Sigismund von Birken (1626-81), who also wrote under the name Betulius, wrote this hymn for Johann Michael Dilherr's Heilige Karwochen (Nuremberg, 1653), a book of sermons for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday with a new hymn written for each sermon. Birken's was paired with the fifth sermon, "Jesus' Passion: Fellowship." Its four stanzas walk with Jesus, suffer with Jesus, die with Jesus, and live with Jesus. The English began in a Kentucky schoolroom. J. Adam Rimbach (1871-1941), pastor in Ashland, heard the hymn sung in German at the Missouri Synod's Central District convention in La Porte, Indiana, in 1900. He taught it to the children of his parish school, who loved it, but when they sang it for the congregation, many members could not follow the German. Rimbach translated it, and his friend F. W. Herzberger printed the first stanza in the Young Lutherans' Magazine in February 1903. LSB keeps Rimbach's first stanza; stanzas 2-4 come from the version prepared for Lutheran Book of Worship (1978). The tune is by Georg Gottfried Boitze, cantor and schoolteacher at the Royal Orphanage in Potsdam, dated 1788 and first printed in Berlin in 1790 for Gerhardt's "Sollt ich meinem Gott nicht singen?"
Sung at Our Saviour
2026