An April Evening

The first genuinely spring day (as against day in Spring) moves toward its close.  The sun looks like it has forgotten to go down - or at least is staying up late - perhaps to make up for its relative disappearance over several weeks.

It brings to mind something that can only be associated with such an April evening:

Maybe it's down to my male council estate barbarism but this bit of Victorian-Edwardian sacred choral doggerel did nasty things to me.  This has evoked guilt over the years when elderly people have expressed their devotion to it - one wanted me to play it on the organ so they could sing it and some imagination was required to avoid this.

This April I've decided to try to understand myself on this issue.

My initial excuse to myself was the paucity of the performance of a Sunday evening Free Church choir in the 1960s when its finest days would have been its former days.  But listening to this chorally excellent rendition on YouTube convinces me that the problem lies elsewhere.

I like sheep and lambs.  I like the countryside and especially the hills.  I have given my life to the Lamb of God who sacrificed his life for me. So the themes in the song can hardly be the problem.

I have concluded that the problem with Tynan's poem, a problem reinforced by Robertson's mood music, is that it evokes pity for the crucified Christ.  And this is not at all what should happen.

Yes, lambs are pitiful, but the Lamb of God who died was not to be pitied.  Did he not quell the women of Jerusalem's tears and tell them to weep for themselves and their children?  The pity in the Passion is all ours, his is the pain, the sacrifice, the slaughter.  

And the salvation.  It is not of any note that He died between two crosses on a hill: he died between two condemned sinners who were on crosses.  In the end the song takes away the power of the cross and replaces it with pity.  Perhaps that is what I find, pitiful lamb that I am, so pitiful about it.

Happy St David's Day!

Paid?

Continuing the theme of last Sunday's African Children Choir's inspirational visit to our church, I was brought down to (English) earth by reading this national newspaper correspondent's letter about his granddaughter's involvement in her Parish Church choir.

When asked if she was now considering being baptized into the Church, my granddaughter said she was unsure (she's 11). When asked why she sings in the Choir I was enlightened to these facts:

1) she likes singing

2) it gets her away from her nagging mum and

3) she gets paid (not a lot but paid nevertheless) and tells me she is saving her money so she can go to UNI later on in life.

She likes singing but feels the rest of the service, especially the sermon, is 'boring'. I asked her how many people attend church. "Quite a few in the morning", says she,

"How many?" says I,

"Oh about 20."

"What about Evensong" says I,

"Oh not many, about 8."

 

 

Prebaptist

This evening I sat in a Methodist Church listening to sacred music for Easter. The choir sang the ancient version of the Lord's Prayer as in this video and it has nothing directly to do with Easter Week.  Yet it reminded me - perhaps it is the beautiful simplicity of the unaccompanied music and the familiar words - that Easter is a time when I feel much more Christian than Baptist. And in a Methodist church, as somewhat a fan of Evangelical Revival - Whitfield and Wesley and all that has issued into Victorian and contemporary evangelicalism and pentecostalism - I am still a Christian first and every Easter I know that afresh.

When these words were sung in Elizabethan England there were no Baptists anywhere and no Evangelical revival called by that name.  Despite my denomination's current self-examination (because it has a financial deficit) my faith is rooted not in it but in the Lord of Easter who taught us to pray saying  . . .