David Faldet

Founders Day: O Sing Jubilee

by DAVID FALDET, Professor of English

I have been asked today to talk about a new creation, which the prophet Isaiah said would mean “the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.” Yet I’ve been asked to do that on Founders Day, a celebration of history. Perhaps in that challenge I can take some guidance from the peoples who lived here before Luther College was founded: tribes such as the Ioway, the Dakota, the Fox, and the Winnebago who were among the many consulted when the Smithsonian began planning the construction of the National Museum of the American Indian.

One point on which tribal leaders insisted was that only about a third of the museum be devoted to the past. They didn’t want history to eclipse the present or somehow block out the vital prospect of seven generations into the future. I honor the wisdom of those Indian elders. You cannot and should not make an idol of the past, imagine an Eden that never was. Still, even as we make ourselves and our lives anew, the past is there, guiding and defining us, and I believe it is important to stay familiar with it, perhaps even as a model for how to make things new. For example, the song with which we began: “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” It’s the African-American national anthem, filled with references to a long and difficult history, but also about facing a new day and marching on with hope. I can’t sing that song without hearing, in my own mind, a little bit of my own treasured history, the voice of my departed colleague Lawrence Williams who for 25 years rarely missed a chapel service. Lawrence was not a great singer but when we sang “Lift Every Voice” he sang it with an inspirational voice. Lawrence grew up African-American in segregated Louisville, Kentucky, attending Green Street Baptist Church. As a high school student he went to jail for protesting segregation at the dining counter of the local department store. At Luther on weekdays Lawrence taught Africana Studies, American history, and Paideia, and on Sunday ministered to a rural Baptist congregation one county south of here. As a historian, Lawrence knew in grim detail the stony road and the chastening rod. As a child, he was often barred access to his rightful place in this, his native land. Putting his and his generation’s progress in the light of that history, collective and personal, put joy in Lawrence’s heart as he sang “Lift Every Voice.” And remembering Lawrence, an important force for change at the heart of Luther’s history, deepens my new joy in that song each time I sing it. We’re celebrating Founders Day: 162 years ago Norwegian pastor Laur Larsen joined the faculty of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis to teach eight Norwegian students: one of the earliest of many steps in Luther’s early history where, though they sought to perpetuate Norwegian culture and the old Lutheran faith, the college founders had to do something new. Note that we are not gathered today in St. Louis. In 1861, a civil war was declared in April. That war ignited what Luther grad Brynjolf Hovde once called “class warfare” among Norwegians. Larsen and pastors like him thought highly of the Missouri Lutheran seminary’s pure Lutheran way of looking to the Bible for truth. The Bible did not label slavery a sin, and neither would Larsen or his fellow Norwegian pastors. Parishioners here in the North were horrified: people owning and brutalizing their brothers and sisters; that could not be right. Bible or no Bible, those immigrant farmers wanted their sons to return north, and when the pastors gave in, the college was founded not in a slave state, but in Wisconsin, and later Iowa. And though the founders originally thought to do as they had in Norway, train pastors through a state university, they now were in America, supported not officially through the state, but by the private giving of, mainly, farmers. They founded something new: an American college with a European classical curriculum. This was a strange and foreign country. The language was unfamiliar, and the customs often shocking. As one horrified economic migrant wrote home to Norway: “In America men milk the cows!” Laur Larsen, the first Norwegian teacher here, spoke Hebrew and Greek and Latin and German and his native Norwegian, but his English was weak, a language still strange to him. He therefore brought with him to the new college which began in Wisconsin a fellow teacher, not a Norwegian like himself, but a German-born pastor named Friedrich Schmidt who had grown up in America and spoke English well. And when the college was opened here on this hill, the most honored speaker at the occasion was a German

OCTOBER 13, 2021

David Faldet

theology professor from the seminary in St. Louis. The people of these two nationalities found new friendship and allies in their mutual difference from Anglo-American culture, and their mutual agreement in Lutheran faith. While the main purpose of the school was to train pastors, those farmers paying the bills insisted that college entrance be open to all, not just future seminarians but also men who planned to teach or farm or enter business or a profession. That would have been hard or unusual in Norway, but it would be the new way here: a new, profoundly leveling mission. And when the pastors attempted to set up Norwegian-speaking church schools for grades 1-8, parishioners balked and insisted instead on sending their children to the English-speaking public schools, reserving Norwegian only for a short summer session of church school. The children of the church in America would, like Friedrich Schmidt, grow comfortable in a language foreign to their parents. There were more surprises. On the very first class day when Luther was opened in its new facility here on the hill, no students showed up for class. They were staging a strike due to the disappointing design of their dormitories and the oppressive demands placed on them by the faculty. Their leader Rasmus Bjorn Anderson, perhaps the college’s most brilliant student, was expelled. But Laur Larsen, the very president who expelled him, later praised and collaborated with Anderson, for, scorned by the faithful, Anderson turned to the secular University of Wisconsin where he joined the faculty in 1867 and where he made something new: the country’s first Scandinavian Studies department. Out of division came something new that all parties could agree was good. Our service closes with a song written by one of our founders, Reverend Ulrik Vilhelm Koren, the man who saw to it that Luther College was founded and remained in Decorah. “O Sing Jubilee to the Lord . . . sing praise unto God out of Zion.” Zion is the hill in Jerusalem where the temple stood, a temple nostalgically missed and ached for during the Babylonian captivity. And jubilee? That’s the one year in seven in the Jewish calendar when Hebrew slaves and prisoners were freed, debts were forgiven, and God’s mercy celebrated. I believe that for Koren, born and educated in Norway, when he penned these words in 1874, his twenty-first year in this country, this place where we gather had become Zion, a place of hope as well as loss. Singing jubilee meant that for all the division and strife and difficulty, it felt like God’s mercy could be felt here. For all the trouble, Koren, like his farmer parishioners, could sense a light shining here, a new and hopeful one.

It is not hard for us to imagine a world like the world of our founders, a world where much is shifting, unsettled, divided, uncertain, and difficult, but also filled with possibility, and, really, exciting unknowns. I hope those hopeful Norwegians and their German-American ally, those founders, would recognize Luther College still as Zion, a place of alliance and intersection, that connects memory with hopefulness, a place where, despite differences, love of what is best in our heritages and belief in new possibilities brings us together still. Sing Jubilee!