Great (Hymn) One Liners 13. The wine of the world

For me, one of the greatest English language hymns that I have never sung (in a congregation) is Lift up your voice and sing. 

It is a reflection on freedom in the context of slavery and oppression in America, and framed in the language of the Exodus.  Although it could apply in many situations it has never resonated outside Black America and those who are its allies.  It has been sung at the SuperBowl, and especially in the context of George Floyd's death - but certainly not at Wembley or Westminster Abbey  This is why I have never got to sing it, having only once preached in a Black American church.

It deserves far better and although much of it is movingly written, the line I have chosen is in the last verse which applies the spiritual warning for the freedom ahead - a verse sometimes left out perhaps exactly because it is so spiritual:

[Keep us forever in the path, we pray . . .] Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;

Freedom is painful to achieve, wonderful if it is gained, potentially intoxicating when it is known.  The devil loves oppression, division and hatred, but he is clever enough to do well in freedom too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift_Every_Voice_and_Sing

Great (Hymn) One Liners 8. In man for Man

A vast array of memorable lines are on offer for Good Friday.  I am going for a line that, frankly, most people singing it probably do not grasp (here I am judging others by my own weaknesses, it is true).

The double agony in man, for Man. should undergo.

The line comes from 'Praise to the holiest in the height' by the Victorian Anglican-turned-Roman Catholic John Henry Newman.  The line describes the extent of the generous love of God in Jesus who died for us.  

The whole hymn is deep and dense, but here Newman uses the simplest of words - in man for Man - to describe the humiliation of God becoming human (Agony Number One) in order to save humans by his death (Agony Number Two).

Did you see what happened there? I took a long and complex sentence - Newman took four words totaling eleven letters. 

These agonies are the agonies of this day, and our good salvation.

(To see the whole series click on the hymnline tag)

Great (Hymn) One Liners 6. To the loveless

 Recently we sang this line at Communion:

Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be

Samuel Crossman's hymn, one of the first written in the English language, is full of poignant phrases of which this is perhaps the most profound.  A threefold use of love which in summary describes the operation of the love of God on lost humanity.

Love is used in many ways in the lives of people and via the media, but never is it so wisely located as it is here.

Great (Hymn) One Liners 4. Reaching the Light

Thomas Binney goes against the grain of the first three in this series (tag hymnline below) in that he wrote very few hymns, though he was a prolific writer.  None he wrote are really sung much any more either, but one that should be - perhaps the only one - is Eternal Light.

The whole hymn is amazing poetry, but Binney excels himself and perhaps nearly all other hymnwriters when he describes the answer to the question of how (sinful) human beings can hope to reach, or even live, in God's eternal light  . . .

An offering and a sacrifice, a Holy Spirit's energies, an Advocate with God.

Rarely has anyone captured so succinctly so many of the riches of the Gospel, for which we truly owe God our song.

Great (Hymn) One Liners: 1. God's limitlessness

In this series of blogs I'm looking at some of the great lines in hymns and songs in the Christian faith.  Of course these do not carry the weight of great texts from the Bible, but many summarise vast ideas in poetic genius. The series can be selected by using the 'hymnline' tag.

John Mason is a relatively mystical figure from the troubled 17th century in England.  He was hugely admired both for his preaching and his godly spirituality and his poetry and hymnody has made its mark.

Francis Jackson, one of the greatest church musicians in 20th century England, and who lived to over a hundred years old, selected Mason's hymn 'How shall I sing that Majesty which angels do admire?' for his funeral service in York Minster last year.

There are few hymns which explore in such depth the sheer glory of God - and even in that hymn no line which so captures the infinity of God as this:

_________________________

Thou art a sea without a shore, a sun without a sphere.

_________________________

Though Francis Jackson was a phenomenal musician, he recognised in the choosing of this hymn the unlimited greatness of the God who cannot be limited to any borders, let alone the walls of York Minster. 

Our Church flags: 1. Latvia

Over the years in London we have met people from all over the world.  London (pre-Covid) has been likened to an International Airport, with people from the world crossing one another's paths in most unlikely combinations.

Like other London churches, we often celebrate this by displaying or talking about national flags.  Let me reflect on some we have thought about over the years.

One thing about flags is that you cannot tell how interesting they are by how they look.  Some sophisticated-looking flags have little story and others that look thoroughly uninteresting - like this one - are a story that needs to be told.

What we loved about this flag is that it has a Christian connotation without intending one.  The story goes - and as it is a 700 year old story it is not fact-checkable - that the flag derives from a sheet on which a warrior's body was laid when bleeding.  The white representing the body, the crimson the blood.

And we thought about it in the context of Communion.

Communion, where we might sing the words of Isaac Watts (though this verse from 'When I survey the wondrous cross' is rarely sung)

 His dying crimson, like a robe,

Spreads o'er hi body on the tree;

Then am I dead to all the globe,

And all the globe is dead to me.

How can I keep from singing?

It has been a surreal experience to return to the church building for Sunday morning worship these past two weeks.  Certainly things were feeling pandemically safe, but then again so is the local cemetery (for its residents).  We have some imaginative ideas for worship in the weeks ahead: but singing with our voices seems a distance away.

It is easy to OVERestimate the importance of singing.
The viral rise of the Contemporary Christian Music industry (CCM) has left most of us wondering how we ever found God without five of this year's new songs being sung.  Yet astonishingly we did.  You don't have to be a Quaker to object that God is at work when songs are silent.  Countless believers have spent years or lifetimes imprisoned or isolated in such ways as to render congregational singing a distant dream.  The Bible enjoins and reports praying far more often than singing (especially in the New Testament!).

But it is easy to UNDERestimate the importance of singing.
Most religions have some kind of music and song, but Christianity is full of it.  Whole service forms are based around singing, and whole church traditions defined by its forms (Anglican Evensong, Hillsongs, Gaelic Psalms).  One look at our church building gives the clue that singing is part of it . . .

. . . the organ, the choir stalls, the piano, the drums, the screen (mainly for projecting song words).
Singing, in Christianity, is an expression of the fundamental joy of a saving faith.  It is not a necessary rite; it is more than that.  Christianity is a new song.

World Cup Blogs 1. Argentina

We've reached another World Cup.  Thirty two nations are represented at it and endless columns will be written before,during and after the event in Russia.

My contribution will be a spiritual thought about each country - in alphabetical order.

Argentina is an amazing country with a very mixed relationship with England at football and with the UK regarding the Falkland Islands over which, in 1982, a war was fought.  Argentina has a very different relationship, though, with Wales.

Over 150 years ago Welsh settlers made their home in Patagonia and still today thousands of their descendants keep the welsh language and many customs alive.  Here's a Welsh Revival hymn at the Chubut Eisteddfod:

In fact, apart from a certain antipathy to the English for different but not unrelated historical reasons the Welsh and the Argentinians also have in common a history of Revival.  One of the great Argentine revivals began almost immediately after the 1982 war defeat in the Malvinas/Falklands. 

At least some of us in the UK would have chosen a Revival from God over a military victory if that choice had been put to us.

Foundling Hospital

Growing up attending Church services yields surprising snippets of information.  This is because during seemingly interminable sermons and sometimes prayers, and lacking the multiple resources of mobile phones, the hymnbook became a permissible and available distraction.  So, for example, I always know (but never need to know) that Charles Wesley lived from 1707 to 1788 because on so many pages a hymn ended;

Charles Wesley 1707-88

More mysteriously an occasional hymn hinted at more exotic origins: Scottish Psalter or Latin 4th Century. And then, in a riddle I have only solved in very recent years, Foundling Hospital Collection. 

This Mothers' Day at Church we thought about the story of London's foundlings, children who were taken in to the Foundling Hospital when a mother could or would no longer care for them.  Great chapel services at the Hospital demanded a hymnbook and this hymn, anonymously written, first appeared there.

We reflected on Psalm 27:10 - Though my father and mother forsake me, Yahweh (the Lord) will receive me.  No human being needs to be entirely abandoned, whatever the vagaries of family or city life may inflict upon them.  It was part of London's story then.  Praise God that in very many ways it remains part of London's story in the 21st century through countless agencies of Christian goodwill to the needy of this metropolis.

Aberfan

Yesterday I spoke at a Primary School Harvest Assembly.  One of the songs that was sung - by Year 3  (7/8 year olds) - was All things bright and beautiful.  Perhaps nobody else in the 400 plus people in the room realised the poignancy of singing that hymn this week.

On the morning of October 21, 1966 the primary school children sang it in assembly at the primary school in Aberfan, South Wales.  The assembly lasted from 9:00am to 9:15am.  I was many miles away in eastern England, though would have been an 8 year old in that assembly had Aberfan been my home.

Which is why I've thought about it a lot this week.  For 88 children just like me died at 9:15am straight after that assembly when the National Coal Board's reckless mountain of slag swept down the hillside and buried the school, sending into eternity a generation of my contemporaries, aged 7-9 and 28 adults.

There are many sad ironies about that particular hymn being sung which both at the time and on reflection have occurred to many observers.  Although we often blame Nature (and by extension its Creator who also makes the bright and the beautiful) for disasters, the Aberfan disaster lay squarely on the shoulders of man.  In South Wales at the time all that was dark and ugly in the landscape was man-made and all that was bright and beautiful was created by God.  But the hymn still feels wrong somehow,

Yet maybe today as the old school site has a peaceful memorial garden it is more helpful to think of the bright and beautiful as the long-term and the dark disasters as short term.  Of course they do not seem very short term to a village that lost a generation.  Yet worldwide from Cambodia to Congo to Hiroshima to St Petersburg there are places haunted by ancient awfulness which have returned to a brightness and beauty in their time.

I thought of that a couple of years ago when visiting the mountain retreat of the Third Reich in the Alps.  Beauty outlasts the Beast.  In the end nobody in heaven sings songs of mourning - not even the martyrs.

Happy St Patrick's Day!

What could be more Irish than this Old Irish poem-turned-hymn?  This hymn has grown in popularity while many previously better-known hymns have disappeared under the flood of Contemporary Christian Music.  This seems partly because of the growing popularity of Irish culture.

But I, for one, have never heard this hymn in Gaelic.  The words I think of as 'Irish' are owed to a Victorian lady born and deceased in England whose love of Irish literature led her to translate this and countless other Old Irish works.  Next time you hear this song in a worship experience it is worth sparing a thought for a lady of not specially noted spirituality doing her 19th century translations in love of the Old Irish language unwittingly being used by God to create something for worship in the 21st century. 

You never know what God's up to . . .  

Happy St David's Day!!

It's Missing 2. On the Brink

The Church has many reasons to be thankful for Matt Redman.  Matt has gone far past many contemporary worship lyricists in incorporating ancient words and biblical truths, some of which sit uncomfortably in the mindset of flashing lights, flashing teeth and flashing sales commercials which can substitute for true worship and togetherness.  I'm especially excited that the worship leader in our church loves this song because it is based on an amazing devotional poem by Robert Murray McCheyne.

McCheyne was younger than Matt Redman when he died and (I'm sure Matt wouldn't mind me remarking) made an even bigger impact in the terms of his day, especially in Dundee.  Like any devotional poem, not every verse should be sung.  In this poem - which is McCheyne's imagining of what he'd be grateful for when he reached glory - the second verse was included in only a few hymnbooks.  Unsurprisingly Matt (if he knew it existed) left it out of his consideration:

1. When this passing world is done,

When has sunk yon glaring sun,

When we stand with Christ in glory,

Looking o’er life’s finished story,

Then, Lord, shall I fully know—

Not till then—how much I owe.

2. When I hear the wicked call,

On the rocks and hills to fall,

When I see them start and shrink

On the fiery deluge brink,

Then, Lord, shall I fully know—

Not till then—how much I owe.

3.When I stand before the throne,

Dressed in beauty not my own,

When I see Thee as Thou art,

Love Thee with unsinning heart,

Then Lord, shall I fully know—

Not till then—how much I owe.

[continues]

There are three possible reasons to leave verse 2 out of hymnic consideration.  

The fact of hell.  That's enough for some, perhaps.  Yet if we only sing about spiritual positives we neuter those positives to an extent - verses 1 & 3 seem more worshipful to me in the light of this verse in between them.

The description of hell.  It is true that this is plucked straight from the church's tradition of horrors, though also from the words of the Lord Jesus . . .  Hell being eternal separation from God means that even the grimmest descriptors - far from exaggerating it - inevitably underplay what hell is really like.

The description of the saved.  This seems to me to be the best reason to leave the verse out.  Much as I admire McCheyne it is hard to see much Biblical justification (there is a little at a stretch) for a heavenly audience thankfully feasting on the spectacle of the lost on the brink of judgment.  I suppose that on the cross Jesus could have said to the repentant thief, referencing the unrepentant one, "You and I will be fine - wait 'til you see what happens to him".  But instead Jesus united the repentant thief to himself in paradise and the other was silently lost (as he shouted his insults) to the eternal salvation story.

If you have a life-saving hospital treatment you do not need to visit the mortuary to be any more knowledgeably grateful.

It's Missing 1. A Lost Peace

Missing things are often interesting.

Take jigsaw puzzles.  If it has a thousand pieces and, on using all that are available, one is missing then that is the one that gains all your attention.

To me this works in other things.  Not least hymns.  How many times, for example, have churchgoers sung the Wesley hymn And can it be and assumed (because it flows) that it is intact?  Well it isn't.

Including a little of the traditional verses four and then the final verse, here is the original verse 5:

. . . My chains fell off, my heart was free,

I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.

Still the small inward voice I hear,

That whispers all my sins forgiven;

Still the atoning blood is near,

That quenched the wrath of hostile Heaven.

I feel the life His wounds impart;

I feel the Saviour in my heart.

No condemnation now I dread;

Jesus, and all in Him, is mine . . .

For any worship leader or organist the advantages of removing this verse are obvious.  Its personal, reflective words would rudely interrupt the grand musical transition from the victorious end of verse 4 to the equally victorious beginning of the final verse.  The musician has an ally in many a theologian.  What's all this about hostile Heaven?  How could a cuddly god be hostile toward sin?  If god loves us she/he must at least love in a small way all the stuff we do - she/he could never inhabit a hostility?  Why, we'd have to put her/him on a register if she/he wasn't careful!

But then again.  What if God really hates sin?  What if having rose up and followed thee I begin to share his loathing of it.  Then I do not just need a tuba stop or drum roll of confidence - I need a whisper.  A whisper that God and I can walk together even though he hates sin and I still at times like it rather too much.

Happy St David's Day!

Disaster's Song

 November 22nd 1873.  A November night in the Atlantic gives us a great hymn from an awful family disaster couples with a deep faith.

 

 

A Greater Love, A Higher Vow

Here's the video we used in this morning's service.  It repays waiting for the remarkable transitioned coda at the end - it'll give me words to sing along with at the next royal wedding or coronation.  Jesus is what it's all about . . .

 

Paul Flowers

For a host of reasons I am reluctant to comment on the evident and alleged sins of others, especially when the media is busy at it.  In the case of Paul Flowers my policy serves me especially well as with each succeeding day I am increasingly bereft of anything to write that adequately expresses my amazement.  Less a case of not casting the first stone; more of being too gobsmacked to think of even looking for one to pick up.

 

 

In this context I was in a service this week where we sang the following words.  They are a translation from the French (well, if you look closely one key word is not translated) by John Wesley.  With his brother's prodigious hymn output it is slightly surprising that he tapped into a European mystic's hymn except that Antoinette Bourignon's words exactly describe the desires for consecrated holiness for which Methodism was born.  It's a long way back from here.  But God is gracious . . .

 

While in this region here below,
No other good will I pursue;
I'll bid this world of noise and show,
With all its glittering snares, adieu!

 

That path, with humble speed, I'll seek,
In which my Saviour's footsteps shine;
Nor will I hear, nor will I speak,
Of any other love but thine.

 

Henceforth may no profane delight
Divide this consecrated soul;
Possess it thou, who hast the right,
As Lord and Master of the whole.

 

Wealth, honour, pleasure, and what else
This short-enduring world can give,
Tempt as ye will, my soul repels,
To Christ alone resolved to live.

A Son's Tribute - Peace

The last hymn in my dad's Thanksgiving Service was amazingly opposite in origin to In heavenly Love Abiding, with which his service began.  Far from being written as calm poetry, this hymn was penned in the midst of almost unspeakable tragedy.

It stands as a beacon to all of us who pass through vales of suffering that a confident faith in Jesus is utterly transformational and offers the brightest of hope in the most overwhelming sadness.  Let us be clear - my dad knew little such deep personal sadness as Spafford's but he shared in that of others and did not enjoy the experience of a month dying in hospital in accelerating weakness.

But hey, where, indeed, O death is your sting?  All death has done when it has done all is usher a soul to his previously purchased-by-Jesus home.

 

 

 

A Son's Tribute - Last Gasp

We chose this hymn for my Dad's service.

On my Birth Certificate he described his occupation as evangelist.

It fell to me of course to describe his occupation on his Death Certificate.  Evangelist, I said to the Registrar.

She looked at his age in his mid-eighties.  "That's retired?", she suggested.

I hesitated.  He had been in hospital only once in his life really, those last weeks.  He had told the doctor that he was not afraid to die because he was a Christian and trusting in the Lord, one of the nurses who passed his Bible over to him to read each day had been given it to read for themselves.  Perhaps he was an evangelist still.

 

Then again, I thought, this is a Death Certificate.  He may have been evangelising until his final breath but there was a final breath.  There are no evangelists in the presence of Jesus.  Only retired ones.  Evangelist (retired) then.