Jesus cooks breakfast for his disciples image- merrycatholic.blogspot.com artist unknown
Today’s hymn
from Sing Praise is ‘We shall see him in the morning’ by Randle Manwaring. John
chose to use an old Welsh hymn tune rather than the one written for these
words.
I had
originally chosen this for Armistice day, as a cursory reading of the words
seemed to suggest it may have been written with that In mind (especially the reference
to those who have ‘toiled and struggled till the earthly fight was won’) but
John suggested swapping it for one that’s more explicit about that. The ‘earthly fight’ may in any case be
intended as metaphysical, i.e. the struggle against evil, rather than referring
to wars between nations.
Either way,
whether soldiers of an earthly king or of the heavenly one are intended, the
message is that it’s worth a struggle to live a holy life now, for the reward
we will get in the next life. That reward
is pictured as the welcoming arms of Jesus and his commendation for our efforts
(“his welcoming ‘Well done!’”).
The ‘breakfast
celebration’ (referring to the meal he cooked for his disciples when he met
them on the shores of Galilee after his Resurrection) as well as the ‘mists of
life’ suggests that the ‘toil all night’ may also hark back to their fruitless
fishing expedition, in which case the promised welcome is not only for soldiers
and spiritual heroes, but for all who have lived an honest and hard-working
life.
Today’s hymn
from Sing Praise is ‘Eternal God, supreme in tenderness’ by Alan Gaunt. The words are said to be ‘after Julian of
Norwich’ and the last line of each verse repeats perhaps her most famous saying,
‘all things shall be well’ (or in the last verse, ‘all things made well’).
Otherwise,
the structure of the hymn is Trinitarian, with one verse each addressed to the
Creator, Son, Spirit and Trinity. The
mercy of the Father, the comfort of the Son, the joy of the Spirit and the
eternity of the Trinity, are what will make all things well. Interestingly, it
is the Son who is also addressed as ‘a mother comforting’. Jesus did use some mothering imagery such as
when he said he wanted to gather the people of Jerusalem ‘under his wing’ (as a
mother bird).
Today’s hymn
from Sing Praise is ‘Lord, is faith is disenchanted’ by Alan Gaunt. Although it’s
in the section of the book headed ‘funerals and the departed’ its theme is
wider than that, and covers other situations of grief and loss, and that, to
use the repeated motif of the last lines of each verse, Christ’s love is deeper
than all the things that trouble us and threaten our faith.
In the first
verse, ‘if pain persists too long… your love is deeper than all time’s wrong’ the
last line repeated at the end of the hymn where it refers to the
Resurrection. In the other verses,
Christ’s love is said to be deeper than our unbelief where we find ourselves overwhelmed
by sin and grief, deeper than the prayers of those who protest injustice and
oppression, deeper than the deepest cry of grief when children are dying.
This deep
love of Christ reminds us that the God we believe in is not a remote creator
but one so full of compassion that he came in human form, suffering pain,
rejection and grief himself, before willingly dying in order that the Holy Spirit
might be with us for ever to channel his love. Lord, re-enchant our faith in you.
Christ worshiped by all the saints stained glass window in the church of All Saints, Clapham Park, London
Today’s hymn
from Sing Praise is ‘Here from all nations’ by Christopher Idle. It’s continuing
a series of hymns for the All Saints season.
Unlike some
of the others we’ve sung this week, this one takes the traditional view of ‘saints’
as meaning those disciples of Christ who have suffered persecution or martyrdom
and are now in heaven. This is clear from many phrases in the hymn: ‘These have
come out of the hardest oppression’, ‘Gone is their thirst and no more shall
they hunger’, ‘sun shall not pain them, no burning shall torture’, ‘gone is
their grief and their trials are over, God wipes away every tear from their
eyes’.
The reward
of these long-suffering saints is, first of all, the very opportunity to be
with the ‘countless crowd’ adoring God in his majesty, serving him in his
Temple. Jesus shall be with them, as
shepherd and guide, leading them to living water (echoes of Psalm 23). The hymn
concludes with a paraphrase of the song of adoration of the saints from the
Book of Revelation.
The image is
of the joy of worship and the comfort of food and drink, contrasting with the pain,
fear and often hunger of persecution in this life. Although the martyrs are at
the heart of this, we could perhaps extend our thoughts and prayers to the
memory of those who for the sake of Christ have lived selflessly caring for
others with no thought of their own comfort and pleasure.
Today’s hymn
is ‘We cannot care for you the way you wanted’ by John Bell and Graham Maule. When I planned the hymns for the year I took
into account the seasons of the Church’s calendar but not the lectionary
readings for Morning Prayer, because it was only later that John decided to include
them. But he has sensibly suggested a
swap here, putting this hymn in the service that includes the account of the Holy
Innocents, the slaughter of all the young children in Bethlehem on the orders
of Herod. For this hymn, following on from yesterday’s, is also about death and
our feelings around it, and specifically where the death was of a baby or young
child. So in singing it we join with the
mothers of Bethlehem of old, with ‘Rachel refusing to be comforted because her
children are no more’, and with the countless parents who lose children in or
own time to disease, starvation or war.
I read only this week in the context of the topical discussion of
climate change that hundreds of children are dying every day in Africa from
drought alone. Each one made in God’s image, each one loved by God, each death
the cause of grief.
As an aside,
and with a linguistic link since Rachel means ‘ewe’, I saw a story on social
media this week of a ewe whose lamb had been stillborn, grieving for it until another
ewe in the flock ‘donated’ one of her own pair to the grieving mother to adopt. These emotions are not only human.
To the
lyrics, then: the first three verses are written from the point of the view of
parents, expressing regret at not having been able to fulfil their own
potential as parents or that of their offspring: ‘We cannot care for you the
way we wanted, cannot watch you growing into childhood, cannot know the pain or
the potential which passing years would summon or reveal’. Instead, a word of
hope is offered, a promise by Jesus to cling to: ‘love will not die’, ‘you will
still stay’, ‘we hope and feel [for promised fulfilment]’. The fourth verse
recognises the complex of emotions experienced – anger, grief, tiredness,
unresolved tensions. The very sorrow that this death has created is offered
back to God along with the child itself, not reluctantly or as sacrifice but as
‘worship’.
Although I wrote yesterday of the difficulty of squaring the ‘everyone goes to heaven’ attitude with the theology of the Bible, when it comes to a stillbirth or the death of a very young child, few people today would argue that a child dying unbaptised would be rejected by God because of ‘original sin’. And pastorally, it’s more important surely to grieve with the family in their loss than to speculate exactly what has happened to the child’s soul. So, the hymn ends with placing the child into God’s arms with the words ‘believing that s/he now, alive in heaven, breathes with your breath’.
The
poignancy of grief, especially at a tragic loss, is expressed exquisitely in the
music of Schubert’s song ‘Litany for the feast of all Souls’, sung in the
original German at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrqIEwQhRMo
(with subtitles, but only two verses) or https://youtu.be/9eUPVDPkdHM
(all three verses, no subtitles).
Today is All
Souls’ day, the remembrance of the dead, and so I have picked a funeral song
from the hymn book. ‘When human voices cannot sing’ by Shirley Murray.
Verse 1 acknowledges
that hearts do break in bereavement, and that singing praise must necessarily
cease during that first period of intense grief. God knows that, and we can
bring our grief to him, aloud or silently.
The second verse admits there is also often fear: the fear of not
knowing what happens in death, or of dying in the same, perhaps unpleasant way.
We ask to be set free from that fear of the unknown, and have our path lit by
Christ. The third verse asks for God’s
love to be as real as it was at Easter. The fourth releases the beloved to go
ahead of us on this unknown journey in peace and that our sorrow may come to an
end.
The Church has to tread a wary path between the general assumption among most people in contemporary society that there is an afterlife or paradise to which all souls go without exception, and the apparent teaching of the bible that ‘not everyone will be saved’ (go to heaven, spend eternity with God, however you choose to express it). Even Jesus who welcomed everyone in life and extended God’s covenant with Israel to the whole world, still taught of the narrow way that not all will find, of those who call him Lord but who will find themselves rejected, and of Gehenna, the unpleasant fate that awaits even those who call someone else a fool, from which the popular idea of hell may derive. The Church’s teaching has generally been around the idea that entry into heaven is for all who believe in Jesus and repent of their sins, rather than for everyone or for the non-existent person who never sins. Yet dare to challenge, however gently, someone who is convinced that their deceased relative is now an angel in paradise and we will be charged with insensitivity or prejudice.
What the lyrics of the hymn remind us is that the future is truly unknown. The Bible offers many images: of a stairway to heaven, souls given new bodies, people in white robes worshiping around a throne, a new Jerusalem. In our own day people make comparisons with a caterpillar that cannot imagine the butterfly it will become. All these can only be poor metaphors for what eternal life really is. All we can do with certainty is put our trust in Christ who said he would go ahead of us to prepare a place. ‘Justorum animae in manu dei sunt’ – ‘the souls of the righteous are in the hands of God’.
Today’s hymn
for All Saints Day from Sing Praise is ‘Rejoice in God’s saints’ by Fred Pratt
Green. The suggested tune is a 17th
century metrical psalm setting (‘Old 104th’) but the tune John wrote
to it had a similar feel.
The overall message in the lyrics is similar to that discussed yesterday: the saints come in various guises. There are people we consider especially holy, both the activists and the contemplative (who ‘march with events to turn them God’s way, (or) need to withdraw, the better to pray’). There are exceptionally heroic individuals who ‘carry the gospel through fire and flood’. And also the ordinary Christians who show their sanctity in quiet service of others (‘unpraised and unknown, who bear someone’s cross or shoulder their own’).
The line
that stands out in the first verse, repeated in the last, is ‘A world without
saints forgets how to praise’. Perhaps that is intended to mean that the true
praise of God is inspired by the actions of those who demonstrate what loving God
and neighbour really looks like.
