Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is “Great and Wonderful your deeds” by Christopher Idle, who also wrote yesterday’s hymn. Both are based on passages from the book of Revelation, and this is a setting of a passage used as a canticle (chanted scripture) in some churches. Now we are far from the problems of earth and focused only on God.
God is praised here as the all-powerful one, the one who is always true and right, the God of justice, the sacrificial Lamb as he was incarnate as Jesus, and as the Holy Spirit.
The refrain to each verse is a single line ending with the word ‘glory’ and that sets the tone for the hymn. These last lines – “To your name be glory”, “All have seen your glory”, and “Love and praise and glory” are the response of people who recognise God for whom he is.
Christopher Idle was, of course, one of the group of people who were got together by what became Jubilate Hymns as they put together the book “Psalm Praise”, and it was very interesting to hear some of his insights on the task of paraphrasing scriptures (when I once consulted him about his “Praise to the Lord, for the Lord is good” paraphrase of Psalm 118 in that book). The experience got him started at putting various scriptures and other texts into meter, and I greatly admire a lot of them. And although I don’t think this is Christopher’s greatest text ever, I enjoyed this one and the chance to use the tune “Wurttenberg” (which I like for “Christ the Lord is risen today” – but no-one else at St Luke’s Eccleshill knows it!)