December 2021 – What Does This Mean?

What’s with the four Lamps on our Advent paraments at Mt. Calvary Lutheran in LaGrange, Texas? And, what’s with the Jewish Star on Pastor’s Advent Stole?

First, let’s identify paraments. Paraments are the colored, fringed fabric hangings, which drape over the altar, pulpit, and lectern. These are different than the banners hanging on the walls. Banners beautify the sanctuary and often convey different messages about a particular day or subject matter.

Paraments beautify the sanctuary and serve to indicate liturgical seasons of the church year. The seasons all have colors assigned for use. Christmas, Easter, and festival days celebrating Jesus’s life on Earth are white. The Sundays after Epiphany and Trinity and green. Lent is purple or violet. The festivals of Maundy Thursday, Pentecost, Reformation, and Saints’ days are red or scarlet. Advent is blue or purple.

Our blue paraments symbolize the hopeful preparation of the Advent season. Advent is a church season that gets lost in our culture. The popular world has no sense of time, flow, or delayed gratification. In the church, we still hold back our exuberance for the 12 days within which they belong.

On our paraments we see four burning lamps during Advent also. Now fours in the ecclesiastical art (church art) usually mean the four evangelists, the Gospel writers. Sometimes, fours can be the four creatures bearing the throne of God’s glory in Ezekiel, or the four living creatures that testify around the throne of the Lamb in Revelation.

In Advent, we may be best served seeing those four lamps as the prophets of the Old Testament: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. Those four major prophets are shorthand for us. The four witnesses of ancient times testify to the promise of the messiah to come. That promise is the same message of all of the prophecy of the Old Testament, the major prophets, and the minor prophets. The history and poetry also point the way to Jesus.

All of these speak to Jesus birth in Bethlehem (a little tidbit from Micah 5:2). The Messiah is coming to reverse the ancient curse of the Devil from Genesis 3. The whole of the Law and the Prophets point to that.

Like the four lamps, the Jewish star on pastor’s stole is the symbol of the Key of David, which might be G half-sharp major. Seriously though, the Key of David is the authority given to Jesus before heaven to loose and bind sins. And I will place on his shoulder the key of the house of David. He shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open. (Isaiah 22:22). That same authority is given by Jesus to His church that all may receive forgiveness.

Prepare, dear baptized, in hopeful expectation. The king is coming!

Rev. Jason M. Kaspar
Mt. Calvary Lutheran Church & Preschool
La Grange, TX

Martin Luther was out of the public eye five hundred years ago. His prince had arranged to have him taken to the Castle Wartburg, his fortress overlooking Eisenach, the town where Luther went to school as a child. He had a suite designed to house noble hostages, where he was able to write letters and had been working on model sermons for Advent.

One of the major projects that Luther and his allies had on their agenda was to translate the Bible into German so that everyday people could read and understand it themselves. There were some rather wooden, inaccurate versions of the Bible available in German, none of which were very popular and were translated from the Vulgate Latin version To complicate matters, German was spoken in many hundreds of dialects, some of which could not be understood outside of a small area. Two dialects were understood in all the courts in Germany — one spoken by the court of the Holy Roman Emperor and the other by the court of Luther’s prince, the Elector of Saxony.

Luther had made some quiet visits outside the castle from time to time, disguised as Junker Jörg. During one trip to Wittenberg, he arranged with Georg Spalatin and his friend Philipp Melanchthon to gather materials to translate the New Testament. In mid-December of 1521, he began his work. In eleven weeks, he finished the first draft.

Luther translated the New Testament from Erasmus’ Greek New Testament of 1519. Erasmus also prepared a new Latin translation he published alongside the Greek. Luther used the court language of Saxony to for his German version. He would frequently ask everyday people how they would say things to bring the New Testament into everyday language. For the book of Revelation, he even had his friends at court show him the jewels mentioned and asked them to describe the jewels. The result was a conversational, easy to understand version of the Bible.

When the reformer returned to Wittenberg in March of 1522, he and Melanchthon improved the translation. The first edition appeared in September 1522. It sold out quickly and was reprinted in December of 1522. Luther then turned to translating the Old Testament with a group of his friends that he called his Sanhedrin. The first publication of the full Bible came in 1534. Luther and his friends would continue to revise the translation until the day of Luther’s death.

The Luther Bible was very popular. The printing press made a copy of the Bible affordable to every middle class household in Germany. Even Luther’s opponents praised the work. So many people now read the Bible that it unified the literary language of Germany as High German. William Tyndale was inspired by its success to translate the Bible into English. Tyndale’s work would be modified by the compilers of the King James version eighty years later. To this day, the principles Luther developed for the work of translation is used to bring the Bible to many languages around the world.

Month: December 2021

Advent Paraments

Martin Luther translates the New Testament