“Codex Egberti” (10th century). Public domain.
The song I picked for yesterday (8 October) was “Calm me, Lord, as you calmed the storm”. The words are by David Adam, a writer (one might even say poet) in the Northumbrian Christian tradition, and the tune is by Margaret Rizza who has written several devotional songs of this nature herself.
It’s a short reflective song asking Jesus to give us inner peace as he calmed the storm that threatened to sink his disciples’ boat. This incident or ‘sign’ in the Gospels is understood in Christian teaching to reveal that Jesus not only has supernatural powers but also that he is so concerned about our individual troubles that he will do whatever it takes to help us to cope. But two things in the story stood out for me when I last preached on it: that he only intervenes when the disciples actively call out for help, and that while he stops the boat from sinking he doesn’t immediately take them to land (on this occasion, at least). They were still far out on the lake with water to be baled out of the boat and a long way to row. Sometimes Jesus works miracles, other times he just helps us to “keep calm and carry on”.
I had found this hymn suggested for the incident in question in the new Methodist hymn book “Singing the Faith”, and our choir had sung it during a service fairly recently, so I was forearmed for this hymn. And as Stephen says, the song is part of the “application” of the Gospel story: if Jesus can calm a physical storm then he can calm a psychological one. The two are, of course, different. It’s a song that works well for this purpose.
It’s a hard passage to preach on. It seems unfair that when the disciples do call out they are rebuked for their lack of faith, yet if they hadn’t they’d presumably have sunk without trace. Mark’s gospel really says that they didn’t, even by the end of the gospel, come to a proper understanding of the answer to their question “Who is this, whom even the wind and waves obey?”
The parallel octaves between soprano and tenor in the transition from bar 2 to 3, and the parallel unisons between alto and tenor in that from bar 5 to 6, and the parallel fifths between soprano and tenor in that from bar 7 to 8, all look careless to the purist in me! But in our choir we don’t have a tenor … so maybe as I sing bass I can survive the effect! But I wonder how Stephen manages on the tenor line?
By the way, what are the rabbits in the top left of the picture?
Good question. I hadn’t noticed them, but might they be fish rather than rabbits (mere plausible for a lake scene)? The image was from Wikimedia Commons but gives no other information than the approx. date and that it’s from ‘Codex Egberti’ held in the public library at Trier, Germany (a treasure that we were unaware of and therefore didn’t get to see when we visited the city in 2015).