“He lives!”
These two words bring me back to time spent on a burnished mahogany pew in the beautiful Western Koshkonong Lutheran Church. This tall, narrow, churchly edifice stood like a fortress on a hill in the small, southern MN tobacco farming belt that helped me become a responsible adult. Her steeple was 100 feet high and held the loveliest church bell I’ve ever heard– its mellow, winsome voice radiating through the countryside every Sunday, announcing the start of the church service and the beginning, middle and end of the Lord’s prayer. On days when he couldn’t attend church, an area tobacco farmer would stop what he was doing when he heard the bell on Sunday and pray along with us.
I spent ten years of that chapter of my youth occupying the fourth pew from the front on the left each Sunday–because that’s where our family sat. The Thiedes sat two rows behind us. The three lovely ladies who wore make-up and had red, blonde and brunette hair, respectively, sat on the other side, one row in front of our row. And Marcus Wedoe sat in the back on a chair–even when he wasn’t ushering.
I’m not proud to say that I spent the first 10 or so years of going to church observing, not listening. When my mind wandered during the sermons, I would count things–curls in the hairstyle in front of me, number of black vertical lines in the stained glass windows, light bulbs in the ceiling fixtures, number of times my dad would look at me from the pulpit, pipes on the organ, syllables in sentences that struck me as memorable and verses in hymns. The latter was the most important count. One of the first things I did when I sat down was to look at all of the hymns to see how many verses we’d have to sing. While I was fond of hymns as a child, I was not fond of long ones. Any hymn with more than four verses made me grumble inwardly.
There was only one hymn with many verses that did not promote grumbling: “I Know that My Redeemer Lives.” The verses were only four lines long and six of the eight verses started with the same words. That was helpful. As a budding writer, I had learned that it was not proper to use a word repetitively, so I was impressed that the author of this hymn had gotten away with what I deemed a clear case of literary redundancy. It was also easy to accept the length of the hymn because special stuff often happened while singing it–descants, instruments or the seldom-used trumpet stop on the organ–the one that raised the hair on my neck.
The phrase ‘He lives’ is sung 28 times in this hymn. I had to recount them for this post but I’m quite sure I had counted them at one time on the burnished mahogany church pew. I clearly remember singing these words each Easter with my eyes fixed on the picture of the cross that hung above the altar. It featured Christ, clad only in a loin cloth, hanging forlornly in front of a gloomy sky background, his head bent heavenward and the crown of thorns creating subtle tracks of blood on his face.
I found out years later that a picture of Christ on the cross was not ‘typical’ decoration in a Lutheran church. Catholic, yes, but not Lutheran. Lutheran churches display empty crosses to highlight the fact that he had risen. Not this church. To this day, the grisly scene of God forsaking his Son is still the focal point of this reverent sanctuary, the Norwegian words ‘Det er Fuldbragt’ inscribed on the altar in gold capital letters underneath, proclaiming the most powerful three-word sentence in history–“IT IS FINISHED.”
It was a sobering picture but I was not bothered by it, especially on Easter Sunday while singing “He lives!” 28 times. While it was a brutal day in the life of my Savior–bearing the guilt of the sins of the world on his conscience, enduring physical torture and being ignored by his Father–even as a young girl I understood it was necessary. He hung there in my place. Without that act, there could be no Easter. Without that act, my sins would still be my sins and it would be me on the tree, dying to pay for them. I used to look up and down at that picture between the verses and lines of that hymn and wonder what it must have been like to visit hell as the Champion. Oh, how I wished I could have been there for that meeting.
“I Know that My Redeemer Lives” is a splashy hymn. That’s a word that comes to mind when I sing it. SO much truth and joy and comfort in every line. Simple words. Happy words. An ascending, rolling melody. An organist pulling out all the stops. And an exclamation point at the very end.
Happy humming!
Liz
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