Twelve Hymns Project: Praise God from whom

Text: Psalm 148

Psalm 148 is like one of those emails you get where the sender entered all the recipients in the To: box rather than Blind Carbon Copy.  This Psalm is the text we used for our Call to Worship this morning.  It’s an invitation to what theologian Douglas Ottati refers to as “the party of existence.”  And we are invited.  Only rather than simply getting our own invite, with all the other recipients hidden, like that lovely Blind Carbon Copy feature allows, we get the full catalogue of invites, which we scan through first before getting to our part.

The sender must have had two lists going, and begins with the first: those in “the heavens” or “the heights.”  It includes things unseen and seen: angels, hosts; sun, moon, and stars; the waters above.  The second list is “you who are on earth.”  It ranges from sea monsters to winged birds, wild beasts to domesticated animals to creeping things to fruit trees and cedars.  To make sure we get the message that we’re all invited, it names kings and peoples of the earth, young men and women, old and young.  And the invitation is not limited to carbon-based life forms.  Even the mountains and hills, fire, various forms of precipitation, even the wind gets an invite.

It’s like when the person who’s working the booth at the skating rink gets on the loud speaker and announces: “the next skate will be an all skate, and all skate.”  The lights go down, everyone gets up from their seats, the disco ball kicks into gear, and before you know it everyone and everything is on the floor, swirling around the same center of gravity, gliding to the same beat.

The party of existence is an all…

12 Hymns Project: Come thou fount, and Rain down

Texts: Matthew 5:43-48

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness…”

You might recognize these as the opening lines to A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, and even though I’ve never read it, I couldn’t help be think of these words as I prepared the sermon for this morning.  Months ago when we were trying to decide how to fit 12 hymns into 10 weeks of worship services, Rain down and Come thou fount were lumped together mostly because they contained pretty overt water imagery and they both were prayers of petition to God to rain down blessings.  That seemed like enough to lump them together, so we did.  And we planned to figure the rest out later. 

Well, later is now, and the more I tried to synthesize these two sets of lyrics into one coherent message during the last few days, the more I found to contrast in them.  Yes, they both draw on images and metaphors about God’s love being like water: falling down, flowing, raining, streams and fountains, thirst quenching, life-giving, saturating water.  Yes, as Joel mentioned a few weeks ago when he talked about the importance of paying attention to the audience of a text, both of them are directed to God as prayers.  Yes, they both are prayers that, at least in part, petition God to rain down blessings and love. 

But then they start to diverge a bit. 

First, let’s look a little more closely at Come thou fount.  Now I realize we haven’t sung it yet, so let me…

Twelve Hymns Project: Amazing Grace

Texts: Exodus 34:5-9; Acts 9:1-9

Joel and Abbie Miller

Joel

Anne Lamott wrote: “I do not understand the mystery of grace — only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.”

Maybe this helps explain the popularity of “Amazing grace.”  The song has been so widely embraced, it spans all kinds of communities that otherwise have little in common, religious and secular.  We are at so many different places – in our life experience, in our ideas about the world.  Grace meets us where we’re at, and so, it seems, does this song that features grace as its protagonist.

A case in point for this breadth of appeal is that these lyrics, written by an English former slave ship captain, John Newton, have also become adopted among the African American spirituals.  Descendants of the enslaved and the enslavers need not understand all the mysteries of grace in order to know we need it.

Abbie

The hymn “Amazing Grace” as we know it, has a grace filled history as well.  It was originally written as a reading or poem that may have been chanted instead of sung.  It was not even seen as one of John Newton’s finest works in Britain.  One biographer calls Newton , in reference to this song, an “unashamedly middle brow lyricist for a low brow congregation.”  Out of the 150 words, only 21 are more than one syllable.

Despite this, the song took hold in the United States during the Second Great Awakening and the development of shape note singing. Amazing Grace was used during tent revival meetings to punctuate fervent sermons, with added repetitive verses.  It was sung to around 20 different melodies before it became widely known and published with a melody named “New Britain”.

The hymn was printed in hymnbooks…

Twelve Hymns Project: HWB 614 In the bulb there is a flower

Text: Matthew 6:25-29

Three times a year Mennonite Central Committee publishes its Washington Memo.  It’s a little six page pamphlet.  Each one focuses on a key social or political area of concern, giving historical background, policy principles for addressing the situation, ways MCC is involved, and ways for the reader to pray and act for peace.  We get it in the church office.

The spring/summer 2017 issue is about US/North Korea relations.  The cover page includes a large picture of an agricultural field with mountains in the background.  On the ground and in the air are a number of birds, cranes.  With MCC’s permission, we’ve used that image for today’s bulletin cover.

The cover page of the Washington Memo includes a caption beside this picture that says this: “View from South Korea into North Korea.  Red crowned cranes are an important symbol on both sides of the border of longevity, purity and peace.  The cranes thrive in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the countries because of the relatively undisturbed habitat.”

Seeing this, I felt myself drawn into something resembling a parable of Jesus.  Out of curiosity I did some online research on these cranes and their place in the Korean peninsula.

It turns out the Smithsonian Magazine did an article on red-crowned cranes back in April of 2011.  It’s title and opening line is this: “The DMZ’s thriving resident: The Crane.  Rare cranes have flourished in the world’s unlikeliest of sanctuary, the heavily mined demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.”

It turns out…this is a complex parable.  More on that in a bit.

Parable was a favorite form of teaching for Jesus.  Parables frequently, but not always, reference the natural world and invite the hearers to consider the wisdom on display.  Parables…

Twelve Hymns Project: Be thou my vision, HWB 545

Text: Isaiah 6:1-8

“Be thou my vision” is a prayer.  It’s an ancient prayer.  The language feels old.  When’s the last time you were having a conversation and found yourself saying “naught be all else to me save that thou art?”  I haven’t decided yet whether I know what that means.  But we sing it.  One of the wonders of setting our prayers to music is that we say things, we sing things, without having to understand everything we’re singing.  Sometimes the music and the rhythm of the words are enough to make it a prayer.

The English feels old, but the song is Irish through and through, in text and in melody.  What we have is just a translation.  The original is old enough that no one’s quite sure how old.  It may go as far back as the 6th century, words of an Irish poet, Saint Dallan.  Or maybe it was written a couple hundred years after Saint Dallan and just got attributed to him.  The oldest surviving manuscripts of this Irish prayer are from the 10th or 11th centuries.

Before Saint Dallan, around the year 401, a young man and his family were walking along a beach in the Western part of Britain.  They were interrupted by a fleet of boats, Irish warriors.  The warriors demolished the nearby village and captured the young man, taking him back to Ireland and selling him to a local warlord.  The young man’s name was Patricius.

Patricius was enslaved as a shepherd, spending his time in the wild with his master’s animals, exposed to the weather and foraging for food just like the animals he kept.  He did this for six years.  During that time he had an awakening toward the Christian faith he had grown…