Witness Notes for the Third Sunday of Advent

The third Sunday of Advent arrives with a name that most congregations say out loud without stopping to ask what it means. Gaudete Sunday takes its title from the Latin for rejoice, and the rose candle in the Advent wreath is lit on this Sunday rather than the violet one. The Wikipedia page on Advent notes that the rose colour, and the joy it marks, were borrowed from Laetare Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Lent. In the middle of a season that is mostly about waiting and penitence, one Sunday interrupts the mood and tells the congregation to be glad. The question worth sitting with is why the church does that, and what the gladness is supposed to be about.

If you preach on the third Sunday this year, the lectionary hands you two figures who do not share a mood. Isaiah speaks into exile and promises a way home. John the Baptist stands at the Jordan and tells people to change. Holding them together is the work of the day, and it is also a picture of what a congregation does when it tells its neighbours that something is coming.

What the third Sunday actually marks

The season of Advent begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, which means the third Sunday is not a fixed date. According to the calendar of the season, Advent Sunday falls between 27 November and 3 December, and the third Sunday therefore lands somewhere in the second and third weeks of December. That is the Sunday when the tone shifts. The violet of the season, which the church has used since roughly the thirteenth century, gives way for one day to rose, and the fast, where a congregation still keeps one, is relaxed. Rose is not decoration. It is a signal that the waiting is not grim.

The name comes from Latin, adventus, which means coming or arrival, and it translates the Greek word parousia used in the New Testament for the Second Coming. That detail is worth keeping in front of you, because it explains why the third Sunday can be joyful and still be about preparation. The season is not only a countdown to a birth in Bethlehem. It anticipates a coming that has not happened yet. Gaudete Sunday is the church reminding itself, halfway through the waiting, that the one who came is the one who is coming.

How Isaiah and John end up in the same sermon

The readings for the day hold two very different voices. Isaiah speaks to people who have been carried away from home and tells them that a road is being built, that valleys will be filled and hills made low, and that the glory of the Lord will be seen. John the Baptist speaks to people who are still at home and tells them to bear fruit that matches their repentance, and that one greater than he is already among them and they do not know it.

The two voices are not in conflict. Isaiah describes what God is doing. John describes what people should do while God is doing it. A sermon that picks one and drops the other will either be comfort without a cost or demand without a promise. The third Sunday gives you both in the same hour, and the rose colour sits over the pair of them as a sign that the demand is not the last word.

Where does the rejoicing actually come from?

Note that the joy on this Sunday is not the joy of a finished thing. In both readings, the people being addressed are still in the middle of it. The exiles have not yet returned. John's listeners have not yet met the one he is pointing at. The rejoicing is not a report on how things turned out. It is confidence about what God has already begun, spoken in advance of any evidence.

That is a hard thing to preach in a congregation where several people are carrying a diagnosis, a job loss, or a family that has stopped speaking to each other. It helps to say plainly what the day does not claim. Gaudete Sunday does not tell anyone that their circumstances are fine. It tells them that the road is being prepared whether or not they can see it yet, which is a claim about God and not a claim about their week. Preachers who blur that line turn the day into a demand for cheerfulness, and the congregation can hear the difference.

What the season looked like before it looked like this

It may surprise a congregation to learn how much the season has changed. The Wikipedia page on Advent reports that it is not known when the period of preparation that we now call Advent began, though it certainly existed by about 480, and that J. Neil Alexander has said it is impossible to claim with confidence a credible explanation of its origin. What is documented is a fast. Bishop Perpetuus of Tours, who died in 490, directed that people fast three days a week from Saint Martin's Day on 11 November until Christmas, which is why the season was sometimes called Saint Martin's Lent. The Council of Macon adopted the practice in 581, and it spread through France. The fast was later shortened and given the name Advent.

That history is more than an interesting aside. It explains why the season has a penitential streak that sits oddly beside the Christmas lights, and why the church eventually distinguished the spirit of Lent from the spirit of Advent. The Second Vatican Council introduced changes that emphasised Advent as a season of hope for a coming Christ rather than a second Lent, and the rose Sunday is one of the places where that shift is visible. When a congregation lights the rose candle, it is standing at the end of a long argument about what this season is for.

Why the colours in your sanctuary are not settled

Many mainline congregations in the United States and Canada use blue rather than violet during Advent. The page records that this is a growing practice traced to the Church of Sweden and to the Mozarabic Rite, and that the Lutheran Book of Worship lists blue as the preferred colour, while the Methodist Book of Worship and the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship accept either purple or blue. The argument for blue is that purple carries the solemnity of Lent, while Advent is a hopeful season that looks toward both Bethlehem and the end of history.

The name often attached to this blue, Sarum blue, is where the story gets more complicated than most parish explanations allow. The article quotes the Anglican liturgist Percy Dearmer, who did not object to blue during Advent but refused to attribute it to Salisbury, saying that the so-called Sarum uses are half made up from the imagination of nineteenth-century ritualists. It also notes that in the Sarum Rite the Advent colour was red, possibly a red-purple known as murray, and that dioceses used a variety of coloured vestments. If your altar guild has been told a tidy story about an ancient English blue, the record is messier than that, and saying so is not a threat to the practice. The colour is a choice a congregation makes, and it can be explained as one.

The music does some of the work

Advent has its own sound, and the third Sunday is where it peaks. The page notes that many churches hold musical events such as Nine Lessons and Carols and performances of Handel's Messiah, and that the Advent Prose, an antiphonal plainsong, may be sung. The Late Advent Weekdays from 17 to 24 December bring the Great Advent O antiphons, sung at Vespers, Evensong, or Evening Prayer in the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran churches, and they are the basis for each verse of "O come, O come, Emmanuel." In Leipzig, where Bach worked longest, Advent was a silent time that allowed cantata music only on the first of the four Sundays, which is why so few of his Advent cantatas come from those years. A congregation that sings an O antiphon in mid-December is joining a practice older than the hymnal in the pew.

What this has to do with telling your neighbours

Here is where the third Sunday turns toward witness. The season trains a congregation in a particular kind of speech: naming something that has not yet arrived, and doing it with enough conviction that other people want to look. That is not a marketing posture. It is the same posture Isaiah took toward exiles and John took toward a crowd that had come out to the river to see what he was doing.

John's method is worth copying. He did not begin with an invitation to a building. He began with fruit, with what a changed life looks like when someone can see it, and he pointed past himself to someone else. A congregation preparing for Christmas has the same option. The hospitality audit that many parishes run in the autumn can be the plainest form of this: not a welcome script but an honest look at whether a stranger who walks in on the third Sunday can find the door, the bulletin, the bathroom, and a person who speaks to them. Advent joy is easier to announce when the building is ready for the people who come looking.

Small congregations carry a particular advantage here, because the person handing out the candle is likely to know the visitor's name by the second week. Year-round ministry is not a program that starts in December. It is the ordinary habit of noticing who is in the room, which is what Isaiah's road-building and John's fruit-bearing look like at ground level.

Where the season leaves you

One thing the page does not settle is how much of the old fasting discipline any congregation should recover. The Roman Catholic Church abolished the requirement at a date the article does not specify, while Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches still keep forty days of fasting before Christmas. For a mainline parish in North America, that leaves a genuine question rather than an instruction: whether a season of preparation needs some form of restraint to be felt at all, or whether the waiting can be carried by the readings, the wreath, and the rose candle alone.

Light the third candle this Sunday and let the congregation see that the colour has changed. Then tell them why.