Soul, Adorn Yourself with Gladness — LSB 636

We sing this one twice today, in different stanzas, and no hymn fits the parable of the wedding garment better. Johann Franck, a lawyer and later mayor of Guben, wrote Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele around 1649, in the wreckage left by the Thirty Years’ War. He had watched plague, famine, and occupation pass through his town, and rather than cataloguing the ruin he turned inward and wrote about joy. The soul is told to leave the “gloomy haunts of sadness” and dress for a banquet, imagery drawn straight from the wedding feast our Gospel describes, setting human unworthiness against sheer divine invitation. Johann Crüger, cantor in Berlin, gave it the melody and printed it in his Praxis Pietatis Melica, the hymnal that set the standard for German Protestant song. Bach loved the chorale, building his 1724 cantata BWV 180 on it and setting it among the Great Eighteen as an organ prelude (BWV 654) whose ornamented, floating line is itself an act of adorning. More than a century later Mendelssohn played that prelude for Robert Schumann, who wrote afterward that Mendelssohn had told him if life ever robbed him of hope and faith, this one chorale would restore them. Catherine Winkworth brought it into English in 1858. --- *From the The Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity primer:* The hymn’s first German word, schmücke, means more than “dress.” It means to deck out, to ornament: the soul is told to put on a festal garment of gladness because the High and Holy One has invited it to His table. Johann Franck (1618–77), a lawyer and politician in Guben in Brandenburg, ranks second only to Paul Gerhardt among the German hymn writers of his century. The first line turns up in 1646 in the index of Franck’s book of a hundred paraphrases of the Lord’s Prayer, pointing to another poem in the same meter; the full text appeared two years later in Johann Crüger’s Praxis Pietatis Melica. The four stanzas we sing are a small history of English Lutheran hymnody. Catherine Winkworth translated stanzas 1 and 2; stanza 3 was made by the committee preparing The Lutheran Hymnal and first printed in a 1936 progress report in The Lutheran Witness; and stanza 4 is John Caspar Mattes’s, made in 1913 and revised in 1978. Stanza 3 confesses “Christ’s true body, for you riven, and His blood, for you once given,” gifts that none could buy. Stanza 4 marvels that the bread of life is boundless “though the souls it feeds are countless.” After a Gospel in which forgiveness is spoken before the body is healed, the hymn names the place where that word is still given.

Sung at Our Saviour