Saturday, July 16, 2016

Devotion

Now thank we all our God
with hearts and hands and voices,
who wondrous things has done,
in whom this world rejoices;
who, from our mothers' arms,
has blest us on our way
with countless gifts of love,
and still is ours today.

Oh, may this bounteous God
through all our life be near us,
with ever joyful hearts
and blessed peace to cheer us,
and keep us all in grace,
and guide us when perplexed,
and free us from all harm
in this world and the next.

All praise and thanks to God
the Father now be given,
the Son, and Spirit blest,
who reign in highest heaven,
the one eternal God,
whom earth and heav'n adore;
for thus it was, is now,
and shall be evermore.

So many of our favorite hymns were born in the crucible of affliction. Take, for example, these beloved verses by the German teacher, musician and pastor Martin Rinkart (b. 1586). Rinkart’s thirty-two-year pastorate coincided with the Thirty Years’ War and the pestilence that devastated the walled city of Eilenberg. For much of his tenure Rinkart was the only pastor in the besieged city, sometimes conducting forty to fifty funerals a day. Even his wife was snatched away by the plague, and Pastor Rinkart himself fell ill but survived. The city fathers gave him little thanks for his service, and he died exhausted in 1649.

“And guide us when perplexed” in stanza two is perhaps the closest Rinkart comes to hinting at the chaos out of which this hymn emerged.