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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An all-age communion liturgy/drama

I had to lead an all-age communion service at LPO. (Well, when I say ‘lead’ … Cath and Rach planned and led the worship, including a wonderful, if somewhat destructive, spoken word piece by Cath’s husband Dai; my role was a very brief preach and to celebrate at the table.) I believe in communion liturgy – not that we should use the BCP or the Roman Missal, but that, whatever words we use, there are things that matter, and must find a place: the recollection of the Lord’s institution of the meal; the eucharistic prayer of thanksgiving; the epiklesis, invoking the Spirit ; … In a very informal, and all-age, context, then, thinking about how to celebrate exercised me a little. The tradition of LPO was clearly very inclusive: all would be invited to the table. (Is this my tradition? I’m actually not sure at the moment, but I celebrate communion in many contexts, and simple politeness demands that I conform to the practice of the community I have been invited to share with and lead on that day.) I wanted an invitation that would make it clear to children what we were doing and why. And I had about three minutes in a very informal holiday camp setting. My mind went to reports I’d heard of all-age communions at the BUGB-BMS Assembly in recent years. Children asking questions, as happens at an Orthodox Jewish Passover meal. I emailed a couple of folks asking if anyone had the liturgy. Andy Goodliff was very helpful with other options, but no-one did. I discovered from a passing comment from Lynn Green on FB that much of that part of the service had been improvised. So I wrote a script. Enough people asked me for copies that I promised to make it available. I should explain that this was written for our three girls. Judith is 14, Philippa 12, and Elspeth 7, so the pattern of Elspeth asking questions and her two elder sisters offering answers seemed natural. Steve: On the night he was betrayed Jesus ate a passover meal with his closest friends. But he changed it. The passover meal was a great celebration of everything the Jewish people knew about the way God saves us – but Jesus knew so much more about the way God saves us. And Jesus knew that we would know more. And so he changed the meal. In Jewish tradition, the links between the meal and God saving us are explained when the youngest child in the family asks four questions about why this meal is different from every other meal. As we are together, young and old, to celebrate the communion meal, we thought it would be good to tell the story borrowing this tradition. So, let me introduce you to my daughters…   E: Why have we got bits of bread and drinks in church?   P: Because Jesus told us to eat bread and drink juice to remember him. So we do. Because he told us to.   J: The Bible says, ‘On the night that he was betrayed, Jesus took bread. He said grace, and then gave it to his friends. And he told them to take it and eat it, to remember him. Then he took a glass of wine and gave it to them, and told all of them to drink it to remember him. So we take bread and wine, or grape juice, to remember him, like he told us to.’   E: But why do bread and juice help us to remember Jesus?   J: Well, Jesus said the bread was his body, and we break the bread into pieces like his body was broken on the cross when he died to save us. And he said the red wine was his blood, and his blood poured out of his body from his wounds on the cross when he died to save us. So bread and wine help us to remember that Jesus died on the cross to save us.   P: And when we eat and drink the bread and juice we are very close to Jesus.   E: So what do we do?   P: Jesus said grace first, prayed to God to say thank you for the food. So we pray and say thank you to God for the bread and the juice.   J: Then everyone who loves Jesus takes a bit of the bread, just a little bit, and eats it. And everyone who loves Jesus has a little drink of the wine.   E: And will we always do this?   J: No. Jesus said we had...

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Lucy Peppiatt on 1 Cor. 11 and 14

Lucy Peppiatt’s Women and Worship at Corinth (Eugene: Cascade, 2015) is a very good book. I don’t say this because I agree with the conclusions, although I do; I don’t even say it because Lucy is a good friend and a former student of mine, although she is; I say it because her book is comprehensively researched and carefully argued, and that combination is what makes a book ‘good’ in the academic world I inhabit. Lucy treats three difficult texts in 1 Corinthians: 11:2-16; 14:20-25; and 14:34-36. She proposes that they may be best read by assuming that in each case Paul is in part quoting his opponents’ views back at them. For this argument, she draws gratefully on Douglas Campbell’s major recent work on Romans, and his extensive investigations into the nature of rhetorical arguments in the world in which Paul wrote his letters. I confess to remaining unconvinced by Doug’s arguments on Romans, but his research on rhetoric is solid, and Lucy’s deployment of it here seems – to me at least – far stronger. Why? Three reasons, roughly in order of significance: 1. the texts in question are self-contradictory unless we invoke some argument like this; 2. we know that Paul is quoting the Corinthians’ views back at them in other places in 1 Cor., which makes an extension of this principle plausible; 3. Lucy’s reconstruction of the basic theological argument of 1 Cor. – that it is cruciform, and God has reversed the standard power hierarchies of the world – make readings of the gender texts which suggest Paul is here reinforcing hierarchies implausible. Lucy’s research is thorough; I do not know if she has read every scholarly commentary on 1 Corinthians, but (admittedly as a non-specialist) I cannot think of one (in English, at least) that she has not read and interacted with; she works extensively with scholarly essays and journal articles also.  As she points out, the sort of ‘rhetorical’ conclusion she is offering here has been proposed before in relation to each of the three texts, but no-one has used Campbell’s work on rhetorical pointers to suggest that the three texts share common literary features which allow us to identify Corinthian quotations within them. Previous work argued that the logic could be sorted out here or there if we imagined an act of quotation; Lucy argues that there is textual evidence of an act of quotation in each case. Her case is not confined to identifying Corinthian quotations: she holds the three ‘headship’ clauses of 1 Cor 11:3 to be Paul’s own, and investigates carefully the (endlessly-debated) question of the meaning of kephale, for instance. That said, the rhetorical arguments are her real advance over earlier interpreters, or so it seems to me. Lucy gives us a reading of the texts that is centred on the cross, and the re-ordered society that the church should be under its crucified Head. In this society, ministry is based on gift and calling, not on gender, and the powerful gifts of God’s Spirit are normal and necessary for the building up of the Body. I am no New Testament scholar, and would not presume to judge the detailed points of the argument; but this reconstruction is theologically convincing, and fits well with the broader themes of the epistle, and of the Pauline corpus more generally, for me to be convinced by...

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A mother in Israel

I was out preaching at another church this morning; I’d planned the sermon some weeks ago, before I realised it would be Mothering Sunday. This week I’ve struggled again with a commercialised festival that constructs a romanticised picture to celebrate, ignoring the pain this heaps on so many who for whatever reason cannot fit that picture. Pete Greig tweeted a wonderful litany this morning which captured this remarkably well; my response was to tell a story in the ‘children’s talk’ slot that explored a rather different vision of ‘Biblical motherhood’ than is usually offered. The style is visibly, to me, a second-rate Bob Hartman rip-off, but here it is: ‘A mother in Israel’ There are lots of mothers in the Bible. You may have heard of some of them. There’s Eve, right at the beginning, who is called ‘the mother of all living’ There’s Sarah, who laughed when God told her she would become a mother at eighty. There’s Hannah, who prayed for a child and rebuked God’s priest. There’s Mary, of course, who believed God’s word and became the centre of God’s plan. Lots of mothers in the Bible – but there’s one mother who, as far as we know, didn’t have any children. Her name was Deborah – which, for those of us of a certain age, brings to mind a Marc Bolan song, but we’re not going there… Deborah was a prophet, and she led God’s people for years. She ‘held court,’ the Bible says, under a palm tree. Whenever God’s people had a problem they could not solve, they would come to Deborah, and she would tell them what to do. She was wise. She had authority. She was a real leader. But – as far as we know – she didn’t have any children, and so she wasn’t a mother yet.   God’s people had one big problem in Deborah’s day. His name was Sisera. Sisera was the commander of the army of King Jabin of Canaan, and Sisera had nine hundred armoured chariots, and so no-one could fight against Sisera. And for twenty years – twenty years – that’s only one year less than the age of lots of your mothers  – for twenty years Sisera and his chariots had oppressed and abused God’s people. But God had had enough. God needed someone to be a great leader; God needed someone ready to fight; God needed someone brave enough and strong enough to take on Sisera and all his armoured chariots You might have looked for a king. Or a knight. Or a general. Or perhaps a superhero like Batman or Captain America (or even Emmet the lego-man – but we’re not going there…) God looked for a mother. ‘Deborah!’ God said. ‘What do mothers do?’ And Deborah, being wise, and knowing God well, said ‘mothers love and protect their children, Lord, and show them the right way to live.’ And God said ‘You’ve loved my people for years, Deborah, and you’ve showed them the right way to live for years. Now I need you to protect them too.’ So Deborah looked around. Deborah knew all God’s people – she’d been their leader for years – and she called one of them who she knew could do it to put an army together. (His name was Barak, which might sound like a politician you’ve heard of, but we’re not going there either …) ‘God wants to save his people from Sisera, Barak, and you’re the one he’s going to use – get an army together and fight!’ But Barak was scared. He wanted his mummy. ‘I’ll only go if you come with me,’ he said to Deborah. So Barak and Deborah went, and they fought Sisera and his army, and all his chariots. And they won, because God was with them. And Deborah and Barak sang a song to celebrate their victory – a duet like they sing in the Battle rounds on The Voice – but we’re definitely not going there… Their song was a bit like the psalms; it was a song about how God had helped and saved their people. And in that song – it’s in Judges, chapter 5 and verse 7 if you want to look it up, Deborah sang that all God’s people were too scared to fight ‘until I, Deborah, arose, until I arose, a mother in Israel’. So Deborah, although as far as we know she didn’t have any children, was a mother after all, or so the Bible tells us. She was a mother because God called her to love and to protect God’s people, and to show them the...

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Once again: on being unapologetically charismatic

‘Are you a closet charismatic, Steve?’ I was having lunch with someone I like and respect greatly when he threw this one at me a month or two back. My response was heartfelt and immediate: ‘What do you mean, “closet”?’ On this issue, I’m out and proud – although hardly uncritical of the movement as a whole, or in its various strands. Because of this, I initially looked seriously at the first reports from the ‘Strange Fire’ conference that happened across the pond a while back; I have to admit that I quickly lost interest: there are some serious theological criticisms to be made of the charismatic movement, but there was no-one on that platform capable of making them. I picked up a farrago of unsubstantiated assertion, inaccurate history, poor exegesis, and – well, generally, it wasn’t good, and I quickly tuned out. One point stuck with me from what little I read, though. My friend Andrew Wilson, who clearly has far more patience and Christian charity than I do, engaged seriously with some of the arguments presented at the conference on the Think Theology blog here; I want to pick up just on one theme, albeit a rather central one: the definition of ‘charismatic’. Andrew quotes, and accepts, a definition offered at the SF conference by Tom Pennington: to be ‘charismatic’ is to support the continuation of the ‘miraculous gifts’. I am not convinced by this definition. My concern with this is simple, and deeply partial, in the sense that it is based only on my own experience and knowledge only, and not on any serious research. The charismatic movement which I know might formally be characterised theologically by its belief about certain spiritual gifts, but this is some distance from its lived concerns and interests. Andrew makes the point that the ‘charismatic/cessationist’ debate is not about belief in continuing miracles: conversion – God giving new life to someone dead in their trespasses and sins – remains the fundamental miracle of the church’s experience, and is believed and rejoiced in on all sides of this debate. I want to push this further, though: consider the ‘gift of healing’: on the ‘cessationist’ side, I have never met a pastor who does not pray seriously for God’s healing for his/her flock when they are ill; on the ‘charismatic’ side, I do not think I have met anyone who claims to have ‘the gift of healing’ (I know they exist; my point is that much – perhaps most – charismatic life is not narrated in these terms). I know many people – including one of my own children – who can give serious testimony to seeing instantaneous and apparently-miraculous healing happening in response to prayer; but the language of  a ‘gift of healing’ is not the way these testimonies would be framed. Similarly, I think of people in congregations I have led (or been a part of) who would regularly prophesy in our worship times; none ever (in my hearing) claimed a ‘gift of prophecy’; that was not their self-understanding of how they were ministering. Again, I stress, I am reflecting on my own experience – but I have been on the speaking or leadership teams of several major charismatic conferences in the UK over the last decade; in some of these prophecy, healing, and salvation were daily realities; I never recall hearing the language of ‘gift of healing/prophecy’ in any context in any of them. When I have been present when messages in tongues have come, the request from the front has always been something like ‘Did anyone sense God speaking as that message was brought?’ not ‘Does anyone have the gift of interpretation?’ Again, I know lots of people who pray in tongues. It happens that I pray in tongues every day (that rumbling sound you can hear is the collapsing of my academic credibility). I suppose if someone asked me ‘have you received the gift of tongues’ I would say yes, but I do not recall ever being asked that question, and I do not habitually think of my spirituality in those terms; my ordinary daily discipline is to say an office, to pray in tongues, and to intercede for needs I am aware of; during the day, I will respond to events/thoughts in prayer regularly, sometimes praying in tongues, sometimes not (our family prayer time at night is obviously in English exclusively). The daily office – and the family devotional material we use – would be as much a ‘gift’ in my narration of this as the ability to pray in tongues; to speak of ‘the supernatural gift of tongues’ is just...

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