From the Pastor: Good news!

Dear friends,

I want to say a personal word of thanks to you for agreeing at our congregational meeting to extend a call to Pastor Judith Morgado to be our new associate pastor. I have to admit I was just a tad apprehensive about whether we would be able to get a quorum at 9:30 on a Sunday morning, especially after people kept saying to me, "Oh, I’m all in favor of this, but I’m going to be out of town." But there were nearly 130 of you who came out—approaching twice what a quorum would be! (A quorum under our constitution, incidentally, is 20% of voting members, and a voting member is a confirmed member who has both communed and made a financial contribution of record to the congregation during the current or preceding year. The number fluctuates a bit, but is generally between 75 and 80.)

Your attendance, as well as your enthusiastic vote (121 to 5) is a great affirmation that your call to Judith is also God’s call for her to serve here at Peace. While she has thirty days to respond to the call, I don’t expect it will take that long, and I expect her answer will be equally enthusiastic.

Pastors are only the servants of the congregation, of course, and we all have lots of work to do in the coming weeks and months to bring everything up to speed. We have committees working on exciting new programs, and lots of energy here right now, so I’m pretty excited.

One of Judith’s particular responsibility will be with our Christian Education program, but she can’t do it alone. We’re looking for a Sunday School teacher or two for the fall, so if you think God might be calling you to help out with the important task, please speak to Manette Shuholm, our Christian Education Committee chair. Team teaching is a possibility so it wouldn’t necessarily be an every Sunday commitment—think of it more as an "every child" commitment, each of us doing our part to be sure that the love of Jesus is passed on to the next generation.

In the meanwhile, I invite your prayers for Judith as she considers our call (and, we expect, as she prepares to begin ministry here). I invite your prayers as well for our congregation as we enter a new phase in our life together.

And pencil in the first Sunday in September on your calendar—that’s when we’ve tentatively scheduled a service of installation for Pastor Judith.

Peace to you,

Pastor Richard O. Johnson

P. S. Several of you have asked if there might be another time when I share some of our impressions of China, and I’m happy to do that. Let’s plan for the Sunday School hour, 9:30, on Sunday, August 24.

Classic Prayers

Eternal God,

the light of the minds that know you,

the life of the souls that love you,

the strength of the wills that serve you;

help us so to know you that we may truly love you,

so to love you that we may fully serve you,

whom to serve is perfect freedom.

Amen.

--Gelasian Sacramentary (ca. 500 A.D.)

Liturgy Notes: "Authors, Composers, Arrangers, Oh, My!"

In church one recent Sunday, we had sung "Come with Us, O Blessed Jesus," which in the Lutheran Book of Worship is set to the tune often known as "Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring." The note in the bulletin indicated that the music was written by Johann Schop (1600-1665). After the service someone said, "I thought Bach wrote that."

The truth of the matter is that when we are talking hymns, whether it be words or music, it’s not always quite so easy to say it was "written by so and so." The reason is that most hymns, by the time they reach a hymnal, are a collaborative effort of one sort or another.

Let’s think about music first. In the case of "Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring," Bach took a previously composed tune (by Schop) and then arranged it, changing the meter and a few of the notes, and making it the "theme" for his famous keyboard piece. So while Bach’s beautiful composition is well-loved and familiar, it wasn’t entirely original. They do say that imitation is the highest form of flattery!

Sometimes a composer or hymnal editor will write a new "setting" for a familiar tune. Usually this means that the congregation will sing the same melody they’ve always sung before, but the harmony played by the organ or other instrument will be different. This is done sometimes because music styles do change over the years; and sometimes just because some musicians can’t leave well enough alone! There are a couple of rather "trendy" harmonizations in the Lutheran Book of Worship that have reverted back to the old familiar setting in Evangelical Lutheran Worship.

When we begin to look at words, things get even more complicated. While some hymn texts appear on the page just as the author wrote them, more often than not there are changes.

The most common "change," of course, is translation. Many of the hymns we sing were originally written in another language—for Lutherans, primarily German or the Scandinavian tongues, but increasingly we have hymns that were originally Spanish or other languages. Sometimes a hymnal will include a "new translation" of an old hymn—usually because someone thinks (often justly) that the older translation is "outdated."

In the Lutheran Book of Worship, there was a new "translation" of "Lo! How a Rose ‘Ere Blooming." It turned out "Lo, how a rose is growing." Just about everybody hated it, and the translator has publicly apologized for it! In Evangelical Worship, the older translation is restored.

Sometimes down at the bottom of the hymn you’ll see the strange abbreviation "alt." which stands for "altered." This means that someone—the hymnal editor, or someone else—decided a change or two was in order. Perhaps there was an archaic word in the original, and a more modern word was substituted. Perhaps there was something "theologically problematic" in the original. For instance, Charles Wesley’s popular hymn "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling" included the line "Take away our power of sinning." This was a peculiarly Methodist doctrine which suggested that if one is "sanctified," God might actually make one sinless. This didn’t fly with Lutherans, and so Lutheran hymnals have usually changed it to something like "Take away our love of sinning" to avoid any suggestion that it is, in fact, possible for us to live without ever sinning.

Very often a hymn is edited by simply eliminating some verses. In the 18th and 19th century, it was popular to write hymns with twenty or more verses, and modern hymnal editors generally pick out no more than four or five. In other cases, a hymn as it appears in the hymnal may include an original hymn, with an additional verse or two added by some later writer.

So hymns are, in many respects, a collaborative effort, across time and space as many hands and voices take a part in bringing us the music we sing on any particular Sunday. In that way, hymns reflect the "catholicity" of the church—many voices, and yet also "one voice" as we sing God’s praise.