“A Mighty Fortress”
Psalm 46:1
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus.
No one knows for sure just how it started. Some say it dates as far back as two thousand years before Christ.
All anyone could say for sure was that, in October of 1347, twelve ships from the Black Sea docked at the port of Messina, on the coast of Sicily. Then when people gathered to meet those ships, they were surprised to find that most of the sailors on board were already dead, and those still clinging to life were covered in boils and oozing sores. Just as soon as authorities heard about it, they ordered that fleet of “death ships” out of the harbor.
But it was too late. Over the next five years, the Bubonic Plague, also known as “the Black Death,” would kill more than twenty million people across Europe, almost one-third of the continent’s population.
But even before those “death ships” docked at Messina, many had heard rumors about a “great pestilence” that was carving a deadly path across the trade routes of the Near and Far East. The disease had already struck China, India, Persia, Syria, and Egypt. Now it had come to Europe.
Physicians did everything they could. They told their patients to use cooked onions, ten-year-old crystallized sugar, arsenic, crushed emeralds, sit in a sewer, or in a room between two large fires. Some even walked down city streets, beating themselves with leather straps and sticks.
But there was little anyone could do. As one author wrote, “In men and women alike...swelling waxed to the size of an apple, others to the size of an egg.” And along with those boils came fever, chills, aches and pains, and finally, death. And it was terrifyingly, indiscriminately contagious--people who were perfectly healthy one day, could be dead by the next morning.
While the plague ran its course over the next ten years, it struck again in the summer of 1527, in a little town called Wittenberg, Germany. It spread so quickly that Elector John of Saxony closed the university, and ordered all of his professors, including the most famous one of all, Martin Luther, to take their family and possessions and leave the city.
But Luther refused. Instead, he said it was the church’s responsibility to stay and care for the sick and dying. So his pregnant wife, Katie, and their close friend and pastor, John Bugenhagen, stayed to care for those who suffered, turning Luther’s house into a makeshift hospital.
He wrote: “I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance inflict and pollute others and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. If God should wish to take me, He will surely find me, and I have done what He has expected of me.”
It was one of the absolute worst times in all of Luther’s life.
But in the midst of that time, as he struggled to understand the Word and the will of God, he found comfort in the words of a psalm, Psalm 46, what would later become his favorite psalm of all.
This is what it says: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble at its swelling” (Psalm 46:1-3).
Now we don’t know exactly why this psalm was first written and sung. Some have guessed one of the sons of Korah wrote it about seven hundred years before Christ, when an Assyrian king named Sennacharib attacked Jerusalem.
Whatever the time or the reason, God’s people, God’s kingdom, was in danger from a force so powerful, there seemed to be no hope at all. Still, God sent His angel to save them and protect them.
So the psalmist wrote in verse 5: “God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved; God will help her when morning dawns. The nations rage, the kingdoms totter; He utters His voice, the earth melts. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress” (Psalm 46:5-7).
Those were good words to hear in Israel’s time, in Luther’s time, and especially in our time.
As one author put it: “We live in a deeply unsettled world, where once again the questions of war and peace rumble across the international headlines, casually, almost as a matter of routine, as if we have become inoculated to their actual meaning.”
“We have become inoculated,” he wrote. It’s as if tragedy and trouble hardly surprise us anymore.
Let’s talk about abortion, for example. Since the Supreme Court’s decision in January of 1973, some fifty million children have lost their lives. That’s 88,652 every month, 2,955 every day, 123 every hour. In one year alone, from October 2017 to September 2018, Planned Parenthood reports that they performed nearly 350,000 abortions, the highest number ever reported in a single year. And if you’d observe just one minute of silence for each life lost, you’d have to be silent for ninety-five years.
Let’s talk about Chicago. So far this year, murders have nearly doubled with 105 lives lost in July alone, making it the most violent month in twenty-eight years! The youngest victim was an infant shot on the Bishop Ford Expressway while riding in a car. And while more than 2,200 were shot in 2019, in 2020 the number is already over 3,400, and counting.
Let’s talk about Seattle. Back in July, in one night alone, dozens of people were arrested as hundreds set fire to buildings, shattered windows, slashed tires, smashed cars, and threw rocks, bottles, and explosive devices at police. More than fifty-nine officers were injured, (and that was in one night alone!)
And let’s come a little closer to home, just across the border, to Minneapolis, where more people have been shot this year compared to the past five. In the words of the director of the Police Officers’ Federation, Rich Walker, “Crime is out of control.” He said, “Criminals feel like they can do whatever they want to do.” And why not? The department is vulnerable, and morale is at an all-time low. The cost, so far, is well over $500 million.
And that’s nothing to say of Portland, Oregon, New York City, and Washington, D.C.
So where can we find our refuge and strength, our help in times of trouble?
There’s only one place. As the psalmist wrote: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.”
Then what? Verse 2: “Therefore, we will not fear though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble at its swelling.”
Come what may--nation against nation, kingdom against kingdom, fightings and fears within and without--no matter what, God is still our God and we will be His people.
As the psalmist wrote: “The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.”
If you didn’t already know it, Martin Luther had many gifts, one of which was writing hymns. He wrote his first hymn in memory of two young Lutheran monks who were burned at the stake for their faith in Christ. He called it, Flung to the Heedless Winds. He wrote, “One of these youths was called John, and Henry was the other; Rich in the grace of God was one, a Christian true, his brother. For God’s dear Word they shed their blood, and from the world departed, Like bold and pious sons of God; Faithful and lion-hearted, They won the crown of martyrs.”
From Heaven Above to Earth I Come and To Shepherds As They Watched by Night were both Christmas hymns, Come Holy Ghost, God and Lord was sung at Pentecost, and We All Believe in One True God on Trinity.
But of all the hymns he wrote, (there are forty-one in all), the most famous one of all is called, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. It’s been called, “the greatest hymn of the greatest man of the greatest period of German history.”
But it wasn’t an easy hymn to write. For ten years, ever since he posted his 95 Theses, both religious and political authorities stood against him. His life was in constant danger. Then in April, a dizzy spell forced him to stop preaching in the middle of a sermon.
In July, as friends gathered for dinner, he said he felt an intense buzzing in his left ear. When he went to lie down, he cried, “Water, or I’ll die!” Shivering and cold, thinking it was his very last night, he prayed a prayer, surrendering himself to God’s will. Later, he wrote to his friend Philip Melanchthon, “I spent more than a week in death and hell. My entire body was in pain, and I still tremble.”
That’s when he wrote the words of his hymn, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.
Now if you’ve been Lutheran for a long time, and most of you have, you’re pretty used to the words from the red hymnal, hymn number 262. But this past year, a woman named Esther Crookshank, a professor of church music and director of the Academy of Sacred Music, took it upon herself to translate his words one more time. And why not? German is her first language.
This is what she wrote: “A massive fortress is our God/A strong defense and weapon/He alone helps in all the needs/That have us overtaken/Our ancient, vicious foe/Aims to seek and destroy/And armed with might and lies/He wars and terrifies/And none on earth can match him./In our own pow’r we’d only fail/We would be lost forever/But fighting for us is the Man/Whom God Himself has chosen./You ask who that might be?/There is no God but He--/Christ Jesus is His name/Captain of heaven’s hosts/And He will hold the field./And though this world were full of fiends/All trying to devour us/We know we do not have to fear/Our God will still empow’r us./The ruler of this world/However much he roars/Can do our souls no harm/He is already judged/One word of God condemns him./That Word no powers of hell can touch/It stands, though demons swarm us/God with His Spirit surrounds His church/With holy gifts He arms us/Though men may take our lives/Goods, honor, children, wives/Nothing will they have won/His kingdom still will stand/It must endure forever.”
As the psalmist once wrote: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea” (Psalm 46:1-2).
We thank You, dear Father, for all the great blessings You give, especially for bringing us to faith in Christ. Grant that at all times and in every way, we may remain faithful, for Jesus’ sake. Amen