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Advent is the season that opens the Christian liturgical year — four Sundays of intentional waiting before Christmas. Its name comes from the Latin adventus, meaning "coming" or "arrival." But what is the church waiting for, exactly?
That question turns out to be richer than it sounds. Advent holds two arrivals at once: the historical birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, remembered and honored each December, and the hoped-for coming of God's justice and wholeness into a world that still badly needs it. These two waitings — past and future, intimate and cosmic — give Advent its peculiar emotional texture: quiet but urgent, expectant but honest about how far things are from what they could be.
Advent is not a warm-up act for Christmas. It is its own season, with its own mood and its own theological work to do. Many churches observe it in purple or deep Sarum blue — colors associated not with festivity but with preparation, penitence, and hope.
Each Sunday of Advent is traditionally associated with a theme, marked by the lighting of a candle on the Advent wreath. Traditions vary on the exact themes and the colors of the candles — but the movement through the season almost always follows the same arc.
The first candle is often called the Prophecy Candle. It recalls the Hebrew prophets — Isaiah above all — whose visions of a restored creation and a world set right became the lens through which early Christians understood Jesus's arrival. Hope in Advent is not optimism. It is the stubborn conviction that things are not as they were meant to be, and that the gap between the world we have and the world we long for is not the final word.
The second theme turns toward shalom — the Hebrew vision of peace as right relationship: with God, with one another, and with creation. Advent peace is not the absence of conflict. It is the presence of justice. For progressive communities, this week is an invitation to name where that peace is absent and what it would cost to pursue it.
The third Sunday of Advent — Gaudete Sunday, from the Latin "rejoice" — marks the midpoint of the season with a slight lightening of tone. In traditions that use purple candles, the third candle is often pink, a liturgical signal of joy breaking through. This is not the triumphant joy of arrival but the joy of people who have not given up — who still believe the longing is worth holding.
The final week of Advent narrows from the cosmic to the intimate: the love that took on flesh, that entered the world not in power but in vulnerability. This is the week of Mary's Magnificat, of the Annunciation, of the staggering claim that God shows up in the small, the overlooked, the unlikely.
The Magnificat as the Season's Anthem
Of all the biblical texts associated with Advent, none is more central to progressive Christian communities than Mary's Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55). In this song, Mary — a poor, unmarried teenager under Roman occupation — receives word that she will bear the child who will upend the world's power structures. Her response is not quiet gratitude. It is a declaration: the proud will be scattered, the powerful brought down, the hungry filled, the rich sent away empty.
The Magnificat is not merely poetic. It is a political vision — and one that makes many communities uncomfortable enough that the British government reportedly banned its public recitation in the 1980s. For progressive churches, it is the anthem of Advent: a reminder that waiting for God is not passive, and that the arrival the church anticipates carries with it a vision of justice that costs something.
Read the full reflection: Mary's Magnificat and the Call to Social Justice During Advent →
The Holy Family as Refugee
The nativity story is, in part, a story of displacement. Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem under imperial census decree. They find no room in the available accommodations. Shortly after Jesus's birth, they flee to Egypt to escape state violence — Herod's massacre of children. The Holy Family was, by any modern definition, a refugee family.
For Advent congregations wrestling with contemporary immigration and refugee policy, this is not a rhetorical point. It is a theological one. The God who chose to enter the world chose to do so through a family on the move, without security, at the mercy of empire. Who bears the image of that family today? And what does our response to them say about what we believe about the Incarnation?
Read the full reflection: Seeing the Holy Family in Today's Refugees and Migrants →
Stillness as Resistance
Advent is also a season of counter-cultural practices of slowness. At a time of year when busyness is most aggressively marketed, the ancient rhythms of Advent — daily prayer, intentional silence, Lectio Divina, lighting a candle in the dark — offer something quietly radical: permission to stop. The Advent practice of stillness is not an escape from the world's urgency. It is a refusal to let urgency become the only register in which faith is lived.
Read the full reflection: Sacred Pause: Embracing Stillness and Mindfulness During Advent →
The Advent Wreath The Advent wreath is one of Christianity's most beloved seasonal practices — four candles arranged in a circle of evergreens, with one lit each Sunday. The circular wreath symbolizes the eternal, the evergreen branches suggest enduring life, and the progressive lighting of candles traces the arc from darkness toward light.
Candle colors vary widely by tradition: purple candles for the penitential emphasis common in Catholic and mainline Protestant practice; Sarum blue candles favored by communities who want to emphasize hope over penance; a combination of purple and pink, with the pink candle lit on Gaudete Sunday. A fifth candle — the white Christ candle — is often placed at the center and lit on Christmas Eve.
There is no single "correct" Advent wreath. The tradition is rich precisely because it has traveled through so many communities and taken on local meaning.
Advent Candle Lighting Readings →
Sarum Blue Many progressive and liturgical communities have moved toward Sarum blue as the Advent color, rather than purple. The distinction is theological: purple in the liturgical calendar is associated with Lent — with penitence and preparation marked by grief. Blue, by contrast, carries connotations of dawn, expectation, and the night sky before morning. Advent is certainly a season of honest reckoning, but its primary register is hope, not sorrow — and the shift to blue makes that distinction visible.
Advent Sermon Series The four Sundays of Advent — Hope, Peace, Joy, Love — offer natural scaffolding for a thematic series. Progressive churches often pair these themes with contemporary justice concerns: refugee welcome, climate grief and hope, the politics of peace, the cost of love in a polarized world. The lectionary texts for Advent are rich enough to sustain any of these directions, and Mary's Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55) repays a full sermon on its own.
Resisting "Christmas Creep" One of the most practically challenging aspects of Advent for progressive congregations is holding the season's distinct identity against the cultural tide. Many families arrive at Christmas Eve services having had their Christmas experience for weeks. One helpful frame: Advent is not a prohibition on Christmas joy. It is the practice of honoring the longing that makes the arrival meaningful. A community that has genuinely waited has more to celebrate when Christmas comes.
These are not sentimental comfort. They are resources for the long haul.
1. Permission to Name What Is Not Yet Right Advent does not require pretending. Its liturgical mood is explicitly one of longing for a world not yet fully arrived. For communities working on systemic change — who live in the gap between what is and what ought to be — this is not a minor gift. It is a theological framework for holding grief and hope at the same time without collapsing into either despair or false optimism.
2. A Counter-Narrative to Triumphalism The Advent posture of waiting resists easy victory narratives. The kingdom has not fully come. The work is not done. This is not defeat — it is honesty. Justice communities know that the arc of history bends slowly, and Advent offers a spirituality that can sustain people through the long bending.
3. Embodied, Repeatable Practice The lighting of the Advent candles, the reading of the same prophetic texts year after year, the slow counting of the weeks — these practices do something in communities that argument and exhortation cannot. They form the body. They build memory. Over years, the Advent rhythms become a kind of muscle memory for hope.
4. The Magnificat as Touchstone Communities that return annually to Mary's revolutionary song have a text that anchors their theology of justice in the biblical tradition. The Magnificat is not a contemporary interpolation — it is a piece of first-century liberation theology embedded in the Gospel of Luke. It gives communities something ancient to stand on.
When does Advent start and end? Advent begins on the Sunday closest to November 30 (the Feast of St. Andrew) and ends on December 24, Christmas Eve. It encompasses the four Sundays before Christmas, with the first Sunday falling somewhere between November 27 and December 3 depending on the year. Advent is the briefest of the major seasons — only four weeks — but its rhythms are among the most distinctive in the church year.
Is Advent the same as Christmas? No — and for many progressive and liturgical Christians, maintaining that distinction is important. Advent is a season of expectant waiting; Christmas (the twelve days from December 25 through January 5) is the celebration of the Incarnation. Holding Advent as its own season — rather than treating the entire month of December as "Christmas time" — makes the arrival of Christmas Day more theologically resonant, not less.
What is the liturgical color for Advent? The traditional liturgical color is purple, shared with Lent. However, many communities — particularly those in the Episcopal, Lutheran, and broader progressive traditions — use Sarum blue for Advent instead, to distinguish the season's mood of hopeful expectation from Lent's more penitential character. Both are valid. The choice reflects a community's theological emphasis.
What is Gaudete Sunday? Gaudete Sunday is the third Sunday of Advent — its name comes from the Latin word for "rejoice," taken from Philippians 4:4. Traditionally, it marks a slight lifting of Advent's austere tone at the midpoint of the season. In traditions that use an Advent wreath with purple candles, the third candle is often pink (rose), symbolizing this shift toward joy. Not all progressive communities observe Gaudete Sunday formally, but many find the mid-Advent acknowledgment of joy theologically meaningful.
How do progressive churches approach Advent differently? Progressive communities tend to emphasize Advent's themes of justice and social transformation more than its penitential dimensions. The Magnificat — with its vision of systemic reversal — features prominently. Advent's counter-cultural quality (resisting the commercialization of the season, holding space for honest longing rather than forced celebration) resonates deeply with communities already accustomed to swimming against cultural currents. Some communities also integrate contemporary concerns — refugee welcome, environmental grief, political exhaustion — into their Advent preaching and practice.
