William Whiting, an Anglican churchman, wrote the words to “Eternal Father, Strong to Save” in 1860. Instantly, the hymn became popular and the next year it appeared in the new Anglican hymnal, Hymns Ancient and Modern.
Whiting wrote the hymn as a response to Ps. 107, verses 23-32, which we prayed together just a few minutes ago in this service.
Go back to your hymnals a minute and take another look at this hymn. You’ll see that Whiting wrote each verse to a different member of the Trinity.
Verse 1 is addressed to God, the God described in our Job reading for today, our eternal Father who creates and controls the sea itself.
Verse 2 is addressed to God the Son, Jesus, who in our gospel lesson calms the chaotic water and wind on the Sea of Galilee when the disciples cry out to him in fear.
Verse 3 is addressed to the Holy Spirit, who brooded over the waters at the very beginning of creation.
Even though this hymn was written in Britain, we Americans have claimed it as our own. We know it as the Navy Hymn, and it has played a part in the history of our nation.
In 1945, the United States was still in the throes of World War II. Some of you may remember that year.
On April 12, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had led the country through the war, died suddenly.
One of my college professors, Bill White, was serving on a Navy ship at the time. He told me that in April, even though progress had been made, the war was still in full swing and no one was yet quite sure of the outcome. He remembers that it was not until July of that year that people felt that the end of the war was in sight.
So when Roosevelt died, the ship’s captain announced the news and then said,
“Oh my God, now we have Truman as president!”
But who was really in charge of this stormy time in our nation’s history?
This hymn, “Eternal Father, God to Save” provides the theological answer to that question.
The hymn reminded those who heard it at Roosevelt’s funeral that God is in control, and that we are to turn with thanksgiving to our good and merciful God for protection and endurance.
Almost all of us in this room can remember the 1960’s, another decade of change and unrest that shook the nation. I was in second grade in October of 1962, and I will never forget that year.
I grew up in Goldsboro, North Carolina, the home of Seymour Johnson Air Force Base.
And because the air base was there, the Soviets had marked Goldsboro as an almost certain target if they decided to attack the United States by launching nuclear missiles from Cuba. I can remember going to bed for several nights and lying awake until I just couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer, knowing that I might never wake up to another day if the Soviets decided to attack.
The Cuban missile crisis was a reminder of just how precarious our relationship was with the world’s other super power, the Soviet Union. The Cold War was in full swing, and fear filled our country.
At school, when my teacher, Mrs. Lewis, suddenly yelled “Drop!” we practiced crouching under our desks, covering our heads and necks with our arms. This exercise in fear was known as a bomb drill.
Our school also had a fallout shelter sign on it.
Close to a million of these signs were placed throughout the nation on buildings that the government had designated as places of safety in case of a nuclear attack. When the signs first appeared in 1961, a newspaper reporter described them as grim.
And I’d have to agree with that description, because I can remember that every time I saw one of those signs, I’d get a slight chilly reminder of that fear of death that kept me awake during the Cuban Missile crisis.
The disciples in the gospel reading are full of fear, so full of fear that they cry out to Jesus,
“Don’t you care that we are in mortal danger?” “Don’t you care that we are about to die?”
And they had a right to be scared, because the storm on the Sea of Galilee really did have the potential to kill them. Their boat was no match for the chaotic wind blowing it every which way and the waves crashing over the sides and filling it with water. They truly were in mortal danger.
They could not save themselves, and their boat was no longer a safe haven.
This is the situation we found ourselves in during the Cold War. We knew what the atomic bomb could do, because we had created it and then watched it destroy two Japanese cities in flashes of blinding light and raging fires.
We were in a fearful frenzy, full of worry that we would suffer the same fate.
So those fallout shelter signs really were grim, because they reminded us of our mortality, of what we had convinced ourselves was our desperate plight, because we knew, deep down inside, that in case of an atomic attack, chances were that the school building or even a well built family fallout shelter would not really protect us from being incinerated.
And then, on November 22, 1963, a year in which this nation was still full of fear and no closer to peace, President Kennedy was assassinated, a mere eighteen years after the death of President Roosevelt.
Who can ever forget the vivid images from his funeral? Jackie’s grief stricken face was partially hidden by the black veil of her hat, as she grasped the hands of her two small children. John-John saluted his father’s casket. White horses, one riderless, pulled the caisson bearing Kennedy’s flag draped casket through the streets to Arlington Cemetery.
And the sounds—the silence interrupted only by the beat of those horse’s hooves, and once more, the solemn strains of “Eternal Father, Strong to Save.”
Again, this evocative hymn reminded the nation of those disciples in that boat so long ago.
“O Christ, whose voice the waters heard and hushed their raging at thy word”
When the disciples cried out to Jesus, Jesus rebuked the wind and the waves. Calm descended.
And then he rebuked the disciples with two simple questions.
“Why are you afraid?” “Do you still lack faith?”
And then the disciples asked a question of their own. “Who is this then, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
This story, stretching across time, reminds us who we are—mere mortals—and whose we are—we belong to a good and merciful God who is with us in our flimsy little boats, God who is with us as we crouch under our desks, scared to death, God who is with us even in death.
And as the psalmist reminds us, when we cry to the Lord in our trouble, he delivers us from our distress.
This deliverance may not take the form of physical deliverance from our distress.
God’s deliverance comes in the way we find that we can deal faithfully with the most difficult and intractable situations in our lives.
Faith in God’s goodness gives us the gift of peace and sometimes, even joy in the worst storms of our lives.
Take another look at the fallout shelter sign—a sign that symbolized for a time our fear as a nation, and our complete inadequacy to save ourselves in the face of a nuclear disaster.
The design of this sign is one of six that were considered. Nowhere could I find any evidence that R. W. Blakeley, Chief of Administrative services division, US Army Corps of Engineers, who created the sign, ever thought of this design as anything more than a stock design, like the other five, taken from Hornug’s Handbook of Designs and Devices, first published in 1946, and still in use today.
But now look at this grim sign with the eyes of faith, knowing who we are and whose we are. Three triangles in a circle, —when we see this sign through the eyes of faith, we see God, an everlasting and encircling love, made up of three parts, our Trinity; God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, in mystic sweet communion.
Seen through the eyes of faith, this sign is no longer a sign of fear, but a reminder that our human lives depends on God, God who cares for us and travels with us through the worst times in our lives—to bring us at last safely to harbor.
“Lord, hear our prayer, and let our cry come to you.”
“Be our shelter in the storm, O Lord, and in your great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers, so that we who are wearied by the changes and chances of this life may rest by faith in your eternal changelessness; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Amen.
References
For more information about the history of fallout shelter signs, see http://conelrad.blogspot.com/2011/06/indelible-cold-war-symbol-complete.html
For a history of “Eternal Father, God to Save” see
http://biblestudycharts.com/HH_Eternal_Father_Strong.html
The Hymnal 1982 Companion, Raymond Glover, general editor