It started as an ordinary Midweek Lenten Service. Befitting such a somber season the opening hymn was Alas! and did My Savior Bleed. Then we sang “for sinners such as I”. What? Did my ears deceive me? Where did the worm go? We we’re singing from a CPH’s Lutheran Service Builder Program, but good ole TLH was still in the pew. I found the worm still in the first verse. “Alas, and did my Savior bleed/ And did my Sovereign die?/ Would He devote that sacred head/ For such a worm as I?”
Thankfully my Confessional Lutheran pastor pointed out the faux paus. The worm had slipped out of CPH’s Service Builder and “sinners such as I” had slipped in. He promised that the worm would be there next time which was fitting because we worms would be too.
The 1942 Handbook to the Lutheran Hymnal, a must have for anyone seriously interested in defending TLH which is usually attacked for its datedness, says that already with the ’41 TLH, this phrasing was debated. It was already amended in some hymnals as “For sinners such as I” and at least one had “For such an one as I.” This last one is postmodern before postmodern was cool. It confesses nothing about the person singing.
“For sinners such as I! [NB not a question but an exclamation,] has the 1950 Armed Forces Hymnal. Ditto the 1974 Book of Worship for United States Forces. The question mark returns sans ‘worm’ returned in the 1958 Service Book and Hymnal and in the 1982 Lutheran Worship’s “For sinners such as I?”. The Wisconsin Synod’s 1993 Christian Worship is the same. The hero of our tale is the 2006 Lutheran Church Missouri Synod’s Lutheran Service Book. To paraphrase Elton John “the worm is back.” There had to be at least one pastoral theologian on that COW., Commission on Worship.
Some would class the substitution “sinners” for “worm” with those Christmas hymns that remove the “ass” from the manger. I don’t like that either, but that seems like a condensation to politeness not a removal of “offensive” theology.
Replacing “worm” with “sinners” is watering-down along the lines of 1941 TLH replacing the 1927’s “O sorrow dread/ Our God is dead!” with “O sorrow dread! God’s Son is dead!”. This is a serious compromise along the lines of LW and LSB continuing to rename the remembrance of Mary on August 15 as “Mother of our Lord” instead of the original “Mother of God”. Replacing the terminology our Lutheran Confessions use with a concept that will not bother Protestants.
This is what the 1942 Handbook said about the worm debate. “The editorial committee for The Lutheran Hymnal felt justified in retaining the line as Watts had written it originally, as unobjectionable in the context, while generally sharing the negative attitude toward the so-called ‘vermicular hymns’ or ‘worm hymns.’ It is true that the Bible calls a man a worm in order to show his utter abasement before God, as in Job 25:6, ‘Man, that is a worm,’ and in Ps. 22:6, the expression is placed into the mouth of the suffering Redeemer: ‘But I am a worm and no man.’ Nevertheless, the fact that a matter may be true does not always justify its use in poetry, and ‘worm hymns’ such as the following have rightly been objected to:
‘Oh, may Thy powerful Word/ Inspire this feeble worm/ To rush into Thy kingdom, Lord/ And take it as by storm.’
‘Worms strike you harps, your voices tune,/ And warble forth your lays;/ Leap from the earth with pious mirth/ To trumpet forth your praise’” (121).
I could sing either of those hymns though the second seems treacly. Its seems timestamped as the mid to late 1800’s when church became women’s domain.
But Could you sing this? This is the original second stanza of “Alas and Did My Savior Bleed” which the original publication of the hymn in 1707 said could be left out if desired.
“’Thy body slain, sweet Jesus, Thine,/ And bathed in its own blood,/ While all exposed to wrath divine,/ The glorious Sufferer stood (Ibid.)!’”
Two things in closing; as I’ve said before and C.S. Lewis long before I. When we change the language of our Fathers it’s not because we don’t understand the words but their theology. From Baby Boomers on down “self-esteem” is to be cherished, promoted, and striven for. No worms allowed here.
The second thing is just another angle of the first. When people leave out the thee’s and thou’s the liveth and reigneth of TLH under the rubric that we don’t talk that way anymore, did anyone else aside from Quakers, Amish, and Mennonites in 1941? This vermiculus thinketh not, still The Lutheran Hymnal did. Hmm?
