"'Oh, May Thy Love Possess Me Whole': A Heart Warmed with Love" (Paul Gerhardt sermon series)

"'Oh, May Thy Love Possess Me Whole': A Heart Warmed with Love"
(Sermon series on "The Hymns of Paul Gerhardt")

During these midweek Lenten services we are using the hymns of Paul Gerhardt as our window to gain insight into the life of Christian devotion. Gerhardt’s hymns are rich resources for doing that. Generations of Christians have treasured these hymns and made them their own.

But what is it about Gerhardt’s hymns that makes them so beloved? I think it is this: They speak to the heart of the Christian believer by expressing what is in the believer’s heart. We can identify with these hymns. They express the thoughts and feelings that each of us experiences in our daily life and in our life’s journey.

I think we can get at what is distinctive in Gerhardt’s hymns, and thereby grow in our devotional life, as we consider our theme for tonight: “‘Oh, May Thy Love Possess Me Whole’: A Heart Warmed with Love.” This theme captures and has within it three distinctive elements of Gerhardt’s hymnody: the individual; the subjective; and the mutual nature of love. Don’t worry, I’ll explain each of these points.

First, the individual. By that I mean that Gerhardt’s hymns emphasize the individual believer more than the whole church. These hymns are filled with the pronouns “I,” “me,” and “my,” rather than “we,” “us,” and “our.” Consider: “Rejoice, My Heart, Be Glad and Sing,” “Jesus Thy Boundless Love to Me.” Now contrast that to a couple of Luther’s hymns: “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”: “O Lord, We Praise Thee.” So who’s right, Luther or Gerhardt? Really, they both are. One commentator puts it this way:

In Luther the congregation calls on God; in Gerhardt the individual speaks. . . . In most of his hymns Luther says “We,” in few of them “I”; in most of his hymns Gerhardt says “I,” in few of them “We.” Yet when Gerhardt says “I,” he says what almost every Christian can say after him. Luther is the leading voice of the whole congregational chorus; Gerhardt is the solo singer of a spiritual song voicing the feelings of the whole congregation. . . . Gerhardt is the fitting complement to Luther . . . and we heartily thank God for graciously giving us two such singers.

And so here’s the first point: A well-balanced Christian life can sing both the “I” and the “we.” We live in both dimensions. Each one of us can speak our faith on the personal, individual level--as indeed Luther does in his explanations of the Creed: “I believe that God has made me. . . .” “I believe that Jesus Christ is my Lord, who has redeemed me. . . .” “I believe that the Holy Spirit has called me. . . .” At the same time, God has made me part of the body of Christ, “the whole Christian church on earth,” and so there is more to the Christian life than just “me and Jesus.” There are times when it is appropriate to accent the individual dimension, and there are times to accent the corporate, churchly dimension. Gerhardt is especially good at helping us sing the “I.” But even when we are saying “I” and “me,” we can still sing those hymns together, because we discover that each one of us shares in a similar experience of the Christian life.

The individual believer, that’s the first accent then in Gerhardt’s hymns. The second is the subjective. By that I mean the subjective in contrast to the objective. Let me unfold that a little. The objective basis for the Christian faith are those great deeds of God which he did outside of us: God created the heavens and the earth. Christ died for the sins of the world on the cross. The Holy Spirit works through the Word and the Sacrament. All of those things God does outside of us. We didn’t have anything to do with them. And that’s good. If our salvation depended in even the slightest measure on us, and on what we do, we’d be sunk. God does it all. To be sure, he does all this for us, and for our salvation, but he does it all on his own, apart from our works, and not dependent in any way on our feelings. Whether we feel like God loves us or not does not change the great fact that God does indeed love us and has demonstrated that love in sending Christ to die and rise again on our behalf. It is entirely objective, not subjective. It does not depend on our feelings.

At the same time, though, there is a subjective dimension to our experience of the Christian life. We have feelings. We have emotions. We experience the ups and downs of a Christian living in this fallen world, a life of sufferings and joys, of heartaches and cheerfulness, of gloom and sunshine. And here is where Gerhardt’s hymns can help us express our feelings. We can relate to the experiences he gives voice to. Our heart can identify.

Again, we need to keep a balance between the objective and the subjective, between the deeds of God outside of us and the emotions of our heart within us. Each in their proper place. Both the objective and the subjective belong to the life of Christian devotion. We sing the great facts of salvation history. And we sing the moods of our own experience as Christians.

We sing hymns that are bold, dramatic, and forceful--that’s Luther. And we sing hymns that are peaceful, serene, and reflective--that’s Gerhardt. Here again the contrast between the two brings out what is distinctive and helpful in each:

Luther’s hymns gushed out of his heart like a mountain torrent rushing over rocks and through ravines; Gerhardt’s hymns, too, rise in the highlands, but they flow through peaceful meadows with the sheen of the sun or harvest moon upon them. . . . Luther’s stream rushes through the narrow banks of the church year of the wonderful works of God for our salvation. Gerhardt’s broad brook meanders through the wide field of the whole human life. . . . If in Luther the world is full of thunder storms, in Gerhardt it lies in steady sunshine; the Creator’s blessings cheer the heart; all things are arranged so beautifully for the benefit of mankind. . . .

So the first point was that Gerhardt’s hymns accent the individual believer. The second point is that they emphasize the subjective experience of the Christian life. Now the third point is one that really strikes the right balance of the subjective and the objective in a single thought, and that is, the mutual nature of love. What do I mean by that? I mean that Gerhardt’s hymns are full of the individual’s expressions of love for God. But that love for God is prompted by and called forth by God’s many expressions of love for us. To put it in a nutshell, in the words of 1 John, “We love because he first loved us.”

Gerhardt wants to sing out his love for God. His heart is full of love for God, and yet he prays that God will unite and purify his heart so that he can love with an even more intense devotion: “All coldness from my heart remove; my ev’ry act, word, thought be love.” Gerhardt rejoices in God, and yet, like the psalmist, he tells his soul to get with it and praise the Lord even more: “Rejoice, my heart, be glad and sing, a cheerful trust maintain.”

But Gerhardt’s cheerful optimism is far more than simply, “Gray skies are gonna clear up, put on a happy face.” No, that kind of surface happiness is much too shallow. What Gerhardt writes about and expresses is something far deeper than that. It is love borne out of seeing traces of God’s great love in every aspect of daily life and human experience. It is joy borne out of faith in the triune God, the God of our Creation, Redemption, and Sanctification. Someone has written:

Gerhardt is an ideal Lutheran poet. There is a beautiful blend of nature and grace, of creation and redemption, of earth and heaven, of time and eternity, of the bodily and the spiritual. Nothing human is foreign to him; he sings in the morning and in the evening, he sings of the weather and of travels, he sings of his home and his country, of sickness and of health, of sorrow and of joy, of holy living and of holy dying.

It is a full-bodied First-Article, Second-Article, and Third-Article faith that Gerhardt gives voice to. We see God’s love in the First Article, Creation: These hymns delight in God’s gifts in nature, “woodland, field, and meadow,” starlight and beauty and sweet slumber. But even while Gerhardt can rejoice in “the radiant sun” with its “golden rays,” he does not stop there. Greater still is “Christ, the Sun of gladness, dispelling all our sadness.” The First-Article gifts remind us of the even greater Second-Article gifts, Christ and the salvation he won for us. “Jesus, Thy boundless love to me” is what will “unite my thankful heart to Thee”! “Oh, may Thy love possess me whole.” Gerhardt here is overcome with the same thought that we heard from St. Paul earlier, about being “rooted and grounded in love,” to comprehend “what is the breadth and length and height and depth,” to know “the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.”

How exactly Christ showed his love toward us, we will see more fully in other hymns, like “A Lamb Goes Uncomplaining Forth” and “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded.” But it is that blood-bought salvation that Christ won for us on the cross that enlightens all of these hymns. We know a loving God ultimately and only in the cross of Christ, whereby our Savior won for each of us forgiveness for our many sins, eternal life, and a secure salvation. All of our singing, all of our rejoicing, all of our delighting in nature comes about because of this Savior who died and rose again for us--for you!

Now with that knowledge, with that faith, we can see all of life in a new light. Joy, hope, and cheerfulness fall on our path like beams of sunshine from God’s face. Now we know and experience “A Heart Warmed with Love,” and we continue to pray to our Lord, “Oh, May Thy Love Possess Me Whole.”

“Jesus, Thy boundless love to me”. . . . How exactly Christ showed his love toward us, we will see more fully in other hymns. . . . But it is that blood-bought salvation that Christ won for us on the cross that enlightens all of these hymns.

I since have found out that even in that hymn, "Jesus, Thy Boundless Love to Me," Gerhardt has more explicit gospel content than appears in most English-language versions today. Gerhardt's hymn originally had 16 stanzas. Most hymnals now have only 4 or 7 of those stanzas. But I did find at least two stanzas, in English translation, that specifically refer to the blood and wounds of Christ:

My Saviour, thou thy love to me
In shame, in want, in pain, hast showed;
For me, on the accursed tree,
Thou pouredst forth thy guiltless blood;
Thy wounds upon my heart impress,
Nor aught shall the loved stamp efface.

More hard than marble is my heart,
And foul with sins of deepest stain;
But thou the mighty Saviour art,
Nor flowed thy cleansing blood in vain;
Ah soften, melt this rock, and may
Thy blood wash all these stains away!

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.