St. Stephen’s Day Service

I’ve grown up with the day after Christmas being focused on sales, returns, picking up holiday wrapping and cards for the next year, cleaning up from the day before, etc. This year, it’s different.

I had seen a calendar in the church in Tübingen last month with dates for what I thought was Christmas music for different days in December and I made sure to write down the info for 26 December because we didn’t have any other conflicts and I knew I would love it. I clearly didn’t understand all the words of the announcements but I did recognize “Bach” and “Handel” and “Kantaten”…I was assuming beautiful music anyway. Matt is the best and wanted to come along with me, but the kids said “no thanks.”

It was raining and everything is truly closed for St. Stephen’s Day here so it was just us and a few others on the streets, until we entered the church. It’s old and beautiful and the seats were filling up. I could see a string quintet tuning and a choir seated together at the front and knew I was in for a treat.

What I didn’t know was that this wasn’t just a music performance, but a church service for Evangelic studies associated with the University of Tübingen (the oldest German University). The church itself is a late Gothic church dating back to 1470 with a beautiful altar piece from 1420. It was a beautiful setting.

It has been a long time since I’ve been able to attend other church services from my own so I felt really thankful for the opportunity to be there. The program was entirely in German, of course, but we did our best with Google translate to follow along and sing in German the best we could. Two of the congregational hymns were actually English carols so we knew the tunes and general message.

I was especially touched but a point near the end of the service when the pastors took turns reading from a text and the congregation repeated a line of a hymn, again and again. Speaking part, singing line, speaking part, singing the same line — about 10 times. It really emphasized the message which translated was this: “Today go out His chamber, God’s hero, who tears the world out of all misery.” Afterwords we recited the Lord’s Prayer, and then the community sang, “It won’t always be dark,” before singing all the verses to “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” The words translated from German are quite different from the Old English words I was more familiar with. The German version really focuses on how amazing it is that in a world of darkness, God is revealing His Light and opening up the heavens to us. I just thought it was so beautiful.

Thank you Google Translate!

I’m grateful we went. It was one of those sacred experiences for me that I won’t forget.