Scargill House, June 2021
I’ve been away for a few days without a computer or Internet access, hence the lack of blog posts this week. I’ve kept up singing a hymn a day (actually rather more, having been on a walking holiday at Scargill House, Christian holiday centre) but rather than write about each of them separately, here’s a sort of summary of this week’s Sing Praise choices.
The actual hymns are: “Lord as I wake I turn to you” by Brian Foley; “Glory to God, the source of all our mission” by Christopher Idle; “Go into the world” by Sylvia Dunstan; and “At the dawning of creation” by David Fox.
The first is a morning hymn, reminding us that to keep in a good relationship with God requires us to remember God from our first waking thoughts, to praise him and pray to him regularly, give thanks, and live a life of love. That sounds like a lot of demands, but perhaps the key is in the last line of the first verse: “yourself the help for which I pray”. God does give us the help we need to do what he requires. His grace comes first; our praise, prayer and thankfulness are a response to it.
The middle two are both on the theme of mission. Sylvia Dunstan’s hymn is based on the Great Commission given by Jesus to his disciples before returning to Heaven, to take his message to all the world. It’s something we know we have to do but most of us find difficult to engage with, especially in a society that prizes freedom of belief and where evangelism can be criticised for “imposing our beliefs” even where that’s not the intention. Some of the phrases which stood out for me in Christopher Idle’s hymn were “Christ’s fellow workers”, and “linked by the cross… joined by the love… one in the hope…”. From Sylvia Dunstan’s I highlight “Go into every place, go live the word of Christ’s redeeming grace”, and “Go as the ones I send, for I am with you till the age shall end”. This mission, we have to remember, is not ours but his.
I chose the last of these because its theme is baptism, and today (24th June) is the feast of John the Baptist. He was perhaps the first Christian missionary, drawing people’s attention to Jesus even before Jesus started his own ministry, so although the hymn is not about mission as such, nor even specifically about John, there is a link with the other two, and the final line “to his life of love he calls us by his total sacrifice” again reminds us that it is Jesus himself who calls us to share in his own mission.
“Lord as I wake I turn to you” by Brian Foley.
This is a setting of Psalm 5, rather abbreviated from the original, and I admit that initially I didn’t warm to it – in particular verse 2 is mournful in contrast to verses 1, 3 and 4 which are cheerful. That’s a reflection of the Psalm itself which alternates mournful and cheerful moods, and means that almost all the possible tunes seem unsatisfactory; and I didn’t warm to the tune suggested in the book, not least because its rhythm is very arbitrary. The key is to set it to the simplest possible tune, and to write that tune in such a way that it can be put into the minor for verse 2 and the major for the other verses – and that’s what I did. Doing so enabled me to recover from my initial dislike of the hymn to a greater appreciation of it.
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“Glory to God, the source of all our mission” by Christopher Idle.
I sang this one to John Bacchus Dykes’ tune “O Strength and Stay”, and I thought it was a worthwhile expression of the mission to which Christ calls us and our resolve to follow where he leads. It made a good excuse for e-mailing Christopher Idle and asking him about the possible tunes and also how he was. As Stephen says it has a helpful reminder that we are “fellow workers” and “linked by the cross” which is the foundation of our faith.
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“Go into the world” by Sylvia Dunstan.
Actually it is “Go TO the world”, and this change of wording is one of its great weaknesses as it immediately loses its resonance with the wording of the Great Commission in Matthew, on which it is based. For me the main point of that commission is Christ’s instruction that we are to TEACH others what he has taught us, and I thought it a real shame that Sylvia didn’t mention teaching at all – there is the preaching of the cross, the baptism, and then various things like struggling, blessing, praying, living, seeking God’s presence … but where is the CONTENT of Jesus’ teaching which has been so much Matthew’s concern to set out in his Gospel? The Gospel of Matthew, after all, consists of five blocks of teaching material from the lips of Jesus, set out in systematic order so that it can be assimilated by the readers. But I felt the singer had been short-changed by this summary of the mission to which Jesus calls us.
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“At the dawning of creation” by David Fox.
I declined to sing this one: it is a baptism hymn and for me it focuses on the water rather than on what the water is about. I’ve never liked the part of the “prayer over the water” which goes through the OT imagery conjured up by water, and I similarly dislike this hymn. Where’s the mention of faith? (Of course, a project to sing through all the hymns in a book commits one to singing even the poor ones, so Stephen did have to fit it in somewhere!)