Now thank we all our God

“At Calw, the pastor saw a woman gnawing the raw flesh off a dead horse on which a hungry dog and some ravens were also feeding... Acorns, goats' skins, grass, were all cooked in Alsace; cats, dogs, and rats were sold in the market at Worms....”

Cicely Veronica Wedgwood's The Thirty Years War is loaded with passages like this one. Between 1618 and 1648, political and religious hatred teamed up to create a war in which the Austrians and Swedes and just about anyone else looking for power on the continent took turns thrashing the life out of the German people and countryside. Thousands deserted farms and homes for protection in the old walled-in cities and soon enough, there was no room.

“The living shut their windows to death groans outside”, Wedgewood writes. In winter, people stepped over the dead bodies all over the streets. Finally, when the city knew it could do no more, the magistrates threw out 35,000 refugees to terror and death outside the walls. Plagues swarmed through the streets.

Sometime during the final years of that war, Martin Rinkart, a preacher in Saxony, found himself in the heart of all that horror. He held funerals for up to fifty people per day. One day, that number came to include his own wife. Shortly after that, Rinkart sat down and wrote a hymn that thousands of churches in hundreds of different countries sing. It’s a magnificent tribute to the God Rinkart loved and worshiped, even though the world around him had seemingly descended into madness.

Thanksgiving—imagine that. Thanksgiving in the middle of all that death. “Now thank we all our God,” Rinkart wrote. Despite the horror, he was still counting his blessings and offering thanks. Some stories must be told and retold again. Then again, some simply have to be sung.

Pastor Tuula, from the October issue of LIFE @ St. Philip's

Here's what he wrote:

Now Thank We All Our God

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.

  

Text: Martin Rinkhart, 1586-1649