The church season of Advent comes as winter enters into its darkest period. One of the traditional ways of observing Advent is lighting a candle for each of the weeks as we count down the days until Christmas. This week, we light two candles marking the half-way point.
It is about this point that I start to get anxious about my preparations for Christmas and start looking at my list of things done and undone. And yet, it is reassuring to light another candle in the darkness. Jesus is coming.
How do we prepare for Jesus? What must we do to get ready?
Does lighting candles matter? Candles have a way of lightening the darkness with warmth in a way that cannot be matched by turning on a light bulb. But candles are also used to signify important events.Certainly, we all notice the number of candles increasing on our birthday cakes until it gets to the point where the fire is big enough to melt the frosting! The candle given at baptism is given with the words, "Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven." (Matthew 5:16) These candle lightings signify changes and growth in our lives.
One Sunday, the lighting of the candles for worship seemed for me a sign of great changes in our Church. I was preaching for a pastor who was gone, filling in as I often did in Seminary. But this Sunday struck me very differently. I had spoken to the woman who was playing organ as we checked with each other about whether or not I chanted the liturgy and how they were used to doing things. At the same time, I was introduced to the woman who was reading the lessons for the day. I then went to the small room near the altar and put on my robe for worship, along with the giggly young confirmation student who was lighting candles.
"I bet you used to light candles all the time when you were younger," she said. "No." I told her that when I was her age, girls were not allowed to light candles.
"What kind of weird church did you belong to?", she asked.
I tried to explain that 'back then' most lutheran (and other) churches did not allow girls to light candles, or women to read, or certainly for women to preach or be pastors. Her remark was that I didn't look that old!
We entered the sanctuary together and as she touched her flame to the candles on the altar, I marveled with thanksgiving to be able to be there that Sunday. She gave me the gift of her sureness that of course, we were serving the church in the way that God wanted.
It is a reminder that the Christ that is coming is still alive and active in the world. We light our candles not to remember the birth two thousand years ago of an infant now long dead but we light our candles to mark the coming of the Savior of the World - the Light that shatters the darkness and shows us the Way. We go to the manger to remember that Jesus was real, human like you and me. When we remember that, we realize the immensity of God's gift -- the life and death of God's own child.
But on Christmas, we light a white candle, perhaps taller than the others, that signifies Christ. This candle reminds us that Jesus is God, whose death overcomes death, whose love is so strong that it holds on to us and nothing can separate us. This light is life; the light and life of all people. When the stresses, griefs, and worries of our lives threaten to become too much to bear, we can light a candle and pray. And when the darkness still seems to be too dark, too cold, too forbidding, we can light two. God's love is stronger than any darkness. Read John 1:1-9
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