Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is John Bell’s “The love of God comes close”, which is set here to its original tune called ‘Melanie’ (I wonder who she was?), but I have heard it previously sung to the Welsh tune Rhosymedre, which in my opinion fits it better. The full words, and suggestions for alternative tunes, can be found here.
I find the words of this hymn helpful in understanding the Church’s task of witness, evangelism or outreach (choose your preferred term). The central idea is that God is truly closest to us (in a spiritual sense – we can’t meaningfully ascribe a physical distance to or from God) not when we are doing the obviously ‘religious’ things but in some of the ordinary actions of life. The refrain at the end of each verse is in the form “The [property] of God is here to stay, embracing those who walk his way”, where the property in question echoes the first line of the verse: love, peace, joy, grace, and in the last verse the Son of God.
Some of those ‘ordinary actions’, as verse 1 suggests, are around showing hospitality – “where stands an open door, to let the stranger in, to mingle [or in some hymn books, ‘to welcome’] rich and poor”. Hospitality, as our PCC agreed at a virtual meeting yesterday, should be what people first experience when they meet us as Christians. So here’s a shout out to the people of St Philip and St James, Scholes near Bradford who welcomed me in for coffee and a chat today when I was just calling in the course of my work to drop something off at the vicarage.
The middle verses (2-4) are more about God being present when life is difficult. They offer God’s peace to those who are caught in the storms of life, or who make the effort to help others in those storms; his joy “where faith encounters fears”, for a true faith is not afraid to face fear; and his grace “when hearts are tired or sore and hope is bruised or bent”. The church’s needs to be not only, and not initially, with the challenge to turn to God from wrong ways (although it includes that), but to find that he is already present where life has forced people into difficult circumstances or wrong choices.
The final verse returns to the heart of our faith in Jesus: “The Son of God comes close where people praise his name, where bread and wine are blessed and shared, as when he came”. It is right that this should come last, not because it’s least important in our witness, but because we need first to show people they are welcome, and that God accepts and comforts them as they are, before they can feel part of our fellowship. Then we can move on to explain the significance of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.
Prompted by Stephen’s comments I hunted up the tune Rhosymedre, and also considered some other alternatives, but I don’t regret my decision to stick with Melanie.
I was very struck by the thrust of this hymn, taking up as it does Jesus’ promise that those who have given up various comforts for the sake of the kingdom will find themselves receiving great blessings in this life, to say nothing of eternal joys. I found it a real encouragement.
But wanting to sing the hymn at Morning Prayer, I was a bit put out by the explicit reference to the bread and wine in the last verse – doubly so, because it seems to me that having made a splendid job of pointing out that we encounter God most closely when NOT doing what everyone expects of the religious ghetto, it is very odd to finish with a verse which extols the virtues of the Holy Communion which has become such a routine religious ritual in so many places. How odd! So I decided to adapt this line.