing no different to the ear and seeming no less congruent than O Come, O Come, Emmanuel and Hark! The Herald Angels Sing do on a Christmas CD found in the bargain bin at Wal-Mart.
Indelible Impressions of Color and Season
What is lost, then, by removing the penitential character of the Advent season? It’s not so much that this penitential character can’t be taught, but rather that the surreptitious features of the church’s public worship lose some of their imbued vitality. While teaching a Bible class during seminary, I got to know a Roman Catholic convert who had married a member of our church and was confirmed as a Lutheran. He loved to tell a particular story about how he chose a college upon leaving active duty in the Air Force: the young fellow who originally hailed from Syracuse scoured the nation for possible educational destinations, but finally landed at Texas Christian University. And why Texas Christian? Because their school color was purple, like the Advent and Lenten colors of his Roman Catholic youth.
Indeed, he would later admit, the school colors reminded him of the violet used in Advent and Lent, a color that symbolized a period of repentance and mortification of the flesh, a color that epitomized a sense of solicitude for and reflection upon sins. The color of those seasons and their attendant disciplines made such an impression upon this young boy that it even determined where he might matriculate for college.
The point is simple: The power of color, season, and symbol to impress certain ideas and attitudes upon churches of the historic Christian calendar is something that cannot and should not be altered, replaced, or eliminated without careful attention to the consequences of such changes. Thus, once the observance of Advent shifted from its traditionally penitential character to a more anticipatory tone, it should come as no surprise that the season is now almost indistinguishable from the cultural celebration of capitalistic Christmastide that spans from Thanksgiving Day through the twenty-fifth of December.
Of Grinches, Christmas Trees, and Other Adiaphora
But of course, this brings us back to the same issue so divisive since the Interims of 1548: the Lutheran principle of adiaphora. The color of vestments and paraments, the seasons and dates of the church calendar, and the occasion when a Christmas tree is erected in the nave are not of salvific importance nor should they be forced upon Christian consciences as articles of faith, but are rather matters regulated by evangelical freedom.
For that reason, my congregation and I reached a compromise that will allow us to put up the Christmas tree on the third Sunday in Advent. Still, have we lost something in the process? In the quest for liturgical flexibility, have we forfeited the catholic assumptions so deeply embedded in our catholic practices? Be it in dispensing with the traditional color of Advent or capitulating to the forces of greed and commercialism that force our historic understanding of the Christian calendar into conformity with various shopping seasons, we have lost some of the penitential character that so marked the liturgical remembrance of God’s coming to us in Christ to give His life unto death for the forgiveness of all our sins.
We lose something if our churches do not recall the Law present in our traditional Advent texts, that it was our sins which led Our Lord into Jerusalem and to his death, that we must stave off false prophets and teachers in our midst who speak ill of the Christ in these latter days, that St. John the Baptist came preaching a repentance of sins in preparing the way for his Lord and ours, and that Mary’s Magnificat is as cautionary as it is hopeful, as much about the God of Israel’s judgment upon the proud and the rich, the wicked and the unfaithful, as it is about God’s own mercy and kindness to us in Christ.
And so Advent, though its celebration be an adiaphoron and though its penitential character recede into the background with the ebb of recent liturgical revisions, nonetheless remains a benefit to the people who
gather in the name of Jesus, even Lutherans who “cherish the useful and ancient ordinances, especially when they contain a discipline by which it is profitable to educate and teach common folk and ignorant” that “by instruction they might transmit to posterity the memory of these important events” (Kolb/Wengert, Apology 180.33; 181.40).
Let not the principle of adiaphora be the Grinch that steals your penitential Advent worship this year.
Pr. Serina is pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church, Albany, TX. This is his first contribution to Forum Online.
Copyright 2006 American Lutheran Publicity Bureau. All rights reserved.
