Advent: Purple or Blue?

by Stephen Crippen

In my quest to be named the Weirdest Dog Owner in the World (and that’s a hard get!), I have purchased dog collars for all the liturgical seasons. We have a variety of collars for summer and fall (green), Lent (purple), and high days/seasons (bright colors, since white is not a good color for dog collars). But Advent—that’s a problem.

In my home, the color of Advent is hotly disputed. Andrew: “It’s purple!” Stephen: “It’s blue!” Who’s right?

As much as I want to say I’m right, I know that reasonable people differ. For time out of mind, the color of Advent has been purple, in keeping with its identity—like that of Lent—as a penitential, solemn season. (Christmas and Easter are solemn too, but joyfully so.) In the ancient world, purple dye was highly expensive, so it was associated with wealth and royalty. A commoner like you or me simply couldn’t afford it. In Lent, this added layer of meaning—royalty—evoked Christ’s identity as the sovereign figure at the center of our salvation story. That Christ ironically was not an earthly king but a poor peasant only added to the significance of purple as a liturgical color. And since Christ is central in both the Incarnation Cycle (Advent/Christmas/Epiphany) and the Paschal Cycle (Lent/Easter/Pentecost), beginning both cycles with royal purple seems fitting.

But I like blue. Indigo, really. In recent decades, the use of deep, rich blue in Advent arose to differentiate Advent from Lent as a season of hope and expectation. Advent blue, at its best, reminds the eye of the deepest blue of the night sky just before dawn. As we await the dawning of Christmas, we drape ourselves and our altar in deep blue. Every Advent I like to sing the hymn, “As the Dark Awaits the Dawn,” by Susan Palo Cherwien. Here’s a stanza from her lovely text:

As the blue expectant hour
before the silvering skies,
we long to see your day arise,
whole and wise, whole and wise,
O lucent Morning Star.

So…how did we resolve the dog-collar dispute? Naturally, we met in the middle: since we have two dogs, we have two opportunities to clothe our beloved charges in the color(s) of Advent. May your Advent draw you ever closer to the dawning light of Christ.


Stephen is a therapist and postulant to the Diaconate. You can find his personal blog here.

Journeys of Faith: Coming to St. Paul’s from a Lutheran Background

by Stephen Crippen

My parents brought me up in a Missouri Synod Lutheran church in rural Minnesota. Our parish was progressive by Missouri Synod standards, but it didn’t stray too far from the minimalist style and robust (and stern!) theological tradition of German Lutheranism. Nevertheless, my mother had been a Roman Catholic before marrying my father, so every once in a while she would turn to me in the middle of a church service and say something like, “You know, they could engage all of the senses if they wanted to. They could use incense. Worship is best when it engages all of the senses.”

Years later, I began to understand my mother’s motivations. She never expressed regret about her decision to become Lutheran, but she cultivated in me a love for beauty in liturgy, and I suspect her whispered comments to me were an expression of longing for what she had left behind. Her influence inspired me to join Lutheran parishes that embraced a rich liturgical tradition and a sacramental vision. Before I left the Twin Cities for Seattle in 1997, I was a happy member of Mount Olive Lutheran (ELCA) in Minneapolis, a parish replete with glorious music, graceful liturgy, and yes, incense. More striking still was Mount Olive’s location deep in the heart of south Minneapolis, an urban area marked by poverty and urban blight. At their best, Mount Olive proclaims a vision of justice in a neighborhood that cries out for it.

In Seattle, following a five-year stint on the staff of a Lutheran parish, I visited St. Paul’s on the strength of its reputation as a good “liturgical” church. When I first arrived here, I was attracted to the fine music and splendid liturgical life, but also challenged to adjust to some unfamiliar things. I remember struggling with the sung Nicene Creed, which seemed long and labored for me, at least at first. (Now, of course, a spoken Creed sounds odd and awkward to me, like we’re skimping on something important!) And as a borderline extrovert, there were times when St. Paul’s felt a little too quiet and solemn for my taste. But I made a good decision: I told myself to settle down, keep coming back, and keep opening myself up to this interesting and entrancing little parish community.

Now, more than five years later, St. Paul’s is not as quiet, much larger, and (it seems) about as extroverted as I am! But my parish home has retained—and even greatly enhanced—its ability to draw me into awe and wonder, ravish and challenge me with fine preaching, and take me out of my everyday life—not as an escape, but rather for the purpose of transforming my life, clarifying my call, and sending me back into my home and workplace with a renewed sense of meaning and purpose.

A Lutheran church like Mount Olive in Minneapolis offers a similar culture and community, a similar setting in which the assembly draws ever closer to the heart of God, a similar parish in which both justice and beauty are found in abundance. But I am glad to be at St. Paul’s, centered as it is in the Anglo-Catholic tradition, and moving as it is into a time of renewal and growth. At St. Paul’s, I find myself excitedly emailing my dad to tell him about the great preaching (for it was my dad who taught me to listen for that!), and also drawing close to my mother (who is now among our beloved dead) to whisper into her ear, “You were right. And it’s lovely!”

Stephen is a therapist and postulant to the Diaconate. You can find other entries by Stephen on our blog, and his most recent sermon here.

What’s with all the incense?

by Samuel Torvend

As we were finishing the entrance hymn on Easter Sunday, my sister, her husband, and their five-year-old son slipped into the pew next to me. My nephew, Rex, stood on the pew so that he could see his friend, Stephen, twirling the thurible, the metal container filled with a burning coal and heaped with incense pebbles. “I can see the smoke,” whispered Rex, “but, Uncle Sam, where’s the fire that makes it?” Well, this was a great question from a curious soon-to-be kindergartner. If there’s smoke, there must be fire. I whispered in his ear that a coal, much like one of his father’s barbeque briquettes, is set on fire with a match that makes it sizzle and turn into a hot ember. The incense that is added to the coal creates both the smoke and the smell. His eyes widened and he said, “Oh, that is way cool … and it doesn’t fly out and hit us.”

While his son found the use of incense fascinating if not wonderfully dangerous, Frank, his father, seemed less impressed. At dinner that afternoon he said: “You all at St. Paul’s really like to do it up big; you know: lots of ceremony.” Let’s be clear: there was no condescending tone in his voice, but I did wonder, Does he think it’s just silly: the bowing, the genuflecting, and, then, those many clouds of Easter incense? And then he asked, “I thought it had something to do with your prayers rising to God … Isn’t that right?” Big point to Frank who could have been quoting Psalm 141: “Let my prayer be counted as incense before you, and the lifting up of my hands an evening sacrifice.” On smoke rising from burning incense as symbol of prayer “rising” to God, he was right on the money.

And yet at St. Paul’s on this Easter Sunday, the altar table, the bread and wine, a newly-baptized baby, the Easter candle, the worshipping assembly and the ministers of the Mass were all incensed. Why all that incensing of food, candle, and people? The answer rests in the ancient past of Christianity. It was not until the fourth century that Christians began to incense people and significant objects in their worship. While one reads in the Bible of incense being burned during worship, the practice of incensing people probably derives from the Roman imperial practice of honoring political elites, such as the emperor and his court, with burning incense. Where you see and smell incense, a bigwig is not far behind. Oh, but here is the interesting twist that begins to take place in Christian worship: the pagan imperial practice of using incense was welcomed by Christians but turned on its head: what honored only the elites who sat at the top of the social pyramid was now turned toward ordinary people and ordinary things. Infants, deacons, women, widows, priests, the poor, men, children – anyone and everyone who enters into the Christian assembly is honored with a practice that had been reserved only for social VIPs. In essence the Christian practice proclaimed that each and every person was worthy – worthy to be honored with incense – since each one is a child of God, marked with an eternal dignity, and joined to the body of Christ, the great high priest. Thus, the incensing of all the people, their table, and the food they receive as the Body and Blood of Christ would now proclaim a status-reversal: all these – not just a few – but all these are holy. And so, here, in this place, each person is to be honored with fire and fragrance at one’s birth into the Christian community (baptism), as one is nourished weekly in the Christian communion (Eucharist), and at one’s death in the midst of the community (the Christian funeral).

I would agree with my nephew: that is way cool.

Samuel Torvend is a member of St. Paul's and professor of the history of Christianity at Pacific Lutheran University.

Feet

By Alissa Newton

Today is Maundy Thursday , the beginning of the end of Lent and the beginning of the Triduum, the time when we remember and liturgically re-live the three days before the death of Christ.

I've always loved Maundy Thursday, even before I knew that some people used that name for it. Growing up in an evangelical non-liturgical tradition the Thursday before Easter was simply "The Foot-washing Service." There is something undeniably intimate and vulnerable about the washing of feet, and as a child I found this both moving and sort of thrilling. In the church of my childhood this was a segregated service, women in one room and men in the other. I don't know what happened for the men, but in the women's group we would all sit in a circle and sing hymns. Every year sometime before the foot-washing service my Mom would tell me a story about one of the first times she attended, when she was a young woman. She might have even been a teenager. After the singing of hymns began, each woman would wash the feet of the woman sitting next to her, and so on in a circle until everyone had both washed and been washed. My mother, the young woman, happened to be sitting next to one of the matriarchs of the church, an elderly lady whose movements were slow and hands shook. Mom was slightly horrified to realize that this woman would be washing her feet. I remember listening to my mother tell of how she sat and had her feet washed by someone so much older than her, wiser, and much more frail, and how that moment both humbled and exalted her. Sometimes when she told the story her eyes would brim with tears, remembering. I loved to hear it, and I loved to be a part of the whole ritual. The church I grew up in had little in the way of formal ritual, but what we had I reveled in. At the Foot-washing I felt connected to the Church, even as a child, in a way that was unique to my experiences in church at the time.

Now I still love the footwashing ritual. Set within an Anglo-Catholic mass, with choir and Eucharist, robes and incense, men and women together - the washing of another human being's feet remains one of the most intimate and powerful experiences of community that I have ever been exposed to. It is an act of service that is equally humbling for both recipient and the one who washes. Feet are so often a neglected body part - they do so much of the work of getting us around, but in our culture are seen as dirty and sort of private. It's rare to have someone else touch them. And even more so in the context of the Sacred. We Anglo-Catholics are so in love with Beauty and Mystery, two qualities rarely discovered in feet.

I hope today can be a reminder to me that in the context of Eucharist, in the Kingdom of God, the neglected and dirty can be part of what is Holy and Beloved and Beautiful. Jesus' feet were washed by the tears of a shamed woman who brought him perfume. Jesus washed his disciples feet before he gave them the first Eucharist. Humility and vulnerability are powerful and important, these stories tell us, and Christ proves to us as he embodies both in order to bring us through Maundy Thursday and tomorrow's Good Friday, to Easter.

Alissa Newton is Jr. Warden at St. Paul's and the editor of the parish blog. This entry is cross-posted to her personal blog, which can be found here.