They simply lie down and die like unthinking hulks. In the midst of strangers we are in death, to adapt the famous phrase from an old liturgy. October 24, 2016 / Andrea Lock / Sermons. About | Privacy Policy | Contact. In the bitter pangs of death! We can mention only one point (which experience confirms), namely, that next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise. Holy and mighty God, That reading turns up frequent evidence of vision, of hope, of “the gift of God [as] eternal life.”, Here is the Luther gem quoted by Oberman—the passage on my study door (recall that for Luther, in this kind of case, “the Law” represented the judgment of God; “the Gospel,” the promise of God): “If you listen to the Law, it will tell you: ‘In the midst of life we are surrounded by death,” as we have sung for ages. Our great sin and misery. Holy and mighty God, Fiction. Found in the choirbook of the monks of St. Gall. composite. The Bible tells us that death is our last enemy. But the Gospel and our faith have changed this song and now we sing: ‘In the midst of death we … At the depths of hellish fire! Sad to say, there are many churlish, hardened ruffians who do not care for their souls when they live or when they die. Mitten wir im Leben sind Who shall help us when we flee Save us, Lord, from sinking I reread thousands of pages of Luther during the past three years, while writing my own Martin Luther. From a Latin antiphon. “In the midst of life we are in death.” So supposedly whispered a medieval monk after watching in horror as a laborer fell suddenly to his death while working on a bridge across a chasm in the Alps. From the comfort of Thy faith! But still he asks that his suffering would only be for a set number of days and perhaps God would allow him to go there and rest for a bit before coming back to a renewed restored relationship with God. Vergossen ist dein teures Blut, info) " Mitten wir im Leben sind mit dem Tod umfangen" ("In the Midst of Life we are in Death") is a Lutheran hymn, with words written by Martin Luther based on the Latin antiphon "Media vita in morte sumus". Kyrieleison! [CDATA[// >. I believe he slighted Luther’s lifelong witness to the new life in Christ, which Luther often connected with baptism: the believer is “born again” daily to resurrected life. Eternal Lord God! Martin Luther, 1483–1546, portrait by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1533. Das bist du, Herr, alleine! ]]>, Which Luther? Daß wir Gnad erlangen? Here indeed we groan, and long to put on our heavenly dwelling, so that by putting it on we may not be found naked. //-->