By Scott Dickison
It was around the year 1636, in the town of Eilenburg, in present day Germany, during what is now known as the Thirty Years’ War — the longest and what many believe is still the most destructive war in European history, if you can imagine that. But at the time it was just “the war,” the terrible, terrible war that people wondered would ever end.
In addition to the war, a great pestilence and famine had swept across the region, killing people by the thousands. At the start of the war, so the story goes, there were four pastors in the town of Eilenburg, but before long one ran away, and the other two died like so many others. This left only one, a Lutheran minister named Martin Rinkart, to care for the ill and the dying and to lay these dear souls to rest.
It’s said that at the height of it all, Martin Rinkart officiated 5,000 funerals in one year alone — sometimes as many as 50 a day. One of these funerals was for his own wife; there was simply no one else there to be the pastor that day. He was left to care for their young children, and it’s said that the Rinkart home was known to be a refuge for the ill and the lost.
And yet it was sometime in the middle of this unspeakable devastation and personal loss that Martin Rinkart penned one of the most well-known and powerful Thanksgiving hymns you’ll find, “Now Thank We All Our God.” But Martin Rinkart didn’t originally intend this to be a public hymn. So the story goes, he wrote the first two verses for his children to sing at home as part of their prayers before meals and each night before bedtime — which gives these words a whole new meaning:
Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things has done, in whom this world rejoices;
Who from our mothers’ arms has blessed us on our way,
With countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.
O may this bounteous God through all our life be near us,
With ever joyful hearts and blessed peace to cheer us;
And keep us in his grace, and guide us when perplexed;
And free us from all ills, in this world and the next!
This great hymn of communal thanksgiving began as a prayer written by a widowed, single father for his two motherless children to remind them (and perhaps himself) that no matter the circumstances, God was still with them, offering “countless gifts of love.” And so there was always reason to give thanks.
We think of this as a Thanksgiving hymn, but it’s a shame to only sing it one day out of the year. I propose that it’s still good for at least another week — just like leftover turkey. “Now Thank We All Our God” might also make for a good hymn to sing during this first week of Advent because Martin Rinkart knew the essential deep connection between gratitude and hope.
When we’re thankful, we can never be totally despairing. In fact, when we’re thankful we can never be even a little despairing. Gratitude has a way of covering whatever fears or doubts or emptiness we may otherwise feel. It doesn’t make them disappear, but it does cover them, like flannel sheets on cold feet. Or perhaps like a Comforter, as Jesus put it.
In fact, when we look closely, this isn’t simply a song of thanksgiving; it’s a prayer of hope, or perhaps “hope deferred,” as it says in Proverbs. The hymn begins in a spirit of thanksgiving; calling to mind all the ways God has been there in the past. But it doesn’t stay there. It then looks around and sees God even in the dark and stormy present, before finally finding strength enough to look ahead and imagine how God will be there in the future, in this world or the next.
And this is how it is with hope: hope may be rooted in the past, but it never stays there. Hope doesn’t long for some fantastical return to the past. Hope always looks forward into God’s future, trusting that despite what we see in the present, God’s promises are still intact, and God’s dream for the world will be fulfilled in ways we could never expect or anticipate.
And that’s how it was for Martin Rinkart and his children. They survived the pestilence and famine, and his family’s blessing was sung as a hymn at the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the war. And so this prayer of hope for his family became a hymn of thanksgiving for a nation.
A return to how things were? Not even close. But an Advent promise fulfilled? Perhaps. Because hope — like Advent, and like our faith — is always looking forward, never backward.