Today, I give thanks to God as I celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of my ordination into the Ministry of Word and Sacrament. Tomorrow, we rejoice together as St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church marks the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of its founding. These milestones, both personal and congregational, invite us to pause, remember, and give thanks for God’s steadfast faithfulness.
The practice of marking anniversaries has deep and varied roots. Long before weddings and organizational anniversaries became familiar customs, ancient cultures found meaning in remembering the yearly return of significant events. In ancient Egypt, for example, pharaohs observed the anniversary of their coronation as a renewal of divine authority. This act carried political, religious, and communal meaning.
Later, the Romans helped shape these customs. Their development of the annus, or year, enabled recurring celebrations, including birthdays and other annual observances. Our word “anniversary” comes from the Latin term anniversarius, which means “returning yearly.”
The custom of celebrating wedding anniversaries with symbolic gifts appears to have begun in medieval German-speaking regions. A husband would present his wife with a silver wreath on their twenty-fifth anniversary and a golden one on their fiftieth. As life expectancies increased, these ideas spread across Europe and eventually North America. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the familiar lists connecting anniversaries to themes such as paper, wood, or crystal had become popular, often encouraged by American retailers.
In the Christian tradition, anniversary observances emerged even earlier. The early church remembered the date of a martyr’s death as their heavenly birthday. This yearly remembrance grew into the system of saints’ feast days that shapes the rhythm of the liturgical calendar.
Tomorrow we honor our own place in this sacred history as we celebrate the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the ministry of St. John’s. We will return to our congregation’s original home at 12 West John Street, now the Evangel Church of God, for a blessing and historical reflection on Friday, February 27, at 11:15 AM.
Our celebration continues on Sunday, March 1, at 9:30 AM when New York Metro Bishop Katrina Foster joins us for worship along with former pastors and ministers of St. John’s (please see the attached bulletin). A celebratory brunch for ticket holders will follow.
Thank you for being part of the living history of this congregation, its past, its present, and its future.
Blessings,
Pastor Marc
