This hymn was written for this very Sunday. Anna Hoppe, born in Milwaukee in 1889, left school after the eighth grade and worked as a stenographer, writing patriotic verse as a girl and turning to sacred poetry by her mid-twenties. Encouraged by Dr. Adolf Hult of Augustana Seminary and published in the Northwestern Lutheran, she gathered her work into Songs for the Church Year in 1928, hymns composed deliberately to follow the lectionary. This text takes up Luke 19:41–44, the weeping of Christ over Jerusalem, and its later stanzas turn from that scene to a personal plea for grace and peace; by long custom it is sung on the Tenth Sunday after Trinity. The melody is far older than the words: Louis Bourgeois set it in 1551 for Psalm 42 in the Genevan Psalter, the tune Lutherans know as Freu dich sehr, later harmonized by Claude Goudimel and by Johann Crüger.