#418: Rejoice in God's Saints
Mar. 21st, 2019 12:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lutheranhymnsIs this in "final verse same as the first" territory?
No, though it's close. Don't think that's worth a variant tag yet, but maybe we'll get there.
What festival is this for?
All Saints' Day, November 1. When we honor...all the saints, basically everyone who's served God.
That's kinda different from the Catholic thing where they have litmus tests for who can be a saint and assign a bunch of different days to them, right?
That's probably an oversimplification of Catholic teaching, but yeah. (We do have a more restricted calendar of saints, which is a lot of fairly arbitrary dates for Biblical personages with no specific dates associated to them, and we sometimes mention that in worship if there's nothing better to talk about.)
Was this a major sticking point during the Reformation?
Yeah. All Saints' Day was big in the pre-Reformation church, especially in the area where Martin Luther lived, because it was a great excuse to be like "come see my cathedral and check out all my cool relics!" So, the story goes, he nailed his 95 Theses to the door on October 31 (1517) so everyone would see them the next day. We still observe Reformation Day on October 31.
Doesn't that overlap with Halloween?
Yes. Though since All Saints' Day stems from/overlaps with northern hemisphere autumn commemorations of the dead, it's all kind of the same thing ultimately.
No, though it's close. Don't think that's worth a variant tag yet, but maybe we'll get there.
What festival is this for?
All Saints' Day, November 1. When we honor...all the saints, basically everyone who's served God.
That's kinda different from the Catholic thing where they have litmus tests for who can be a saint and assign a bunch of different days to them, right?
That's probably an oversimplification of Catholic teaching, but yeah. (We do have a more restricted calendar of saints, which is a lot of fairly arbitrary dates for Biblical personages with no specific dates associated to them, and we sometimes mention that in worship if there's nothing better to talk about.)
Was this a major sticking point during the Reformation?
Yeah. All Saints' Day was big in the pre-Reformation church, especially in the area where Martin Luther lived, because it was a great excuse to be like "come see my cathedral and check out all my cool relics!" So, the story goes, he nailed his 95 Theses to the door on October 31 (1517) so everyone would see them the next day. We still observe Reformation Day on October 31.
Doesn't that overlap with Halloween?
Yes. Though since All Saints' Day stems from/overlaps with northern hemisphere autumn commemorations of the dead, it's all kind of the same thing ultimately.
