(printed on bulletin insert on February 9, 2025)
adapted from: Rev. Stefan Michael Gramenz, Evangelical Lutheran Church of Christ the King, Pawling, NY
Next Sunday, we will begin the season of Septuagesima, sometimes also called “Gesimatide” or “Pre-Lent,” a period of three Sundays that leads up to Ash Wednesday. Septuagesima is related to the Latin word for “Seventy,” and is roughly seventy days before Easter. The following Sunday is Sexagesima, about sixty days before Easter, and then follows Quinquagesima, about fifty days before Easter.
This brief season of the Church’s year looks back to the Biblical account of the Israelites’ seventy-year captivity in exile in Babylon. The beginning of the exile is recounted in 2 Kings 24:10ff, and its end in the first chapters of Ezra. The books of Daniel and Lamentations are products of this exile, but perhaps the most poignant picture of this period of captivity is found in Psalm 137:
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down,
yea, we wept when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows
in the midst thereof….
How shall we sing the LORD’s song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, Jerusalem,
let my right hand forget her cunning.”
Psalm 137:1-2, 4
In these seventy days following Septuagesima, which include the forty days of Lent, we join with these Israelites in “hanging up our harps.” As we begin to turn our faces toward Jerusalem and Holy Week, we recognize that we are, like those Israelites, not completely at home in this world beset by sin. In response, we set aside our “Alleluias” as well as the song of the angels, the Gloria in Excelsis, while we wait for the resurrection of Our Lord and the undoing of sin.
As we say farewell to Alleluia, we sing hymn 417, “Alleluia, Song of Gladness,” sometimes more accurately translated as “Alleluia, Song of Sweetness.” In its first stanza, it reminds us that Alleluia is most properly the song of heaven. In the second, we exiles from Paradise are set alongside those exiles from Israel, singing “But by Babylon’s sad waters / Mourning exiles now are we.” The third stanza recalls why we must leave behind this song for a time, and the fourth points us forward to where we are going: to Easter, to resurrection, and to the company of the saints and the eternal presence of God Himself.
The following is the psalm-prayer for Psalm 137, which will serve us well in the days following Septuagesima:
O God, Almighty Looser of our captivity, grant that we may sing Your praise with spiritual harmony, so that the lifting up of Your right hand may restore to heavenly citizenship those whom the load of sin exiles from You; through Jesus Christ, Your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
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