Music Notes from Denise, September 28, 2024

This Sunday we read about Queen Esther petitioning to the King and speaking up for her people. This photograph is one that I took in Rome of an ancient mural that might have been a powerful woman like Esther. In our Psalm 124 we recall If the Lord had not been on our side…then would the raging waters have gone right over us. Blessed be the Lord! In James 5 we learn that faithful prayer and anointing of the sick will bring healing. And in Mark 9, Jesus teaches John about healing people from disease or fear and sending them on rejoicing, instead of putting a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me.

Our Processional hymn will be inspired by our Psalm, Sing praise to God who reigns above. Johann Jakob Schütz wrote this hymn of praise in German with nine stanzas. In 1675 he published it in his Christliches Gedenkbüchlein. The most common English translation in use is by Frances E. Cox from 1864, which was published in Orby Shipley's Lyra Eucharistica and her own Hymns from the German. Catherine Winkworth has also made a translation. It extols the greatness of God in giving all good things to us, and calls on us to continue to give God praise. (Tiffany Shomsky, Hymnary.org) 

Our Sequence hymn is the Spiritual, Standin’ in the Need of Prayer. Eileen Guenther has identified over forty primary themes that encompass the body of work that is spirituals. “It’s Me, It’s Me, O Lord” falls into several categories. The text reveals that accountability and humility are required to live a Christian life. Familial and community relationships are present in the stanzas of this spiritual. Guenther states, “in Spirituals, ‘I’ equals ‘we’ in the African sensibility, where individuals are responsible for the whole community, not only for themselves” (Eileen Guenther, In Their Own Words: Slave Life and the Power of Spirituals (St. Louis, MO: MorningStar Music Publishers, Inc., 2016).

For the Offertory, St. Martin’s Choir will sing a new anthem written in 2024, both words and music by Diane Hannibal: To You, I Lift My Soul. Based on Psalm 25, it is a prayer for God’s comfort and features a lovely sequential melody that develops nicely. A modulation builds to the affirming final section before closing with a quiet prayer: “Lord, I lift my soul.” Hannibal has been a music therapist near Chicago and has also been involved in church music for many years. She has composed several bestselling anthems for church choirs.

To you, Lord, I lift my soul, Lord, I place you in control. Those who wait upon you will be blessed.

Show me, Lord, which path to take, guide me in each choice I make.

I am yours and I long for you each day, comfort me I pray.

Lord, my heart I give to you, with my hands, lift praise to you. Guide my feet to follow in your ways.

God will pardon every sin, make me pure and whole again,

In my soul residing day and night, warming me with holy light.

Bring me out of my distress, guard my soul and deliver me.

Heal my brokenness, bring me peace and rest. I wait upon you, Lord. Lord, I lift my soul.

(2024 Hope Publishing Company)

Our final hymn is one written by Carolyn Winfrey Gillette that has been used by the National Council of Churches. She describes her purpose in recommending this hymn during our current situation. “God loves immigrants; they need our love too. Since the fall of Kabul, we have had an Afghan father and four children living very near us. This past Christmas Eve we did a Spanish language worship service for other new neighbors. For five years we hosted an immigrant group from Ghana. The repeated bigoted, racist comments [heard by several politicians today] need to be condemned by all Christians.” Sung to the familiar tune Bunessan that we know as Morning has broken, this hymn looks at some of the immigrants that we are familiar with in the Bible and calls us to reflect on our own families and our approach to OTHERS. (2010 Carolyn Winfrey Gillette, used with permission, carolynshymns.com)

Join us for Worship at 10:30 am on Sunday September 29th

Queen Esther Denouncing Haman, Ernest Normand, 1888

Live by faith, grow in grace, and walk in love with St. Martin's this coming Sunday as we come together, in person as well as online, for worship, thanksgiving, and praise. Wherever you are on your journey of faith, allow us to walk alongside you.

To download a bulletin for the Sunday Holy Eucharist at 10:30 am, please click here:

19P 29 Sep 2024 Final

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Rector's Reflection: Begin With Happiness, September 21, 2024

First impressions, we are told, mean a lot. First words mean a lot. Think of famous first lines in literature. Elizabeth Barrett Browning began her most famous poem, Sonnet 43, with these words of adoration, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 begins, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate….”

Just as I believe that Barrett Browning and Shakespeare chose their opening words carefully, so it is, I think, with scripture. Genesis fittingly begins with the words, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth….” Mark, probably the first gospel written in the Christian scriptures, echoes Genesis when it opens with the proclamation, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The Gospel of John is even more obvious in its reverberation of creation: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

This Sunday, track one of the Revised Common Lectionary includes in its readings Psalm 1.  Its first two verses are these:

Happy are those

who do not follow the advice of the wicked,

or take the path that sinners tread,

or sit in the seat of scoffers;

but their delight is in the law of the Lord,

and on his law they meditate day and night.”

Think of it: the very first word of the Psalter is “Happy.” Now some versions of the Bible use a different word: “Blessed.” That’s an amazing thing. What if we too reminded ourselves that those who are happy are blessed, and those who are blessed are happy? This is an insight that all too often gets drowned out in the lives of many of us. We are programmed to think about satisfaction—or more importantly, the lack of it. We are told to buy, buy, buy. We are persuaded that products will make us more beautiful, thinner, fuller—as if those three things could coexist at the same place and time. But will those things make us truly happy? Will they make us truly blessed?

Psychologist Martin Seligman has claimed that there are three components of happiness: pleasure, engagement, and meaning, and the last two are the most important in living a happy life—while pleasure is fleeting, being engaged with others and feeling a sense of positive purpose in one’s life is more enduring, and leads to a general determination that life is worthwhile. Happiness does not rest in things. Happiness rests in living life well.

This is a gift that all too many of us feel eludes us. Most of us do not live our lives feeling happy all the time, or even most of the time. There are so many things that are beyond our control.

Yet Psalm 1 points to something that IS in our control. Happy are those who delight in the law of the Lord, who meditate upon it day and night. This then requires a further determination of the law and what its ultimate ends are. Here, we are fortunately given the answer in Mark 12:29-30. When asked what the pinnacle of God’s law was, Jesus answered: “The first is this: ’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

The summary of the law, the key to happiness, is love: love of God, and love of each other.

When we do this, we bless God, and bless each other. But we also bless ourselves, and remind ourselves of what roots us in the heart of real truth, and real happiness. The key is not to sit in "the seat of scoffers," to all-too-coolly hold ourselves aloof from real connection and real risk in loving, but to embrace love and the happiness it brings whole-heartedly, and damn the risk of failure.

Love never fails, but is, to quote Shakespeare again in Sonnet 116, an ever-fixed mark, that looks on tempests, and is never shaken. That's the love that God offers us and at the same time calls us to embody. Happy are those who delight in the law of love, which is the end of all our days, and the promise of all our longings.

May we all find ways to show love for God and love for our neighbor in all the things we do.

In Christ’s love,

Mother Leslie+