Rejoice, My Heart, Be Glad and Sing

Rejoice, My Heart, Be Glad and Sing

Rejoice, my heart, be glad and sing,

A cheerful trust maintain;

For God, the source of everything

Your portion shall remain.(1)

He is  your treasure, he your joy,

Your life and light and Lord,

Your counselor when doubts annoy

Your shield and great reward.(2)

Why spend the day in blank despair

In restless thought the night?

On your creator cast your care;

He makes your burdens light. (3)

Upon your lips, then, lay your hand,

And trust his guiding love;

Then like a rock your peace shall stand

Here and in heaven above. (7)

When I was a child, living in a Chicago suburb with my mother’s family in Milwaukee, Fosslands was the half-way-mark between our home and my grandparents‘ home. It was a restaurant at the state-line, where we got to have pancakes and my father played the slot machine in the hope of getting money for breakfast. In those days, anything that signaled that the end was in sight was welcome. We children rejoiced as much in the pancakes as in the fact that Milwaukee was 50 miles closer.

Laetare played such a role in our church lives as well. For most Christians in churches which followed a liturgical calendar, Laetare was the half-way mark, the Sunday on which the Introit sounded „Rejoice, Jerusalem…“ – and we all rejoiced because we knew that the tedium of Lent with its extra worship services, its absence of „Alleluias“ and other things joyful, would soon be over. Easter was on the way.

That may be a child’s view of the matter, but Paul Gerhardt, the 400^th anniversary of whose birth we are remembering this year, wrote so many hymns of joy to interrupt the sadness of the times in which he lived that one of them is surely easy to find for this year’s Laetere, even if we don’t use the Latin word any longer for the fourth Sunday in Lent. There is good reason to take a break, to look up, even as we remember the suffering and death of Jesus, because God remains „your treasure, he your joy, your life and light and Lord, Your counselor when doubts annoy, Your shield and great reward.“

Yesterday I as sitting in the barber shop and a woman was having her haircut before me. As soon as she sat in the chair, she began a monologue, a jeremiad, as it were, a long list of complaints in her life. „Who asked her to speak,“ I asked myself with the same fervor I raise when people next to me in a waiting room begin to speak loudly on their cell phones. „All the people on my mother’s side,“ she announced, „died of cancer. One after the other. And they lived all over the country, so we had to go to the funerals. And now there’s another in Cincinnati.“

I wondered what she would have done, or any of those bemoaning their lives over cell-phones, or any any dismal Dora or Don at all, for that matter, if I would have stood up and commenced singing, „Why spend the day in blank despair, In restless thought the night, On your creator cast your care, He makes your burdens light?“ For that matter, one can only wonder what Pastor Gerhardt’s congregation thought when in the midst of war, plagues, death, and destruction during the Thirty Year’s War, he was regularly asking them to sing happy songs-or as Steve Martin might have said it, to put on happy feet.

There is something very Christian about this joy in sadness motif. In writing to the Philippians, Paul, probably in some kind of prison setting, which didn’t promote happy feet, repeatedly writes „Rejoice in the Lord, always, and again I say ‘Rejoice.'“ He was surely a Gerhardt mentor as he is for all of us. There are seasons for sorrow and lament, as the author of Ecclesiastes reminds us, but there is also a time for singing and laughing.

At a funeral, for example, as we are gripped with the pain of loss, we sometimes shock ourselves as we break into laughter or joyful song in remembering good things about the departed or celebrating the resurrection joy into which Jesus summons us. It’s good to have a break at time.

Laetare is an important break in the Lenten season, and Gerhardt’s hymn which we now sing is the trumpet blast which gives clarity to the moment. Of course, Jesus suffered and died, at our hands– at our most grievous hands. Of course, evil is a part of our story,–a part that troubles us even as we nail its full dimensions to Calvary’s tree. Yet this tree is a cross of beauty because even though Jesus dies there at our hands, God accepts this death to sin as the price that frees us from its power. Here at Laetare we stop to remember that it is for us and for our salvation, for us and for our eternal future, that this darkness plays itself out before a resurrection dawn. „Rejoice, Jerusalem…“ and all of you here today, in the face of any and all loss, „for God, the source of everything, your portion shall remain.“

Sometimes, life is like Lent, shadows, grim cries of pain, grumbling over the unfairness and injustice of it all. „Why me, Lord, why me, indeed?“ we mumble in the barber shops of the world. But then the roseate glow of Laetare sounds through it all, Gerhardt leading our voices: „Upon your lips, then lay your hand, And trust his guiding love, Then like a Rock your peace shall stand, Here and in heaven above.“