On the surprising origins of the advent wreath

Sunday night we had our church carol service, with considerably more candles than any Scottish Baptist of a previous generation would have approved of outside of a power cut. Front and centre was our advent wreath, four red candles now of differing heights burning, a central larger candle waiting until Christmas morning to be lit. It was a good service; later that evening, whilst certain other members of the family were watching The Apprentice final, I noticed some tweets about the origins of advent wreaths. The Anglican mission society US (once USPG) had tweeted a picture of a pink candle alight, and linked it with the theme of remembering Mary on the fourth Sunday of advent; others had responded querying the link and suggesting that the pink (sic, ‘rose’) candle properly belongs to the third Sunday, and the celebration of Gaudete Sunday, when in Roman tradition rose vestments are worn. Which was the original tradition, and when did it start? asked Julie Gittoes, residentiary canon at Guildford Cathedral. It struck me as an interesting question, certainly more interesting than a business tycoon being gratuitously rude to sycophantic idiots. Plenty of internet sites – and plenty of books, I have since discovered – talk about the ‘ancient custom’, some proposing pre-Christian pagan origins. There was nothing concrete, though, and in my experience claims about pagan origins of Christian customs unravel fairly quickly more often than not. One of the joys of a modern university library is how much material is electronic, and so available from home late on Sunday night. I turned up a fascinating paper by Mary Jane Haemig, ‘The Origin and Spread of the Advent Wreath’ (Lutheran Quarterly, XIX (2005), pp. 332-343). Haemig proposes a startlingly specific origin for the tradition: Johann Heinrich Wichern, head of the Rauhe Haus, a Hamburg city mission, created the first advent candle arrangement (not yet a wreath) in 1839, with the greenery added in 1860. This is all documented in D. Sattler (ed.) Der Adventkranz und seine Geschichte (Hamburg, 1997), and it is clear that Wichern believed he was doing something new. Haemig points also to research done for the ‘Atlas der deutschen Volkskunde’ around 1930, which demonstrated that advent wreaths were largely confined to Protestants at that time, and were much stronger amongst the upper classes. This makes it more likely that Wichern’s innovation, or at least some similar Lutheran invention, is the origin of the tradition: an ancient tradition would presumably have been remembered by Catholic families not just Protestant ones. The Lexicon fuer Theologie und Kirche (a Roman Catholic publication) affirms the origin of the wreath amongst Protestants, but notes its adoption by Catholics after 1945. Haemig goes on to look at the arrival of the wreath in the USA, finding it proposed as something new in the Lutheran Standard magazine in 1939. She suggests that the wreath moves from home to church sanctuary in the late 1950s, and then discusses the colours and significance of the candles, which are clearly not fixed. Her evidence suggests two things: an assimilation to liturgical colours, and an identification of the candles with the lectionary themes of the four advent Sundays. The first of these led to the introduction of the rose/pink candle for Gaudete amongst the purple/violet set; the second to the identification of the fourth candle with Mary. The last piece of the journey is not hard to trace: confronted with an odd pink candle, and not knowing the tradition of rose vestments for Gaudete, and inculturated with the modern obsession that pink is somehow feminine, moving the rose candle from Advent 3 to Advent 4 and linking it with Mary is an obvious move. When and how did this German/US custom reach the UK? Very recently would seem to be the answer. Google ngram can find no use of ‘advent wreath’ in its British English corpus before 1955, and I suspect (from poking around the data a little) that the early incidences are mostly down to US books being misidentified as from the UK in the Google dataset. 1973 looks like the year we really first started talking about advent wreaths over here, at least in print. (In the US dataset the big jump is in 1939, which fits with Haewig’s data above.) Anne Peat, who had been a part of the Twitter conversation, confirms that the 1980 Alternative Service Book of the Church of England makes no mention of advent wreaths (the ECUSA 1940 Book of Common Prayer does, under ‘Additional Directions’ for Morning and Evening Prayer). Finally, Paula Gooder offered a recalled comment from Michael Perham, the former Bishop of Gloucester, who wrote...

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Irregular Hope: Seven Stanzas for Christmas

Irregular Hope: Seven Stanzas for Christmas   1. Epiphany Thrice fourteen men and Just three women named Between Ur and Nazareth. The men are rapists, murderers, Incestuous, adulterers, and the rest. We read and note the female lives To be irregular.   2. Benedictus Pretending to have Dreamt. Straining to Forget. Then the blood Fails to flow. Young enough Still to be irregular She tries to hope For two weeks more.   3. Annunciation His voice controlled. Effort Etched into his neck. He searches for civility. ‘But how? It all seems … Most irregular.’ She fails to hope Until he dreams her reality.   4. Quickening Her belly soon begins to Swell. Straining to contain the One who fills time, space. One day she prays. Between Her kidneys prayer is heard. Omnipotence awakes; She feels it kick.   5. Nunc Dimittis An unremitting sun and A dusty track and A troubled fiancé add To the weight that Hangs from the Front of her torso. At least the donkey’s gait is regular.   6. Nativity Of course, where Animals live the Straining of females and the Crying of newborns is All quite regular. New life brings new hope And blood-sodden straw.   7. Advent Mucus gives way. Waters descend. Sweat dilutes urine. On this moment the world balances. The Spasms that pull her apart Become more regular. She subsides. Here is hope: The Word which spoke light is heard again.  ...

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On religious liberty: an open letter to Franklin Graham

Dear Mr Graham, This week someone who has put himself forward as a candidate for the presidency of your great nation made a number of hate-filled and inaccurate comments about Muslims, and proposed some extreme policies on the back of those comments. This came to our attention here in the UK because one of the things he claimed, entirely erroneously, was that parts of London were so radicalised that they had become no-go areas for our police and security services. Our national response was, as our national responses so often are, as mocking as it was derisive. The mayor of London led the way, but on social media many of us joined in with the humour. I know London well; I trained for ministry there, took my PhD there, pastored my first church there, made, with my wife, our first home there, and saw two of our three daughters come into the world there. My home has been elsewhere for eleven years now, but it is a city I still visit several times a year, a city that still has a significant place in my heart. For all these reasons, I know that the truth about London was expressed far better by a young Muslim Londoner caught on camera as our police arrested someone who had attempted violence, pretending to represent Islam. In a pure London accent he called out to the attacker, ‘You ain’t no Muslim, bruv!’ London is an exhilarating and sometimes disorientating coming together of people of different national backgrounds and of different faiths; London is also a city that is passionate that people come together, without denying who they are. London Muslims are truly Muslim, and devoted the the peace of the city also; London Baptists the same, as I know well. In London, the person who believes the two are impossible to hold together will be told, straightforwardly, ‘You ain’t no Muslim, bruv.’ It was with sadness, therefore, that I noticed that you had associated yourself with some of the policy proposals of that presidential candidate, specifically the suggestion that your nation should close its borders to Muslims for an indefinite period. I know that you have spoken strongly about Islam before, calling it a ‘religion of violence’ and so on; I know that your words then were as mistaken as they were inflammatory. I wish that you had taken the time to understand Islam a little before speaking so publicly about it, but I am a Baptist, and so I believe passionately in freedom of speech, even if that speech is damaging and inaccurate. Which is why I am writing to you now, although I do not expect that you will ever read this. Your father is, alongside Martin Luther King, the greatest Baptist statesman your nation has produced; I do not know if you would claim to be Baptist also, but your most recent comments are unacceptable to any Baptist, and – as a Baptist – that concerns me. Let me take you back to suspicious religious minorities in east London; the attack I referred to above happened in Leytonstone; not far away from there, just the other side of the Olympic Park really, is an older part of London called Spitalfields. There, in 1611, a religious radical suspected of violence and insurrection established a new congregation. His name was Thomas Helwys; his congregation tiny – perhaps in single figures. But that church was the very first Baptist church in England and the origin of the Baptist movement across the world. Your father’s faith, and so I suppose yours, can be traced, under God, back to those few believers in Spitalfields. Helwys was soon imprisoned by the government; the immediate cause of his imprisonment, somewhat ironically, was a book he had written demanding the government grant religious liberty – not only to him and his followers, but to all. As the most famous passage of that book has it, ‘…man’s religion is between God and themselves … Let them be heretics, Turks [that is, Muslims], Jews, or whatsoever, it does not appertain to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure.’ Did you know that the faith of your father virtually began with a plea for religious freedom for Muslims in (what was then) the greatest city in the Western world, Mr Graham? It is not just Baptist beginnings, either. As your nation began, in the heady days of the revolution, a Baptist, Isaac Backus, was arguing the same point. Backus objected to the newly-independent States imposing compulsory church taxes to support the ministers of the majority, Congregational, churches. In his finest rhetorical flourish, he...

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Sex, death and marriage

In case anyone is interested, this is the paper I gave at an ETS panel on theological methodology for discussing marriage; many of the arguments have or will appear in print elsewhere, but I’m not going to publish this, so it may as well be here.   And I say to you, that whoever puts away his wife  – except on account of porneia – and marries another woman commits adultery. [His] disciples said to him, ‘If that is the way it is for a man with his wife, it is not a good idea to get married!’ Mt. 19:9-10 (my tr.) This retort from the disciples fascinates me, as does its neglect in recent commentary and ethical reflection. Let me pose my question straightforwardly: can any of us here imagine Christian leaders in our own context responding to a description of a Christian sexual ethic by asserting it is better not to marry? If, as I presume, the answer is no, it might be worth us asking why there is this difference: what did the disciples know that the we don’t, or what do we know that they didn’t? Jesus has been challenged over the famous, if probably apocryphal controversy between R. Shammai and R. Hillel; he responds by citing Genesis, affirming marriage as a creation ordinance intended by God, and so not to be broken by human beings – ‘what God has united, let no-one untie’ (6b). They cite Moses’ stone tablets; he cites their stony hearts – a concession, but it was not so at the Beginning and now at the beginning of the End it will not be so again. Matthew’s Jesus then offers an exception – porneia[1] – and so offers a much more liberal reading than we discover in Mark or Luke; the disciples still however, recoil at the strictness of the interpretation – so hard it would be better not to marry at all. Jesus responds with the strange saying about varieties of eunuchs, and then turns to play with some children. Someone – a rich young ruler, on Luke’s telling – arrives and leaves, sorrowful, and we hear about camels and needles’ eyes, and Peter’s protest about how much he has given up already. There are some textual variants, mostly apparent assimilations to the similar text in Mt. 5:31-32; none of them change the force of the teaching, or the strength of the disciples’ rejection. So how might this be read? Badly, would seem to be the general answer amongst us moderns. Some commentators – France (TNTC) for example – assume the disciples cannot mean what they say: ‘[w]as this a serious suggestion, or were these words spoken with a wry smile which the printed word cannot convey?’ Well, Jesus took it seriously, speaking of Kingdom castration with his next breath. Morris (Pillar) is equally weak: ‘[t]he disciples envisage problems in maintaining the marriage relationship with this hanging over their heads. They probably had no intention of making use of the provision for divorce, but they found it comforting that the provision was there in case of need.’ Hagner (WBC) does a little better, at least acknowledging the plain meaning of the disciples’ objection: ‘[t]he risks … were too great in their estimate’. But the risks of what? He says ‘becoming inseparably linked with an unsatisfactory wife, in whatever way’. Is that really it? ‘Unsatisfactory’? I think we need to recall the strength of the Jewish commitment to marriage at this point, and insist that whatever worries the disciples, it is a bit stronger than this. Hays[2] offers something more plausible: for a man to renounce the right to divorce would be, he comments, ‘startling … within Matthew’s patriarchal cultural context’, but it can, he suggests, be placed alongside renunciation of anger, turning the cheek, loving the enemy, as a principled embrace of powerlessness which is a mark of the Kingdom. Older readers listened to the text more carefully. Calvin makes two fairly characteristic moves in his commentary on the harmony: he blames the devil, and he is surprisingly feminist.[3] For the latter, he criticises the disciples for not thinking about what wives have to endure – all assumed in the day that wives had no right of divorce, of course – ‘why do they not consider how hard is the bondage of wives?’ he asks. And he answers ‘devoted to themselves and their own convenience, they are driven by the feeling of the flesh to disregard others, and to think only of what is advantageous for themselves’. Warming to the theme, he asserts ‘it is a display of base ingratitude that, from the dread or dislike...

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