After
the day of Pentecost
and Trinity sunday
proper 5
After the Day of Pentecost and Trinity Sunday, the Church returns to Ordinary Time, which began after the Epiphany but was ‘interrupted’ by Lent and Eastertide. This year, Year A in the three-year lectionary cycle, we read Matthew’s Gospel, picking up this Sunday with Our Lord’s call to Matthew to follow him. The religious authorities criticize Jesus for socializing with Matthew and many other ‘tax collectors and sinners’, but, he says, he has come to call not the righteous (perhaps this term should be in quotation marks), but sinners: God ‘desires mercy, not sacrifice.’ This divine desire for mercy, love, and a thankful attitude rather than conventional material offerings is the theme of the Lesson from Hosea and the Psalm as well; in showing mercy we reflect God’s own mercy, which we sing, is wide ‘like the wideness of the sea’; in it there is grace, healing, and ‘welcome for the sinner’, and our own love and faith ought to engender thanksgiving for these gifts of God [Hymn 470]. The question of true righteousness is also the topic of the assigned passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans – it consists not in adherence to religious observance, but rather in faith – and here too is, obliquely, a reference to calling (that of Abraham). Our Communion anthem, a lovely duet setting by LJ White of the famous ‘prayer of St Richard of Chichester’ (a modern creation, rather like the ‘Prayer of St Francis’), responds to this call to discipleship with the plea that we might know, love, and follow Christ better.
Two important healing stories that follow the call of Matthew provide our other main theme, though here too true faith (of the woman with the hemorrhage, and of the synagogue leader whose daughter Jesus raises to life) is contrasted with false righteousness (the Pharisees, sticklers for correct observance, can only grumble at the miracles that take place before them). What better occasion to sing perhaps the best-known hymn about healing, Charles Wesley’s ‘O for a thousand tongues to sing’ [493]? Healing, of course, is not only physical; Jesus’s word and very Name, our poet writes, bring not only life and health, but also peace, joy, and even ‘music to the sinner’s ears’! Our Offertory anthem comes from another account of a raising from the dead: ‘I am the Resurrection’, Jesus tells Martha, the brother of Lazarus (John 11). The setting is by Melchior Franck, a prolific and popular composer of the beginning of the 17th century, writing with a concern for clear declamation of the vernacular (rather than Latin) text.
The themes of righteousness and resurrection are gathered in a hymn for the Lord’s Day that is new to us, ‘Come, let us with our Lord arise’ [49]. The text, also by Wesley, the greatest of all English-language hymnists, is not new at all, but is given new life by its setting to a modern tune taken from an anthem by Wilbur Held.
Finally, in this season we put away the Gloria in excelsis and sing one of the alternatives, the Trisagion. This ancient Greek text (the word means ‘thrice holy’) is found in various Eastern liturgies as well as in a few places in the Western liturgical traditions, although its use in the West at the beginning of the Eucharist is a modern development. I have adapted our musical setting from one of the standard repertory of Gregorian chant Kyries, part of a larger body of simple chant associated with the Mass from quite early times.
proper 6
Last week we introduced a hymn for the Lord’s Day, ‘Come, let us with our Lord arise’ [49], which we repeat this week in order to continue getting to know it. Its modern tune seems to be influenced by several streams of tradition: it begins not unlike a 16th-century British or Genevan Psalm-tune (suiting very well the scansion of the first line); the dance-like syncopation at the end of the fourth line (disguising the fact that the pitches in this phrase are the same as in the second line) is more like an early-17th-century German tune; the ‘soaring’ beginning of the fifth line seems to come from the 20th-century English tradition, while another rhythmic twist at the end takes us back to the Renaissance or early Baroque.
Having called Matthew to follow him, Jesus now sends the Twelve on their first mission to proclaim the good news of the Kingdom’s advent, and to cure, raise, cleanse, and exorcise – at which point he delivers the ‘Mission Sermon’, the next in a series of such discourses in this Gospel. Mission is, appropriately, the subject of our dismissal hymn, ‘Lord, you give the great commission’ [528], a modern text covering at some length various parts of the Christian calling. The lectionary shapers note that the Twelve are sent on this occasion to the house of Israel, the people established by covenant in the Lesson from Exodus that has been paired with this Gospel.
Psalm 100, also appointed, is however addressed to ‘all you lands’ (and our Communion hymn, ‘My God, thy table now is spread’ [321], likewise asks that in time, all will be gathered to the divine banquet). As this is a psalm of approach to God, we sing settings of it at the Offertory in addition to its ordinary use as the Gradual Psalm. ‘All people that on earth do dwell’ [377], which we sing at 9:00, is a paraphrase from early English Protestant tradition, set to a very familiar melody derived from a Genevan Psalm-tune. ‘Cry out with joy’, the Offertory anthem at 11:15, uses a modern translation, set to lively and playful music by Christopher Walker.
Paul, having established in his Epistle to the Romans that we are justified by faith, goes on to teach that we may therefore ‘boast’ not only in the ‘hope of sharing the glory of God’, but also even in suffering, which produces endurance, character, and that very hope. ‘They that shall endure to the end shall be saved’, the choir replies in a quotation from later in Matthew’s Gospel, set to music by Felix Mendelssohn, who was also the composer of the organ prelude.
proper 7
The discipleship to which Christ’s disciples in the first, and the twenty-first, century have been called is, we learn this week, a very hard thing: it will test us, it will sever bonds of blood; indeed we are asked to give up everything that we think constitutes our lives, to take up our cross – the instrument of our own destruction – in order to find true life in Christ. Our dismissal hymn [675] expounds this passage, admonishing and encouraging in equal measure. And this is no abstract notion; as we commemorate Juneteenth and simultaneously watch the unravelling of its legacy in our society, we are both challenged to stand and speak for justice and righteousness (as Jeremiah could not help but do in our Old Testament Lesson), and prompted to seek Christ’s presence and strength for that work. Knowing that Christ has walked this way before and is himself the Way, we indeed ‘want Jesus to walk with’ us, as we sing at the 9:00 Offertory, and we plead God’s loving empathy – God’s aching heart, as our Entrance hymn ‘God is love’ [379] puts it – as we experience sorrow and strife in this life.
Christ’s trailblazing, as it were, is the subject of the Epistle portion: because Christ’s life led to his death, and also to his life beyond death, those who have died to their old lives and have been united with Christ in baptism are promised and challenged to share in his new life. Our Sequence hymn, ‘Baptized in water’, takes up this theme of union with Christ, teaching that through baptism we are cleansed, adopted, endowed, risen, freed, and forgiven. This hymn has been underutilized due to the difficulty of the tune printed with it in the Hymnal [294], but last year we learned the fine tune subsequently written for it by Eugene W. Hancock, which appears in the Hymnal supplements Lift Every Voice and Sing and Wonder, Love, and Praise.
This Epistle passage forms part of the anthem known as ‘Christ our Passover’ (see BCP 46 / 83), which is appointed for use at Morning Prayer in Eastertide and may also be used at the beginning of the Easter Vigil Mass and at the end of the Burial rite. This text has been set to many kinds of music, including the elaborated Psalm-tone to which the men of the choir will sing it at Communion. The first sentence of ‘Christ our Passover’ is also one of several texts appointed to be sung at the Breaking of the Bread; we sing it this season to a simple Psalm-tone with a matching Alleluia refrain.
proper 8
Our Entrance hymn this Sunday is inspired not by one of our Lessons, but by the Collect of the Day, which draws upon the image found in I Peter 2 of Christ as the cornerstone of the Church and its members as stones building up a ‘spiritual house’. The traditional chant melody for this hymn for the Dedication of a Church – one of the great hymn-tunes of the plainsong repertory – is found with the first half of the hymn at 519; the music we sing, at 518, is taken from the concluding ‘Alleluia’ of the anthem ‘O God, thou art my God’ by the great English Baroque composer Henry Purcell’. Purcell is also the composer of the organ prelude, one of only a few organ works of his – and one of not many more in total – to come down to us from this interesting period in English music.
Two of our hymn-tunes this Sunday come from an earlier period in English history. ‘Southwell’, first printed in 1579, is one of the most beautiful British psalm-tunes of the late-16th/early-17th-century heyday of this type of tune; in the Hymnal version it retains its modal flavor, using the scale that could be played on the white keys starting on D (though here transposed to E). It supports ‘Lord Jesus, think on me’ [641], a paraphrase of a fifth-century text by Synesius of Cyrene, an official and later bishop in that Greek colony in what is now Libya. ‘Dundee’, sung at St David’s with several different texts, first appeared in a metrical psalter published in Edinburgh in 1615; it is both typical of, and shapelier than most, British psalm-tunes of the period. On this occasion it supports ‘O God of Bethel, by whose hand’ [709], a prayer for God’s presence and protection through our lives written by Philip Doddridge, the 18th-century author of several other hymns in our Hymnal.
‘Omni die dic Mariae’, with which our 9:00 Communion hymn, ‘For the bread which you have broken’, is paired [341], comes from a German Catholic hymnal of 1631 and may have been a folk melody. Its provenance reminds us that, despite some modern suggestions to the contrary, people of faith have always put that faith into song, and Roman Catholics in this period, at least in Germany, had several large printed collections of hymnody in both Latin and the vernacular at their disposal, containing not a little overlap with Protestant collections. (Sixteenth-century collections such as Piae Cantiones, published in Swedish-controlled Finland, and the several successive songbooks of the Bohemian Brethren also testify to the rich late-medieval heritage of religious song.)
Finally, ‘Pleading Savior’, first published in The Christian Lyre (New York, 1830), is another tune probably of earlier folk origin (as suggested by its use of the pentatonic scale – the ‘black notes’ of the keyboard). We have chosen it to support ‘As we gather at your table’, found in the Hymnal supplement Wonder, Love, and Praise. The quality of this tune was recognized by no less a figure than Ralph Vaughan Williams, the great 20th-century English composer (including of our Communion anthem, a setting of Psalm 34.8 as applied to the Eucharist): it was one of the first American tunes to appear in a British hymnal, the seminal English Hymnal of 1906, of which he was the music editor.
Login To Leave Comment