Music at All Saints Parish Sunday, November 19, 2006
From All Saints Music Director Donald Teeters
Apocalyptic themes, which anticipate the early Advent season themes, dominate in today's readings and in the choral music chosen for this service. At the offertory the choir will perform an anthem by an English composer active in the early 20th century, who is hardly known in this country at all. Edgar L Bainton chose a familiar Revelations text for this setting (Rev. 21:1-4): "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth . . . and I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven." The passage concludes with the consoling message, "God shall wipe away all tears, for the former things are passed away." This is quite an excellent example of late Edwardian English church music, and the setting captures the spirit of the text quite well I think. At the Communion the choir will sing a brief, beautiful five-part anthem by Henry Purcell, Let my prayer come up into thy presence.
The hymns today, two quite familiar, one not so, also speak to these themes, some in more direct ways than others. God is working his purpose out (#534) is one of the few hymns in our hymnal that can be sung as a canon, i.e. where one part enters at a specified time after the opening part. If you would like to try this for yourself, join with the men of the choir in the canon on the last verse. The text of this hymn was written in the last decade of the 19th century, and the tune by Martin Shaw dates from the 1930s.
The offertory hymn (#601), O day of God, draw nigh, may be unfamiliar to you, but the tune St. Michael, by Louis Bourgeois, dates from the 16th century and is not a difficult one to catch on to. I have chosen this hymn because the text, dating from 1937, by the Canadian R.B.Y. Scott, makes a powerful statement, very apt to today's lections, about apocalyptic (final) things. It was written in 1937 in the hope that peace and justice would prevail on the verge of what turned out to be the cataclysmic Second World War.
And the service will end with a hymn that should make you want to get up and start marching. At least, several generations of our predecessors felt that way about it. O Zion, haste, thy mission high fulfilling (#539) is a popular missionary hymn that entered the Episcopal hymnal for the first time in 1892. For The Hymnal 1982, the text was altered slightly (thank goodness!) to allow for the use of inclusive language and to remove pejorative images of people who do not yet know the Lord.