Trinity sunday
the first sunday after pentecost
The First Sunday after Pentecost, marks the Church’s best attempt to understand the very nature of the Godhead. The evocative Old Testament readings for the day celebrate the Creation (Genesis 1 this year; Proverbs 8 in Year C) and the majesty of God (Isaiah 6 in Year B); there is thus no shortage of suitable hymnody.
‘Holy holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!’ [362], the best-known of Reginald Heber’s texts and one of the most popular of all Protestant hymns, is based on Revelation 4, where the thrice-holy appears as in Isaiah 6. The similar outer stanzas (a trait found in other hymns of Heber’s such as 117/118 and 258) end with a Trinitarian acclamation, while the inner stanzas end with other triads: ‘which wert, and art, and evermore shalt be’; ‘perfect in power, in love, and purity’. Heber, a parish priest and then briefly Bishop of Kolkata before his death, helped establish hymn-singing in the Church of England with his 1826 collection, written when the congregational singing of anything but psalm-paraphrases was not officially sanctioned. The tune, called ‘Nicaea’ after the location of the Council that worked out the Trinitarian doctrine 1,700 years ago last year, was written for this text in 1860. Its opening notes, forming a major triad, may symbolize the Trinity. In addition to our congregational singing of this hymn, the choir will sing it to music by Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky originally written to set the ‘Cherubic Hymn’ sung at the Offertory in the Orthodox liturgy.
Our Communion anthem, the work of Hildegard of Bingen, likewise praises the Trinity:
Praise to the Trinity, who is Sound and Life and the Creatress of all things in themselves in life,
and who is the praise of the angelic host, and the wondrous splendor of mysteries unknown to mortals, and who is Life in all things.
Hildegard was a twelfth-century German abbess, writer, composer, philosopher, and mystic. This stunningly brilliant woman left us with one of the largest bodies of music known to be written by a single composer in the medieval period; this œuvre is all the more remarkable for setting texts also written by the composer. It is most fitting to celebrate this particular feast with one of her strikingly visionary works.
The thrice-holy appears as well in our closing hymn, which, while enumerating the fundamental things that happen (Word and Sacrament) and are commemorated (Creation, the Resurrection, the giving of the Spirit) on the Lord’s Day, repeatedly highlights the triune nature of God. Although the hymn was considerably rewritten for the Hymnal 1982 in order to eliminate some confusion between the seventh day (the Sabbath) and the first (the Lord’s Day) in the original text, the praise of Sunday in the first four lines and the mention of Sabbath in the fourth stanza remind us of the joy with which Shabbat is greeted in Jewish tradition and challenges us to yearn for and welcome the Lord’s Day in like manner.
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