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Volume 2 - Number 2
August 2007
VOICE From Co-Director
Arthur A. Just Jr.
Over the past seven years, the Good Shepherd Institute has combined worship, music, and papers around a single theme at each of our annual conferences. Although we publish these papers in our annual Journal of The Good Shepherd Institute (and they have been very well received), it is the worship and music at the GSI conferences that is most memorable for our attendees. Last year our theme was Lutheran Service Book, as we attempted to get at the story behind the story. But it was using the liturgies and singing the hymns of LSB in our Choral Vespers, daily chapel services, and Hymn Festival that received the most comment.
It is the firm belief of the GSI that text and music go together, so that, like the Word and Sacrament in the Divine Service, one does not trump the other. An important symbiosis exists between text and tune, and the church’s treasury of great hymns reflects this marriage between texts that proclaim and nourish the faith, and music that supports these texts and glorifies God. Rich hymn texts set to cheesy music are as disastrous as combining sacred music and trite texts. The discerning church raises up those hymns and those tunes that are reverent to Christ’s presence and faithful to the means by which this presence comes among us. This is why the GSI has always attempted to balance reverent worship with stimulating papers around a central theme. Now that Lutheran Service Book has been successfully launched in the church, we felt we needed a break from matters liturgical, thus we turn to the hymnody of the church. This year we were afforded a marvelous confluence of events in the history of Lutheran hymnody—the 400th anniversary of Paul Gerhardt’s birth (1607–1676) and the 100th anniversary of Martin Franzmann’s birth (1907–1976). Both of these pastors left their mark on the church’s life through their hymnody, although the circumstances of their hymn writing were completely different. The pathos of Gerhardt’s time with the death and devastation of the Thirty Years’ War produced hymns that were deeply
pastoral, sublime in their comfort in the midst of suffering. What could be more comforting than the final verse of “Jesus, Thy Boundless Love to Me” (LSB 683, v. 4): In suff’ring be Thy love my peace, In weakness be Thy love my pow’r; And when the storms of life shall cease, O Jesus, in that final hour, Be Thou my rod and staff and guide And draw me safely to Thy side!
Franzmann wrote in the context of two World Wars and during the turbulent 1960s in our country. The poetry and imagery of his hymns are so rich that sometimes students who hear these hymns for the first time are baffled by such lines as “Glorious now, we press toward glory, And our lives our hopes confess” (“Thy Strong Word,” LSB 578, v. 3) or “The sower sows; his heart cries out, ‘Oh, what of that, and what of that?’” (“Preach You the Word,” LSB 586, v. 4). And yet, as one wraps one’s mind around these words, the imagery his texts evoke in our imaginations and the beauty of his language take us to depths of understanding that could not be achieved without such gorgeous hymns. How could one not be moved by these words of Franzmann in “O God, O Lord of Heaven and Earth” (LSB 834, v. 3): continued on next page
THE GOOD SHEPHERD I
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Pastoral Theology and Sacred Music for the Church
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