The Way to Good is Almost Wild
This is a follow-up essay to his recent discussion on The Gottesdienst Crowd podcast “Tunes of Triumph” on how Lutheran hymns prepare Christians for battle in this world.
The Way to Good is Almost Wild
Fr. Karl Hess
Lutheran hymns, following Holy Scripture, prepare Christians for witness, martyrdom, and feats of bravery in the Spirit in a multitude of ways. One of those that has been most neglected in these days of spiritual impotence has been the call to war issued in Holy Scripture. “Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed.” (Hebrews 12:12-13) What is this language except the call of a father, an older brother, or an officer to stop crying and act like a man? In the feminized atmosphere of the home in which many now middle-aged Christian men grew up, and likewise in the Church, words like these sound unloving and harsh, but of course they are the words of God. One’s mother doesn’t speak this way to her young son, but this is often the way men must speak to each other, when the alternative is cowardice and hesitation that endangers everyone they are called to watch over.
During the decades when we heard little of this from Lutheran pulpits, there were still voices crying in the wilderness. Gottesdienst’s “Sabre of Boldness” award brought to the memory of at least some of the LCMS clergy roster that Scripture bids us to “quit us like men” and “take up the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.” But the call to war issued by Scripture was rare indeed in our churches, except in our hymns, where departed saints from the Church triumphant bore witness to us.
We need to be drawn up short to recognize that the battle is upon us, and we need to be given courage to do what we must do. Our ancestors experienced something similar when they prepared to charge into gunfire. They had to come to terms with the fact that it must be done, and be convinced to throw themselves into the battle rather than skulk around fearfully. But we have a more noble battle to engage in, and this is no hyperbole or masculine posturing. We have been enlisted under the banner of Christ crucified. “Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him. (2 Timothy 2:3-4).”
“All newborn soldiers of the Crucified
Bear on their brows the seal of Him who died.”
If the pastors were silent, the hymns continued to send out this call to “fire us for the fight” (LSB p. 539 st. 2). One hymn in particular has embedded itself in my conscience, and it deserves attention particularly because it is not found in any synodical hymnal after Kirchen-Gesangbuch für Evangelisch-Lutherische Gemeinden, the Synod’s hymnal from 1862 until its first English hymnal in 1917. It is Paul Gerhardt’s eighteen-stanza hymn on Christian vocation: “My God, my works, and all I do.” Matthew Carver has done a great service to the church in translating the first hymnal of the Synod under the title Walther’s Hymnal and the hymn is number 274 in that work.
Stanza 16 in particular exemplifies this call to battle:
“The way to good is almost wild,
And high with thorns and hedges piled;
And he who bears the sadness
Lord, by Thy Spirit, comes at last
To realms of bliss and gladness. ”
In the hymn Gerhardt addresses a very common, practical problem that probably every Christian has experienced: What does God want me to do? The Small Catechism gives us a helpful outline to answer this question in the Table of Duties. But the Table of Duties doesn’t answer every difficulty that arises for a Christian. Granted that we know that our duty as a father is to raise our children in the fear and admonition of the Lord and not exasperate them, how do we struggle through the decisions where it seems as though either choice may lead us into sin against our children? This is what the apostle talks about in Romans 12, when he exhorts: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (v. 2) This is basically the subject of Gerhardt’s hymn: learning to test and discern what is the will of God.
In the first five stanzas, Gerhardt reminds us that while we make plans, it is only God who gives success or failure. Even wise men set out to do good works that turn out to be built on sand. Others have self-indulgent dreams that they pursue and God shatters them. So in the next five stanzas Gerhardt asks God for divine wisdom, that he may not “build upon his willing,” set out to accomplish things according to his own will if God has not willed it. He asks that God would deliver him from choosing to do things that seem good in his sight but are not in accord with the Father’s will.
But it is in the next few stanzas that Gerhardt launches into his call to battle.
“If so a work be Thine, then bless,
My poor weak efforts with success;
But if of man, destroy it
And change my mind. What Thou dost not
Will fail ere man enjoy it. ”
This is the courage in which a Christian goes forth to work. He makes a decision, asking God to bless his efforts if the thing is according to His will. And then he leaves it in the Lord’s hands. If the work fails, he realizes the Lord was not in it, and he is content with that.
But in stanza 12, he acknowledges that many things that God does will are met with opposition by the devil, that this is inevitable.
“But if our common enemy
Begin to rage revengefully
Against what Thou intendest,
My comfort is, Thou from his wrath,
My soul with ease defendeth. ”
Gerhardt echoes the Scripture that teaches repeatedly that the devil opposes God’s work. As Lent approaches, we remember how our Lord was tempted immediately after His baptism to miscarry the work of redemption by taking up the form of God which He had laid aside. We also remember that satanic opposition to the Lord’s work came from His own closest friends and family—some who did it in weakness, without realizing what they were doing, others in malice. Christians, and pastors particularly, should not assume that when uproar occurs in the congregation at his pastoral practice or teaching, it is in every case because he is trying to do a work apart from God’s will. Sometimes he is taking flak because he is over the target.
But if the work is God’s, He will give strength to accomplish what He intends. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” says the Apostle, “for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” (Phil. 2:12-13) But Gerhardt says:
“Draw near, and let that easy be
Which seems impossible to me,
A happy issue giving
To what Thou didst Thyself begin
All through Thine own conceiving. ”
God often calls Christians to do things that appear impossible. Young pastors come into congregations where Lutheran doctrine and practice has largely been lost, and they despair of confronting it forthrightly. Indeed they are often counseled that it is wrong to confront it too directly. Christian husbands often find it nearly impossible to lead in their families; the catechesis against the order of creation in both church and home is so strong as to make it seem impossible. Christian wives likewise find it nearly impossible to bear up under what they perceive to be their husband’s poor leadership.
Yet we have forgotten all the examples in Scripture of people who boldly set out to do the impossible in their vocations because God called them to it. By faith Sarah became able to conceive; by faith Abraham offered up his only son, and received him back from the dead; by faith, cowardly Gideon became a “mighty man of valor” (Judges 6:12), and tore down the altar to Baal. Our God is “the God who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” (Rom. 4:17)
Gerhardt sings what the Psalms repeat to us over and over: the one who fears the Lord, and goes forth in faith in His word, will not be forsaken by Him.
“Whoever prays and trusts in Thee,
With valiant heart shall victor be
O’er all that else dismayed him;
In thousand pieces soon shall break
The stone of grief that weighed him. ”
Now we return to the stanza at which we began:
“The way to good is almost wild,
And high with thorns and hedges piled;
And he who bears the sadness
Lord, by Thy Spirit, comes at last
To realms of bliss and gladness.”
The way to good is wild and high with thorns and hedges like the way to Sleeping Beauty’s castle. We are often tempted to think that any way in our vocation that is full of thorns, or that we appear to be the first ones in a long time to have walked—must not be the way to good. It must be a way that’s foolish to walk, that God doesn’t want us to walk.
How wrong it is to teach young pastors and Christians that! Everyone grows up reading children’s books and watching cartoons where a hero walks a dangerous path that few have walked upon and ends up slaying the dragon. Most of us who were born in Generation X and after were tricked into believing that there are no monsters to slay, and that it is naïve to think that you will ever be called on to do something heroic. But in reality, Christ calls us to walk through hedges like this every day—when we speak the truth of God’s Word to those who boldly mock it, when we try to root out false teaching in the Church, when we confront laxity in our members, when we even strive to be faithful in family devotions, or to be fruitful and multiply. Try doing what Luther says in the 8th commandment and rebuking someone who is gossiping in church—you will find you are walking an almost wild way full of thorns and hedges.
Gerhardt says—this is a normal part of Christian life. We are called, frequently, to walk on paths that no one else is walking, filled with thorns and brambles. Then other members of the Church will say, “That’s not wise. Pick your battles,” and so on. And sometimes other church members may be right. But just as often, if not more often, the way to good has become full of hedges and thorns because people stopped walking on it. A few people started taking a different route, then others followed their example. Then the thorns grew. Then it became exceedingly difficult to walk that way. Sensible people began to say it was foolish, crazy, or prideful to try. But it may well be that it is the Lord’s will for you, as a pastor or a father or a hearer of the Word, to push through the brambles and clear a path.
Each one of us faces paths regularly, whether in the ministry, the government of the home, or work, that have become wild and piled with thorns. Rather than look at them as places God doesn’t want you to walk, dare to listen to God’s Word and act in accord with it. Everyone in town thought that Baal and Asherah had to be tolerated, but God did not and raised up Gideon to tear them down. Most of the Synod and most of the Christians in America thought the thorns and hedges piled against continuing to celebrate the Divine Service during Covid meant that God didn’t want us to walk that way, but an increasing number of us recognize that was a time where the Lord invited us to bear the sadness of walking an uncharted way in faith in Him. If we listen to God’s Word, offer our bodies as living sacrifices to Him, and try to discern what pleases the Lord (Eph. 5:10), there will be no shortage of nearly wild ways for us to walk. Let us heed Gerhardt’s call to battle and go into the thorns.