Today marks the 100th anniversary of the end of the War to End All Wars, what we now call World War I. With nearly 1 million dead from England and the rest of the United Kingdom, this date has been observed as Remembrance Day for the past century: the Church of England and other churches in the U.K. will be solemnly marking this occasion. Anyone who’s read biographies of Lewis, Tolkien and others of that generation know how much a mark the war made on the British people.
In the U.S., today is unlikely to be a big deal. The deaths were a factor of 10 smaller in absolute terms and 20x smaller in proportion of the overall population. The president (as any president would) is in Europe, not the U.S., to mark the occasion.
There isn’t really anything in the U.S. lectionary for Veteran’s (née Armistice) Day, and today’s readings don’t really lend themselves a sermon on the subject. However, I did find it was possible to gently remember the occasion through a choice of hymns.
The obvious hymn for the occasion is “Joyful, joyful, we adore thee”, which is missing from my favorite hymnal but #376 in Hymnal 1982 and #375 in Book of Common Praise 2017. This hymn was a pleasant surprise when, in our wanderings earlier this century to find a suitable Episcopal church, we found it was a quite popular recession hymn. I was struck how clever the adaptation was: the tune from the final movement of Beethoven’s 9th (“Ode to Joy”), with words that are roughly a paraphrase of Schiller’s 18th century text that was used in Beethoven’s German original.
The fit is that the melody is the EU national anthem, something hard to miss if you watch an EU gathering on TV. (Officially there are no words, but I recall seeing Europeans singing Beethoven’s words on TV). Of course, the EU is an institution created to prevent a repeat of World War II, but given that the 1918 Armistice did such a terrible job of preventing a repeat of World War I, in reality the Marshall Plan, Common Market and European Union were a do-over of what should have been done to provide peace 100 years ago.
Still, this was vaguely unsatisfying. Looking through the various topical indices, none of the first lines had an obvious fit to a more general desire for peace. But then a (sung) phrase kept rattling around in my brain: “Give to us peace in our time, O Lord.”
It turns out this is the end of verses 1-3 of the 19th century hymn, “God the Omnipotent! King, who ordainest.” The verses were fairly stable until the late 1970s, the first two in 1842 by Henry F. Chorley (a London music critic and opera librettist) and the last two in 1870 by Rev. John Ellerton, a graduate of Trinity College Cambridge and a contributor to Hymns Ancient & Modern.
The words I have sung from Hymnal 1940 (#523) since my childhood are:
God, the omnipotent! King who ordainest
Thunder thy clarion, the lightning thy sword;
Show forth thy pity on high where Thou reignest,
Give to us peace in our time, O Lord.
God the all merciful! Earth hath forsaken
Thy ways all holy, and slighted Thy Word;
Bid not thy wrath in its terrors awaken;
Give to us peace in our time, O Lord.
God the all righteous One! Man hath defied Thee;
Yet to eternity standeth thy Word,
Falsehood and wrong shall not tarry beside Thee;
Give to us peace in our time, O Lord.
God the all provident! Earth by thy chastening,
Yet shall to freedom and truth be restored;
Through the thick darkness Thy kingdom is hast’ning;
Thou wilt give peace in thy time, O Lord.
What I remember most about the hymn, however, is the march that makes it both memorable in imminently singable. The real irony, however, is that the tune was the Tsar’s national anthem — at least until the Romanov family was executed by the Bolsheviks in July 1918. So singing the tune also marks a link to an earlier era of Europe that (for better or for worse) came to a violent end in 1917-1918.
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