Hymns of the Church: "Christ Is Arisen" ELW 372/LSB 459

Abstract

On Easter morning this year - it must have been around 6:30 - I checked my email before heading to church for choir rehearsal and services. On previous Easter mornings, I've had emails from choir members telling me they'd be half an hour late for rehearsal that morning; but this year, it was a colleague - and faithful reader of these articles - who was the first to wish me a Happy Easter. Oh, and besides, if I didn't mind him asking: Would I please consider writing something about the accompaniment in our 'Evangelical Lutheran Worship' (ELW) of "Christ Is Arisen" (#372). Without wanting to cite the colleague verbally, his Easter-morning opinion of the setting was less than enthusiastic. One can't help but loving such Easter-morning emails - in fact, this one really made my Easter this year. Of course, I right away accepted ELW 372 as my next topic for the series and starting thinking about it that same morning in the car to church. Although we didn't sing the hymn that morning, I made a point of looking it up in the Accompaniment Book between services (the things one does to relax on Easter Sunday!) - and I had to agree with the writer of the Easter-morning email that the accompaniment for "Christ Is Arisen" is not among the most appealing pages of the hymnal. The hymn deserves better. It originated perhaps as a kind of congregational response in the vernacular to the Latin Easter sequence "Victimae paschali laudes," itself dating from the eleventh century. Lutheran Service Book (LSB) preserves this idea at #460, where the sequence, presumably sung by the choir, is interspersed with the three stanzas of the chorale "Christ Is Arisen." It was a favorite of Martin Luther, who said, "Aller Lieder singt man sich mit der Zeit müde, aber das Christ ist erstanden muss man alle Jahre wieder singen." (With time one grows tired of singing all songs, but Christ Is Arisen must be sung every year.)