Danish: Hvor dejlig skal Guds kirken stå
Text: Thomas Hansen Kingo (1634-1703) Tune: Martin Luther (1483-1546)
(For text and music see below)
REFLECTION
It is easy to miss Jesus’ meaning in Mark 7, the gospel lesson for next Sunday. In teaching the religious leadership of his day about their faith, he gets at their failures. It can be difficult for us to apply his fierce approbations against them to our own lives. We don’t have strict dietary laws, we say, or do we? Today people can become pretty fierce about what they eat, almost making their rules into a saving faith. On other issues that Jesus mentions, we plead innocent. We aren’t open sinners, so we vote to acquit ourselves.
So if we are not terribly transgressive, we content ourselves and ask God to forgive us and then may even wonder why. We have been pretty good, all things considered. But here is where the danger lurks. Open sin, while awful and against God, is maybe not our issue. The lie at the bottom of my self-satisfaction is that I am good enough to please God. I want to be reconciled on my own terms. And that is the fundamental problem—my own sense of worth up against the holiness of God. Gerhard Forde, my colleague at Luther Seminary, would note that God had two problems with us: our sin, and our righteousness. That I could think God would be reconciled to me without my repentance is one of the lies the devil has helped us think is possible. Think of how much God did to get close to us, even the death of his Son. Deciding our way will reconcile us is nothing less than apostasy! It comes from our wicked hearts.
Jesus talks about the human heart and its corruptions—it is not what goes into the body that corrupts it—that will end up in the privy—it is what comes out of the human heart that is corrupt.
There is a mantra among contemporary poets that says, “Write what is in your heart truthfully and poetry will come of it.” Much of this poetry is shockingly sinful, narcissistic, and ultimately boring. While the devil is wily, he is not creative—he can’t be—so our transgressions, while tawdry, are all similar in a dull, but revolting, way.
God knows us better than we know ourselves. Making us holy is best done in the congregation with friends in Christ. In the kingdom of heaven on earth, the congregation, God ministers to us and we to each other. As Kingo says in stanza 5, “the secrets of the heart he reads/The wicked cannot be concealed/Their evil ways shall be revealed/Each true believer God well knows,/And Love and grace on them bestows.”
So we pray that God will renew our hearts and fashion them, each secret part, as Kingo has it, so we will be sanctified, on .his terms, not ours. Jesus sees us as we are. He came to clean house, and as he dwells In us, he will.
HYMN INFO
Thomas Hansen Kingo, a Danish pastor and later bishop, is counted among the greatest of Danish hymn writers, and the source of much of Dano-Norwegian hymnody. He compiled the great hymnal of 1699 which was used among Danes and Norwegians until the middle of the 19th century. His hymns are still at the core of the current Danish hymnal. This hymn first appeared in Kingo's hymnal of 1699. It was a reflection on 1 Peter 3:8-15, the epistle for the fifth Sunday of Trinity in Kingo's time. It has been set to Luther’s tune for the Lord’s Prayer, Vater Unser. Because it was a teaching hymn and not a hymn of praise to God, it lost its place in American Lutheran hymnals after 1950. F. Melius Christiansen of St. Olaf College, composed an anthem on it that was among his most well known works for many years.
LINKS
Calmus Ensemble singing Vater Unser, the same tune as used for the Kingo hymn
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