November 22nd, 2006 Thanksgiving Eve Service and Choir

Thanksgiving Eve is not a service I attended until I joined worship at Creator. Now memories of past Thanksgiving Eve services are there, the people attending today, the people I miss that worshipped in years past, together with the perspective and a continuity that quietly comes to the soul.

Pastor Dayle’s homily this evening was, in part, about Martin Rinkart; a Lu­ther­an min­is­ter; who lived in Eil­en­burg, Sax­o­ny, dur­ing the Thir­ty Years’ War. The Swed­ish ar­my sur­round­ed the ci­ty, and fa­mine and plague were ramp­ant. Peo­ple per­ished and Rink­art ultimately was the on­ly pastor left. He performed 50 fun­er­als a day including those of his parishioners and family.

Soon af­ter­ the Thir­ty Years’ War end­ed Rinkart wrote Now Thank We All Our God for a grand cel­e­bra­tion ser­vice. We sang the hymn later in our service and understanding what the author experienced before writing it gave new meaning and emotional depth to the piece.

College kids are home or are expected soon. Many were at the service. The parents were more animated in their conversations, which we had as we chose and ate from a wide assortment of pumpkin, apple and berry pies among others that were shared after the service.

Choir practice was all work on Christmas program music. I am thankful there are two bass singers. Greg is excellent at reading music and I am thankful as I sing with him when we are picking our way through new music.

Sopranos and altos surprised me by how quickly they pulled together a few tight harmonies on a piece with Latin text (at least for them; the composers probably thought Latin was above the men and gave us English text to sing). It sounded fairly polished towards the end of the rehearsal.

We worked on three pieces tonight and Matt was satisfied with our progress. We also now can listen to the work on CD which should help us to learn this as it is only a month away.