Candle Confusion

Advent Colors and Converging Traditions

Looking for recipes online can be challenging. It’s not because there are not a billion recipes out there for almost anything that you can imagine, but rather because almost every time you find a recipe that looks appealing, you have to wade through someone narrating three summer’s worth of family vacation stories and what the author was wearing when they cooked this recipe for the very first time. I hate that. It used to be called burying the lede and it was a big no-no in publication. Now it’s standard practice. I still hate it. So, with the exception of this paragraph (I’m really sorry), I’m going to give the simplest and quickest answer to the question possible and then I’ll give the longer answer for those who want “the rest of the story.”

Every year in the season of Advent, I get the question “What happened to the pink candle?” The shortest answer possible is that the color of the candles match the color of the vestments for the week and we wear blue vestments, not purple and pink, so all of our candles are blue. Now… the rest of the story…

The Advent Wreath as we know it today, began with a Lutheran pastor in Hamburg, Germany, in the early 19th Century. Pastor Johan Hinrich Wichern ran a school for needy children and he used a wagon wheel to help the children keep track of how long it was until Christmas. He used 4 larger white candles to denote the Sundays before Christmas and 20 smaller red candles for the various days of the week. Pastor Wichern’s idea became so popular that it was adopted not only by other Lutheran Pastors, but also by local Roman-Catholic congregations as well. Eventually, the red candles were dropped from the wreaths and Roman-Catholic Congregations changed the colors of the white candles to match the liturgical colors of the Sundays in Advent: three purple candles for the first, second, and fourth Sundays and one “rose” candle for the third Sunday. Technically, the color is “rose” not pink, but since the Latin word rosa translates to pink in English, it’s basically the same thing. But why then do some churches use blue candles for their Advent Wreaths?

That answer takes us even further back. In 1547, the Roman-Catholic church convened the Council of Trent. That gathering was, in part, a response to the ongoing Protestant Reformation. One of the outcomes of Trent was the release of one (and only one) liturgical rite by which priests in the Roman-Catholic Church could celebrate Mass. This was known as the Tridentine Rite and it was used throughout the Roman-Catholic Church until Vatican II in the 1960s. That rite set not only the words of the liturgy but also the colors of vestments for each of the Sundays in the year. The first, second and fourth Sundays in Lent were assigned the color purple to represent the penitential and preparatory character of Advent, while the Third Sunday in Advent was assigned the color Rose to remind worshippers of the joy and hope of the Incarnation of Christ.

Prior to the Council of Trent, however, there were many other liturgical rites used throughout the Roman-Catholic Church. There was the Ambrosian Rite that originated in Milan, the Gallican Rite that originated in what would be modern-day France, and the Mozarabic Rite that originated in Spain. Each of these rites had slight variances in wording and ceremony. In England, they had their own liturgical rite that developed out of Salisbury Cathedral and was known as the Sarum Rite. That rite not only included different prayers for the Mass but also different colors for the various Sundays of the year. In the Sarum Rite, white vestments were worn on Pentecost (hence the English tradition of calling Pentecost “Whitsunday”), red vestments were worn for most Sundays of the year except during Lent, when unbleached linens were worn (think of something like sackcloth). In the Sarum Rite, blue vestments were worn during the four weeks of Advent. Following King Henry VIII separating from the Roman Catholic Church in 1534 and the liturgical revival which began in England in the early 19th Century, liturgical Anglicans began to reclaim the traditions of the Sarum Rite as a way of connecting themselves to their liturgical heritage while at the same time distinguishing themselves from the Roman-Catholic priests. In the almost 200 years since, many different denominations have adopted blue vestments for the season of Advent connecting the blue color to the expectation of the coming of the royal, Davidic Messiah.

In the Charismatic Episcopal Church, many congregations first experienced liturgical worship through Anglican expressions, while many others first encountered liturgical worship through the Roman-Catholic tradition. Whichever tradition one experienced first usually determined which tradition one followed. For those of us in the CEC-NA, both purple and blue are permitted for the season of Advent. Many congregations that follow the Roman tradition still do not use rose vestments on the Third Sunday of Advent, often because sets of vestments can be extraordinarily expensive and rose vestments would only be worn on two Sundays of the year, once in Advent and once in Lent.

That brings us back to the candles on the Advent wreath. Generally speaking, the colors of the candles should correspond to the colors of the ministers’ vestments. If one were to follow the more Roman tradition, they would have purple and rose candles and purple (and maybe rose) vestments. Likewise, those who followed the more Anglican tradition would have blue vestments and blue candles. When I took over as pastor of my congregation, we still used blue vestments and purple and rose candles. I decided to bring the candles into line with the vestments, essentially, so that everything matched.

In summary, the congregation I pastor had an Anglican heritage and wore blue vestments but an Advent Wreath that reflected a Roman-Catholic tradition with purple and rose candles. I eliminated the purple and rose candles so that the blue candles would match our vestments. The most important aspect of all of this is that we in the Charismatic Episcopal Church are a Convergence Church, and that means God has called us together from a variety of traditions and expressions. Sometimes those varied traditions meld very well together; at other times we need to apply some pastoral sensitivity and adjust a few things ever so slightly for the sake of order and clarity in worshipping The Lord.