Today’s choice of hymn from Sing Praise is, unlike many of the others, very well known to me. “Brother, Sister, let me serve you” is sung in many churches, but was also one of the hymns that my wife and I chose for our church wedding at St Luke’s Eccleshill.
The reason it makes a good wedding hymn is that it covers the many ways in which a couple in a long-term relationship serve each other, irrespective of what religious affiliation they may or may not have, but it is also a thoroughly Christian text that begins “Brother, Sister, let me serve you, let me be as Christ to you, pray that I may have the grace to let you be my servant too”. The inclusion of “grace” reminds us that we need God’s help to make our relationships work well, and that second line points to the truth that being served by others graciously takes effort and grace just as much as being the servant.
These various ways of serving are summarised in the second verse as “we are here to help each other walk the mile and bear the load”, a reference to Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:41) that “if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile”. This is itself said to be a reference to the Roman law that a soldier could make someone carry their equipment for one mile, a law invoked when Simon of Cyrene was compelled to carry Jesus’ cross on the way to his crucifixion. But forcing? compulsion? crucifixion? How does that square with love? Perhaps it is intended to mean that when our partner is suffering, is under the pressure of external forces, we are expected to share that burden. It finds expression also in the traditional English marriage service where each partner is asked to make a vow to love the other “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health”. Marriage cannot be expected to be a lifetime of easy happiness, but where there is the commitment to support each other in all circumstances, it can survive and even flourish and grow in difficult times.
The following two verses (3 & 4) list some of the ways this will work in practice: “I will hold the Christ light for you in the night-time of your fear, I will hold my hand out to you, speak the peace you long to hear”; “I will weep when you are weeping, when you laugh I’ll laugh with you, I will share your joy and sorrow till we’ve seen this journey through”.
The fourth verse is again thoroughly Christian as it looks forward to “singing to God in heaven in perfect harmony”, although “we” here must mean the whole Christian community, past, present and future, since Jesus taught that there will be no marriage in heaven: our individual loving relationships will be blended into the perfect love of God that God intended for all creation.
Linda and I have been married for nearly eighteen years now. We’ve certainly known the ups and downs of “sickness and health”; while not experiencing poverty we’ve known the uncertainties of the private rental market and times when expenditure exceeded income; and certainly our share of weeping and laughter. We can testify to the truth of the words of this hymn.
The one line I haven’t quoted yet is the first half of the second verse: “we are pilgrims on a journey, and companions on the road”. Now you know where our domain name (pilgrims.org.uk) comes from – from this hymn and our experience of living it out.
I had forgotten that this hymn was sung at Stephen and Linda’s wedding here – but it is also well-known to my wife and me, and we sung it to the congregation at St Peter’s Bexleyheath as a kind of manifesto when I began my second curacy there back in March 1988 (when Malcolm the vicar poured a bottle of thick oil all over my hair!), and I have always liked it. I particularly like the line “pray that I may have the grace to let you be my servant too”. It’s amazing the number of people I’ve come across in churches who have become a real concern to others around them because, as they get older, they refuse to ask for help because they “don’t want to be a burden to anyone”. The St Paul verse which says “owe no-one anything except the obligation to love one another” (Romans 13:8) has been misapplied countless times in the lives of people who value their independence too highly; and this hymn supplies a welcome corrective!
In 1988, of course, the hymn was “Brother, let me be your servant”. Of course in those days everyone recognized that “Brother” in this context meant both brothers and sisters – it was only later that the modern fad for gender-equalization of texts demanded changes in the way we speak and write. But the hymn lost something when the word “servant” disappeared, in my view!
The reason I didn’t keep this hymn for 12 April (our anniversary) is that for that day I’ve picked one of our other wedding hymns, “Lord for the Years”. Of the two, “Brother, Sister” seemed more fitting for Lent.