Cure your children's warring madness; 
Bend our pride to your control. 
Shame our reckless, selfish gladness, 
Rich in things but poor in soul. 
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage
Make our broken spirits whole. 
-Harry Emerson Fosdick

The alteration we find in the last line in our hymnal was an attempt to avoid the patriarchal language of Fosdick's original "lest we miss thy kingdom's goal," but in many ways it misses the same point that I think Fosdick may have intended. These are a number of things that get in the way of who we are called to be in the Kin-dom of God. And each of us struggles with them. If we look at the third and fourth phrases..... it always brings to mind this thought: Can I see a person in a third-world country being upset about the thing I am upset with. If not, then it probably is a symptom of being rich in things but poor in soul. 

This may seem an odd hymn in Advent, but this week we have Isaiah 2:1-5 which is rich in imagery, but the preponderance of music written in connection with this passage is centered around verse 4 and the image of swords being turned into tools and the idea of nations not being at war with other nations. Another song this week, "Plowshare Prayer," extends that idea of things being used as weapons to include words, actions, and systemic injustice. And yet another one of our songs with a text written by William Reid a pastor in Wyoming in 1958 reminds us of a lot of the things Fosdick holds up "search for wealth and power," "bitter threats," and "bombs that shower destruction" being what contributes to our "blindness to [God's] way." 

And yet the seeds of hope are planted in each... as Reid states it in his hymn, "Keep bright in us the vision of days when war shall cease, when hatred and division give way to love and peace." 

Marshall

Now thank we all our God 
with heart and hands and voices
- Martin Rinkart, tr. Catherine Winkworth

It has always struck me in Catherine Winkworth's translation that "heart" is singular while hands and voices are plural. I think it can be a great moment of growth for us to reflect on why that may be. Catherine Winkworth is the primary reason so many of these German hymns have come to us in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her careful skill in wording not exact translations, but translations that carry the meaning in a way that is poetic and singable was unparalleled in her time. And despite the German "Herzen" being the plural, she chose specifically to translate it as the singular. 

Martin Rinkart is another interesting figure. He was a Lutheran Pastor in the walled city of Eilenberg, Germany. Because it was a walled city it became host to a lot of refugees during the Thirty Years' War. Because of the overcrowding and famine inside the walls, many people died from hunger and disease. Eventually, he was the only pastor left within the walls and was conducting as many as 50 funerals a day as people were dying around him. Rinkart was also the one person who left the safety of the walls to negotiate with those who had the city under siege. And yet through all this, he managed to write these words handed down to us today through Winkworth's translation.

I'm sure the second verse of this hymn makes more sense in light of where this hymn came from. "And keep us still in grace, and guide us when perplexed, and free us from all ills in this world and the next."  

Marshall

I'm sure you have heard the word peal and associated it with bells (or out of context and thought it was a banana), but a peal is a very specific thing very tied to the history of handbells.

Handbells descended from the big tower bells in cathedrals where several people would stand there in the cold in the tower pulling the rope that would ring their particular bells out of all the bells in the tower. One of the techniques used to create melodic patterns is what is called change ringing. In change ringing, you would start out with a simple pattern. For instance, if you had 8 bells you would ring them in this order: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8. Then someone would call out a change that would switch the order of the bells, so the next time through the sequence would be possibly: 1 3 2 4 5 7 6 8. A sequence of these changes would ensue until the ringers got back to the original sequence constitution and entire peal. The more bells involved in the change ringing, the longer the peal might be, sometimes lasting several hours. When bell teams (accurate terminology because change ringing is much more like a marriage of math and sports) would practice, the townsfolk would get upset about all the noise. So eventually the handbell was developed to allow teams to practice at the pub without disturbing the whole town. Over time bell foundries began to tune handbells so that the overtones were more compatible with other Western instruments and people began to ring melodies rather than changes. Some more information into change ringing can be found here: https://www.bells.org/change-ringing

So when the Plymouth Ringers ring Michael Helman's "A Jubilant Peal" as the prelude this Sunday, there is this tie in the melodic line throughout the piece to the changes that would be seen in change ringing and hence the history of handbells. At the same time, this piece uses many more recently developed techniques such as martellatos, echos, thumb damping, and more. Helman has directed handbell ensembles for several decades in Delaware and Florida and certainly has cemented a place in the history of handbell ringing with his compositions and advocacy for pushing the art of handbell ringing in new directions. Some may find joy in just the timbre of the handbells. Others might find joy in the intellectual challenge of tracing the changes through the sequence of bells that form the melodies in each section of the piece. But most of all, I hope we take a moment to thank God for the gift that Michael has been to handbell ringing over the last several decades, and for the gift that all LGBTQ+ people like him have been to the church as a whole and to our understanding of the multiplicity of ways in which God is at work in this world. 

Marshall

Here in this place new light is streaming, 
Now is the darkness, vanished away, 
See in this space, our fears and our dreamings, 
Brought here to you in the light of this day. 
- Marty Haugen

The prelude this week is James Biery’s Galliard on “Gather Us In.” The first question that will pop into most people’s head is “What the heck is a Galliard?” A Galliard is a dance from the renaissance period for two people that was known to be in a fast triple meter and have some very complicated steps. Biery’s setting of this tune captures that dance character very well in the opening section. Maybe some of you will dance your way down the aisle as you gather for worship?!?! 

The next section takes the melody and still retains its dance character but begins to layer fragments of the melody in increasingly complex and dissonant layers with the quiet intensity of a tango building to what amounts to a bursting scream of tension. There is a pause, and then it returns to the original dance, but now with new chordal structures formed from the some of the layers that created the dissonance in the middle. The ending winds down to a final fragment that layers both an idea from the dissonant section and the first section, but never fully resolves in as concrete an ending as one might expect. 

I see Biery alluding to the complicated dance between people in larger contexts with this setting. Maybe it’s the Galliard of the Church. If so, at what point are we (Plymouth) called to be in this dance? The first section? Somewhere in the second? Letting out the scream of all that layered dissonance? Beginning the return to the dance with new harmonic structures formed from the dissonance? The ending with its unresolved fragments? 

(Interesting side note: a lot of what creates the dissonance in the second section is formed out of the whole tone scale. Let that marinate in your mind for a moment.)

Marshall