In today’s gospel reading we will hear of a man, blind from birth, coming to grips with the amazing grace of God. He receives from Jesus some mud along with the command to go and wash it away. The words of John Newton, a hymnwiriter and self-professed wretch , will no doubt be on the lips and minds of many, even though we are not singing it:
I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind but now I see.
“Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound”
The Eucharist music sung by the choir today will be “There is a Balm in Gilead”. It is a beloved Negro Spiritual based on Jeremiah 8:22, “Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?” It is not a question directed to any particular person to answer. It is not addressed either to God or to Israel, but rather it is a question raised by Jeremiah’s entire life. He is searching his own soul.
The slave caught the mood of this spiritual dilemma, and with it did an amazing thing. He straightened the question mark in Jeremiah’s sentence into an exclamation point: ‘There is a balm in Gilead!’ The basic insight here is one of optimism-an optimism that grows out of the pessimism of life and transcends it. It is an optimism that uses the pessimism of life as raw material out of which it creates its own strength.
George Pullen Jackson calls to our attention that both Charles Wesley and John Newton used the phrase “sin-sick soul.” The Newton words are:
How lost was my condition
Till Jesus made me whole,
There is but one Physician
Can cure a sin-sick soul.
“Christ, Whose Glory Fills the Skies” is our morning opening hymn. Charles Wesley’s first printing of it was in Hymns and Sacred Poems in 1740. It has been called one of the greatest morning hymns in our language, but it is more. It is a glorious hymn to Christ, the Sun of Righteousness, the Light of the World.
“I Want to Walk as a Child of the Light”, our sequence hymn was written by an American contemporary hymn composer, Kathleen Thomerson. A scriptural meditation and prayer, this hymn stands as a statement of its creator’s personal faith. Its composition began in the summer of 1966, when a heat wave and an airline strike simultaneously hit the city of St. Louis. At the time, the composer’s mother was visiting her there. To help her mother escape both the heat and being stranded, Mrs. Thomerson decided to drive her mother back to her home in Houston. For Kathleen, the anticipation of returning to Houston, to family and to very close friends at the Church of the Redeemer, was a source of great joy and the inspiration for this hymn. The text, rich in biblically based images of light, was introduced in the summer of 1966.
The recessional hymn will be “How Wondrous and great they Works”. This hymn was originally included in the Hymnal of 1826 and by appearing in every edition since that time and was suggested for pairing with the gospel reading of today.
Psalm 23 will be chanted by the choir during the Lesson readings. You will hear the chant from the Complete St Paul’s Cathedral Psalter as printed for The Choir of St Paul’s Cathedral in England. The words will be slightly different than the words of the King James Version or the handout you have today which is the BCP 1979. The 1549 Prayer Book adopted Miles Coverdale’s incomparable translation of 1531, and it is this version which was maintained in the 1662 and 1928 Prayer Books. The beauty and resonance of the language has established itself firmly in the hearts of those within the Anglican Communion; he understood and retained the principle in his English prose of one of the chief structural features of Hebrew poetry.
Modern versions are of great value in discovering the meaning of the Hebrew Psalms, where the old may be obscure, but they cannot compare with the euphony and poetic beauty of Coverdale.
The Psalms have always been sung. When Jesus read the prophecy of Isaiah in the Synagogue (Luke 4) he probably used a ‘cantillation’ which a modern Jewish cantor would still recognize today. Contemporary Jewish free-rhythm chants are clearly related to the ‘modes’ found in Byzantine and Western plainchant. All derive from a common stock. Anglican chant, itself originally a harmonized variant of Western plainsong, can thus be seen to be intimately related to the wider tradition of the singing of the Psalms by Jew and Christian.
Our guest organist today will be Glenn Pool. Our organist, Pat ONeil is visiting her father in California, who fell and broke his hip this past week. The singers joining me in the choir are Sharon Helppie, Mary McGuire, Darrell Ludders, Bruce Moberly.
May we look forward to dwelling in the house of the Lord forever,
Lana
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