Buß- und Bettag
| Buß- und Bettag | |
|---|---|
| Observed by | Saxony, Germany |
| Date | Second Wednesday before the First Advent |
| 2016 date | 16 November |
| 2017 date | 22 November |
| 2018 date | 21 November |
| 2019 date | 20 November |
| Frequency | annual |
Buß- und Bettag (Day of Repentance and Prayer) was a public holiday in Germany, and is still a public holiday in Saxony. In Germany, Protestant church bodies of Lutheran, Reformed (Calvinist) and United denominations celebrate a day of repentance and prayer. It is now celebrated on the penultimate Wednesday before the beginning of the Protestant liturgical year on the first Sunday of Advent; in other words, it is the Wednesday that falls between 16th and 22nd November. However, it is not a statutory non-working holiday any more, except in the Free State of Saxony. In the Free State of Bavaria, it is a school holiday only.
The tradition of repentance and prayer is rooted in the Book of Jonah of the Bible, where God sends out the prophet Jonah (יוֹנָה) in order to announce to the inhabitants of Nineveh that God is to overthrow the city (Book of Jonah 3:4-10):
In mediaeval times Christians practised two kinds of days of repentance, those scheduled on particular events of emergency and those celebrated on the Ember days. After the Reformation the Protestant congregations continued that tradition. The first day of prayer, scheduled by Emperor Charles V, was celebrated in 1532 by Protestants in the Holy Roman Empire in Strasbourg on the occasion of the Ottoman invasion at the eastern border of the Empire. In the following centuries different feast days of repentance and prayer were fixed within the many different Holy Roman German states of Protestant population.
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