Blurb 1: Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity (September 6, 2026; planned as Hymn of the Day but not sung)
Georg Weissel (1590–1635) wrote this text for his own installation in 1623 as pastor of a newly built church in the Rossgarten district of Königsberg. No printed copy survives from before his death in 1635; the hymn reached us only through a 1642 collection of Prussian festival hymns. Its opening stanza turns the occasion of a new building into a meditation on the true, eternal Church: whatever we build in this life will crumble, but Christ alone remains the sure foundation (1 Corinthians 3:11) when every other refuge fails. The hymn moves from that general instruction to intimate personal confession, and by its fourth stanza declares in the first person that neither persecution nor death can sever the singer from God’s love in Christ Jesus, echoing Paul’s great assurance in Romans 8:35–39. Fittingly, the tune, "Such, wer da will," began its life in 1613 as a wedding song for a man named Christoff Klein before Johann Stobäus’s melody was joined to Weissel’s sturdier words. As the Hymn of the Day, it presses home what the Gospel’s healed Samaritan discovered: every earthly foundation gives way, and only Christ remains.
Blurb 2: Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity (September 27, 2026; Hymn of the Day)
Georg Weissel (1590-1635), the pastor who also gave us "Lift Up Your Heads, Ye Mighty Gates," wrote this hymn in 1623 for his own installation as the first pastor of the new church in the Rossgarten district of Königsberg, now Kaliningrad in Russia. The occasion explains its opening. The LSB companion paraphrases Weissel's point: build whatever buildings you like in this life; in the end they will crumble, and the eternal Church stands on Christ alone. The second stanza presses the same claim: seek where you may, salvation is found in no one but Christ, the one foundation that remains when every other has failed (John 14:6; 1 Corinthians 3:11). No copy printed in Weissel's lifetime survives; the earliest is in the Prussian Festival Songs of 1642, compiled by the Königsberg musicians Johann Eccard and Johann Stobäus. The tune has an unexpected origin. Stobäus, cantor of the cathedral at Königsberg, first wrote it in 1613 as a five-voice wedding song for a local couple, set to the words "Wie Gott bestellt, mir wol gefällt" ("As God ordains, it pleases me well"). Arthur P. Voss translated the hymn in 1938 for The Lutheran Hymnal. LSB appoints it as the Hymn of the Day for the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity.
Sung at Our Saviour
2026