First, a word of explanation to anyone else who is reading these in conjunction with joining in Morning Prayer from Eccleshill on YouTube. I went through the book before the start of the year allocating hymns to days and seasons, and it seemed sensible to have the many Communion hymns allocated to Sundays. So after going through the various church seasons from Christmas to Trinity, for the next few months, my blog posts on Sundays will be on hymns in the Sing Praise hymnbook that are set for the Communion / Mass / Eucharist. As there are fewer hymns in the book (330) than days in the year (365) most Saturdays weren’t allocated a hymn What I didn’t know at that stage was that John would join the project by playing these hymns in Morning Prayer, which is set for six days a week excluding Sundays (or rather, Morning Prayer on Sundays has a different liturgy and set of readings). That explains why we end up with communion hymns on Saturdays, and sometimes (as today) I end up posting the ‘Sunday’ blog a day early.
Photo (c) paullew on Flickr; Creative Commons licence.
This one is “Before I take the body of my Lord” by John Bell and Graham Maule. It’s about preparation for the Communion, which means taking time to put aside (or in the words of the last line of each verse, ‘lay down’) the things that distract us from prayer: sins we regret having committed, the self-centredness that stops us doing good for other people, failings in relationships. These are described in ore detail in the first three verses.
Verse four is about forgiving others and asking their forgivensss of ourselves. In the Communion service this is the intention of “sharing the peace” although in practice this is often reduced to merely a friendly greeting. Verse five turns to Christ himself, coming with empty heart and open hands, recognising that our laying down of these things is only a poor response to his own laying down of his life for us.
Singing this on Saturday, and perhaps again on Sunday morning, gives time for reflection on how this applies to me personally before receiving the bread and wine in the service itself.
Thank you, Stephen, for explaining the events which led to singing Communion hymns on Saturdays. I did consider (a) putting them in the Sunday service (but I try to use the Choir and Music Group on Sundays, and that would have meant a degree of organization of rehearsals and filming which is beyond me at the moment) or (b) relegating them to a kind of “Saturday appendix” that would appear separately from Saturday’s service (but that’s a lot of extra work) or (c) just opting out of singing them (but that defeats the ideal of singing through the whole book). I suppose another option would be for me to bite the bullet and start doing an on-line communion service – but if I did that I’d want to do it on Zoom rather than on YouTube (so that it would be a real-time expression of fellowship around the Lord’s table), and I’m not confident of how to share singing on Zoom. So I’m intending to do as Stephen says, and to sing Communion hymns on Saturdays.
Of course, this particular hymn is only “accidentally” about the Holy Communion – in that the attitude of confession and granting of pardon should be part of any encounter with Jesus. The Lord’s prayer (“forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us”) is not, after all, a prayer exclusive to the Holy Communion. The references in first and last verses make the hymn harder to use in non-Eucharistic settings, but I valued the reminder of this basic aspect of following Jesus despite the fact that it was Saturday and no actual sharing of bread and wine was to follow.
I thought the tune for this hymn was charming; and I very much liked the way that the refrain “these I lay down” was transformed into a thought about Jesus “laying down” his life on the cross. I wish there had been some rhyme in the verses; but I suppose it could be argued that saying things directly is more important than rhyme in a hymn like this.
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About the picture and the title in Stephen’s post: is there such a thing as “informal confession” as opposed to “formal confession”? Are there degrees of formality in how God listens to us?