September 26, 2024

On this second Sunday of our "Sustaining Grace" Stewardship Campaign, we are focusing on God's Justifying Grace which sustains us on God's path for our lives.

The Choral Prelude invokes God's guidance as we enter Worship, and the simple text from Psalm 5 is the perfect prayer to start every day: Lead Me, Lord. This almost hymn-like gem is the last movement of an 11 minute "verse anthem" Praise the Lord, My Soul, by Samuel Sebastian Wesley, great grandson of Charles Wesley, and eldest child of Samuel & Sarah Wesley. (A Verse Anthem sets alternating segments of the text for full or partial choir, duets, soloists, etc.)  Note the “pleading” motif in “Lead Me, Lord” as the Alto descends in tied seconds on “Lo-ord, Lo-ord” at 38-40 seconds into the video. S.S. Wesley wrote many much-loved anthems and hymn tunes, including Aurelia (The Church’s One Foundation).

Lloyd Larson’s tuneful prayer of supplication Teach Me Your Way, O Lord sets a tender yet confident prayer by the English Organist B. Mansell Ramsey from 1920. Ramsey’s biblically-inspired text implores God’s justifying grace to know our Creator’s way in joy and sadness, doubts and fears, until the race is won and our journey is done. 

Our Amazing Grace setting at Communion this week is by Marianne Forman and sets a new and memorable melody which rises by a 4th (Do-Fa) and 5th (Do-Sol) to begin each verse, and includes Celtic-inspired ornamentation of the vocal lines. Forman’s setting reaches a glorious climax at “we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise” and her ending quotes the famous “New Britain” tune we all know (4:15 on the video) as the choir sings “and grace will lead me home” and coalesces on a unison middle C to very moving effect on the final word “home.”

To close this Worship about God’s Justifying Grace, we will sing a lively hymn by Lori True from our Worship & Song hymnal which sets Shirley Erena Murray’s powerful text A Place at the Table. The refrain ends with the “And God will delight when we are creators of justice and joy, passion and peace!” Ms. Murray presents a Christian equivalent to the United Nations’ “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” from 1948.

My daily prayer is that the words we sing will change the way we live, just as the ancient Chorister’s Prayer so beautifully states: “Bless, O Lord, us thy servants, who minister in thy temple. Grant that what we sing with our lips, we may believe in our hearts, and what we believe in our hearts, we may show forth in our lives. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.’

With a Thankful Heart,
Kenton