Advent Paraments – 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