Necessary Roughness

This morning was a very sad day for reasons that will remain private. I stayed pretty stoic until I sat down for Divine Service, but the dam cracked for most of worship. Pastor Gau did give Law, Gospel, and Jesus in his sermon (unlike the “Lutheran” in the previous post), so that was good. His sermon dealt with delivering the Gospel to those God has placed in our midst.

Today was Holy Communion, and we led off the communion music with one of the best communion hymns ever written: “I Come, O Savior, to Your Table,” LW 242. The first two verses are incredible when one is suffering:

I come, O Savior, to your table,
For weak and weary is my soul;
You, Bread of Life, alone are able
To satisfy and make me whole.
Lord, may your body and your blood
Be for my soul the highest good!

Restless am I and heavy laden,
With sin my soul is sore oppressed;
Receive me graciously, and gladden
My heart that here is now your guest.
Lord, may your body and your blood
Be for my soul the highest good!

Communion hymns sadly get the shaft, because at any time people are moving to and from the rail. The three of us guys who sat in the back row took it upon ourselves to belt out every verse. My advice to you: because of all the distractions, sing them out more!

While Lutheran Worship only has six verses for this hymn, The Lutheran Hymnal has fifteen. LSB splits the hymn into two hymns of five verses each, 618 and 619. I’m glad we go back up to ten in LSB. We could have used more than six stanzas today.

“I Come, O Savior” is particularly special to me because when I was little it seemed we sang this song every time we had Holy Communion, and we would just continue with the next verse until we ran out of people! I don’t remember using all fifteen. And yes, I knew the last two lines before I could read.