HYMN FOR LENT 2 Thy Holy Wings

Text: Lina Sandell (1832-1903)                                Tune: Folk tune   Christ on the Mount of Olives Praying for Jerusalem Josef Untersberger 1. Thy holy wings O Savior, Spread gently over me And let me rest securely Through good and ill in thee. Oh, be my strength and portion, My rock and hiding place, And let my every moment Be lived without thy grace. 2. Oh, let me nestle near thee, Within thy downy breast Where I will find sweet comfort And peace within thy next. Oh, close thy wings around me And keep me safely there. For I am but a newborn And need thy tender care. 3. Oh, wash me in the waters Of Noah’s cleansing flood! Give me a willing spirit, A heart both clean and good. Oh, take into thy keeping, Thy children great and small. And while we sweetly slumber, Enfold us one and all. REFLECTION Jesus Weeping over Jerusalem. James Tissot When Jesus wishes he could gather up Jerusalem like a hen gathers her chicks, people think warm thoughts of a gentle mother hen. Actually, mother hens are more fierce than gentle. Anyone who has ever picked eggs from the mother hen in her nest knows to be careful. We have a henhouse in our back yard and from my days on my grandparents’ farm to now, I have marveled at how true the phrases we have in our vocabulary about hens or roosters are. Mad as a wet hen, ruler of the roost, mother hen, pecking order, cock of the walk. While we do call people chickens, meaning cowardly, a mad hen is not something I wanted to face when I entered the henhouse with my grandmother to pick eggs or even now.   So when Jesus weeps for us and talks about wanting to protect us, the mother hen is not a weak image. It is filled with the ferocity of a mother hen’s care for her chicks. Jesus and those who heard him say this were well aware of chickens and how they acted, as were most people until the move from the farms we have lived through in the past century.   The notion of being under the wings of God appealed to Lina Sandell. She, who also knew chickens well, loved the image of holy wings and used it in several of her hymns, the most famous this one, Thy Holy Wings. She picked it up from many verses in the Bible, among them Luke, and Psalm 91:5, in the Kings James Version, “He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust.”   Other places in Scripture such as Deuteronomy 32:11 use eagles, instead of chickens. An eagle is rather more fierce than a chicken, a fearsome predator, but this language is also about the mother eagle who “stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, beareth them on her wings.” It also became the image of the holy angel that Martin Luther’s morning and evening prayers invoke. Let your holy angel watch over me .... Wings again. And always in morning and evening prayers ala Luther.   Jesus is looking at a faithless and rebellious population when he weeps over the city. They don’t want to be covered and protected. On the other hand, we can read in the psalms many many cries from the psalmist for the Lord to show up and protect the people, especially the psalmist. We are really a handful—we think we can do it alone, and then, like frightened chicks, we want protection. Jesus will protect us a fiercely as any mother hen, he says. And the graceful truth is that God, whether he seems far away, distant, or silent, is always there with us—Immanuel—to guard and keep us. "O close thy wings around me and keep me safely there!"   HYMN INFO Lina Sandell Sandell wrote this in 1860. She then revised it in 1865. It became the Swedish children’s evening prayer and like Luther’s prayers invoked the wings of the angels. I was looking for a baptismal song for my first godson and found this. To translate is to betray, many say. I took Sandell's evening prayer and made it into a baptismal hymn. And added a new stanza for my nephew continuing the mother hen image. At the time there was a call for new hymns for the sacraments and, to my surprise, this became a hit. The folk tune is so lovely people want more words to sing to it.   LINKS Carola https://youtu.be/Gw2qjNIFVNA   Sissel   https://youtu.be/c94RJyGLEEI   Chris Sjögren https://youtu.be/-PJEsSK8baE