Hymn of the Week, A Lenten Devotional: March 6, 2023 Part 2
How Great Thou Art (O Lord My God)
Glory to God: 625
Text Stuart K. Hine 1953
Music Swedish Folk Melody: adapt, Stuart K. Hine 1949
Today’s Hymn of the Week is part 2, featuring a different devotion on the final verse.
O Lord, my God, when I in awesome wonder
consider all the works thy hands hath made,
I see the stars, I hear the mighty thunder,
thy pow'r throughout the universe displayed;
Then sings my soul, my Savior-God, to thee:
How great thou art! How great thou art!
Then sings my soul, my Savior-God, to thee:
How great thou art! How great thou art!
When through the woods and forest glades I wander,
and hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees;
when I look down from lofty mountain grandeur
and hear the brook and feel the gentle breeze;
Then sings my soul, my Savior-God, to thee:
How great thou art! How great thou art!
Then sings my soul, my Savior-God, to thee:
How great thou art! How great thou art!
And when I think that God, his Son not sparing,
sent him to die, I scarce can take it in,
that on the cross my burden gladly bearing
he bled and died to take away my sin;
Then sings my soul, my Savior-God, to thee:
How great thou art! How great thou art!
Then sings my soul, my Savior-God, to thee:
How great thou art! How great thou art!
When Christ shall come with shout of acclamation
and take me home, what joy shall fill my heart!
Then I shall bow in humble adoration
and there proclaim: "My God, how great thou art!"
Then sings my soul, my Savior-God, to thee:
How great thou art! How great thou art!
Then sings my soul, my Savior-God, to thee:
How great thou art! How great thou art!
Hymn Texts: A Lenten Devotional
The next several week’s devotions come to us from a book that takes us on a Lenten journey, using hymns of our faith. Each day of Lent is represented with a beloved hymn in the book. I will be sharing music and approximately 6 of the many devotionals available in the book.
The devotion has been reprinted with permission of the author, James C. Howell, from his book entitled: Unrevealed Until Its Season: a Lenten Journey with Hymns. Published by Upper Room Books 2021. The book can be found here: The Upper Room
How Great Thou Art
And Take me Home
“How Great Thou Art” is a dramatic movement from praising God in the wonders of creation – from the sublime grandeur of mountain peaks to the singing of birds, from thunder up in the clouds to a brook meandering through the woods, from the starry host to a gentle breeze - to the purpose and turning point of it all, the cross of Christ.
All this sets the stage for the climatic vision of the fourth stanza, which doesn’t fantasize about when we go to heaven but rather “when Christ shall come,” which is the Bible’s vision. The overwhelmed, giddy, awed exclamation of all creation will be a “shout of acclamation,” reminding us of Psalm 47, where the Israelites in the Temple literally shouted as the ark of the covenant was hoisted and carried to the altar.
Then our hearts are opened by the phrase “and take me home.’ Where is home for you? Are you at home now? The question is not “Are you at your address?” It is “Are you home?” St. Augustine famously began his life’s narrative by summarizing his story and ours: “You made us with yourself as our goal, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” We are always looking for something, someone, someplace, like that prodigal son in Jesus’ best story (see Luke 15:11-32).
Restless Sense of Yearning
We know this restless sense of yearning for home but never quite settle in. Carl Sandburg wrote that Abraham Lincoln never felt at home in any of the thirty-one rooms of the White House. Anne Tyler’s novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant tells the story of Ezra Tull inheriting Mrs. Scarlatti’s restaurant, where he’d worked. He renamed it the “Homesick Restaurant” and got rid of the menu. Customers would name a food they were homesick for, and the cook would make it.
God seems to have fashioned us with a hankering for home and also with a gnawing sensation that we’re never quite there. It might feel like nostalgia for some hazy yesteryear (that maybe wasn’t as marvelous as you recall). But what is nostalgia anyhow? The word derives from Greek roots meaning an ache for home. Can you remember such a place? You want it, you crave it, you’re driven by a quest to figure out just where and what it is.
We get surprising glimpses now and then. Dolly Parton had a hit with “My Tennessee Mountain Home” and then built a huge theme park around a replica of her childhood home. She calls this “golden thread that keeps me tied to Eternity.” Tourists flock to it by the thousands. They’re having fun, but many report being touched by some deep memory and yearning. What’s downright shocking is how popular her song is in countries like Kenya, England, and Lebanon, where Appalachian culture could not be more alien. It’s because of that home-shaped hole in the heart of every person. God is calling us “Softly and tenderly” to “Come home.”
For me, the home in my heart wasn’t a house where my nuclear family lived. We were an Air Force family that moved a lot, and my parents were at war with one another. So home for me was my grandparent’s home in a sleepy, middle-of-nowhere town called Oakboro. My memory of it is expansive, as if it were a huge mansion. But I was a bit stunned by its actual size when I went back to visit years after my grandparents had died. It was just a small bungalow of no architectural distinction. Nostalgia, or my God-given ache for home, had expanded the place to fit the space in my soul. I wanted to go back and be welcomed home as I’d been as a wee one.
I stood in the yard for a few minutes and wondered what it had been like when my dad returned there from World War II. Back in those days of no immediate communication, families could just wait and hope for good news. So many young boys were killed in action, but my dad, in his early twenties, returned and was embraced with shouts and tears. It was probably a lot like the homecoming Jesus pictured when that prodigal finally found his way down the road to home.
Doesn’t “How Great Thou Art” invite us to dream of such a day when Christ will bring us home? The plot of the gospel is that God in Christ made his home among us so that he might then bring us home to God. The promise, the hope, the assurance is that the elusive home we’ve known and yet have always sought so earnestly is waiting for us. We’ll get there, we’re headed that way even now. So let’s exhale, sigh, and even rest a little on the journey. Then what will rush into that empty place where we’ve just breathed out our frustrating seeking? “What joy shall fill my heart.”
Sources
St, Augustine, Confessions, trans. Sarah Ruden (New York: Modern Library, 2017), 3.
Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years (San Diego Harvest, 1954), 407.
