As Men of Old Their First Fruits Brought

As Men of Old Their First Fruits Brought (No. 639 in our hymnal) is a wonderful thanksgiving text, but because the tune is somewhat unfamiliar here, we will not use it in worship this Sunday morning. I have enough else on my plate that I chose not to attempt to wrestle with how best to introduce something “new” right now. Here’s the text by Frank von Christierson for your enrichment. Maybe next year will afford us an opportunity to use it in corporate worship.

As men of old their first fruits brought,
Of orchard flock and field,
To God the Giver of all good,
The source of bounteous yield,
So we today first fruits would bring;
The wealth of this good land,
Of farm and market, shop and home,
Of mind, and heart, and hand.

A world in need now summons us
To labor love and give;
To make our life an offering
To God, that man may live.
The Church of Christ is calling us
To make the dream come true:
A world redeemed by Christ-like love;
All life in Christ made new.

In gratitude and humble trust,
We bring our best to Thee,
To serve Your cause and share Your love
With all humanity.
O Thou, who gavest us Thyself,
In Jesus Christ, Thy Son,
Teach us to give ourselves each day
Until life’s work is done.

It raises the question in my mind: Does God get my first fruits, or only what I have left over at the end of all my expending of energies? That’s enough to think about for now.

YouthCUE Carson-Newman 2006

Blogger's note: This entry was written before the event mentioned but posted after.

I will be away this Sunday taking 16 of our Youth Choir members to YouthCUE’s Carson-Newman Choral Festival. This will be the 4th year that we have taken choir members, and the largest group we have taken since we began going to this festival every Fall.

There are a couple of things about this year that are particularly exciting. First, our conductor this year is already somewhat known to our kids who have been before. Dr. Eric Thorson conducts the Carson-Newman A Cappella Choir. A regular feature of the festival is a Friday evening mini-concert by this group for the YouthCUE participants. Because Dr. Thorson is our conductor this year, he has decided to add the voices of the Carson-Newman A Cappella Choir to our voices for the YouthCUE event. The maturity and musicianship that those voices will add to the teenagers’ voices will make the experience all that much richer for our kids. I can’t wait to hear it.

I’m further excited to see and hear the wonderfully rich poetry combined with well-written tunes and harmonies that the kids will sing. Our teenagers will spend literally hours during the weekend in rehearsals with the music and the texts. Their ears, mouths, hearts, and minds … yes, even their very souls … will be deeply immersed in scriptural truth and beautiful music for that time. Contrast that with the junk with which they are bombarded in their day-to-day lives. Some aspects of this experience will remain with them for the rest of their lives.

I’m already emotional about one of the pieces in the repertoire for the festival. The text is paraphrased from Ecclesiastes chapters 1 and 12. It begins by painting a rather bleak picture of the vanity of human existence (you may remember how Ecclesiastes begins). Mark Hayes’s music beautifully illustrates the text by John Parker. His genius is no clearer in any other work that I know of.

The anthem’s final thought, however, redeems everything: “To love our God, the reason we live; To love our God, the highest call. Nothing satisfies our soul, gives life meaning, makes us whole. For this purpose we were made: to love our God.” If our kids remember nothing else from the weekend, I want that thought to carry them throughout the rest of their lives. “The reason that we live is to love our God.” That’s enough to think about for now.

Worship is spiritual food

Bloggers note: The following was my Musings article from my rehearsals of 10/25/06. On Sunday, 10/29/06 the church celebrated the 125th anniversary of the founding of this body. Instead of our usual 2 very different worship services, we had one longer service ... mainly traditional in look and feel. I will probably write about it when I have more time, but we experienced a delightful sense of community that morning. I'm still thanking God for it 3 days later. The sanctuary choir received this article on the Wednesday evening prior to that service of worship.

“The problem in many congregations is not that the diet includes the wrong proportions of spiritual milk and meat; it is that the hungry are being given pacifiers and think that they are being fed.” ~ Paul A. Richardson, The Primacy of Worship.

The image of milk and meat to which Richardson alludes comes from Hebrews 5. The writer is frustrated at a lack of “getting it” in the people to whom he is writing because they are immature.

We have much to say about this, but it is hard to explain because you are slow to learn. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! ~ Heb. 5:11ff (NIV)

I heard Richardson speak on the subject before it appeared as an article in the theological journal The Review and Expositor a few months later. He had just conducted a campus-wide survey of favorite hymns and used the results of that survey to craft a teaching worship experience in chapel at Southern Seminary. His analysis of the survey was that he saw a lot of spiritual “meat and potatoes” in the content of our favorite hymns, but very few spiritual “vegetables” (exactly how one would discern the difference between the two is still not clear to me some 20 years later). After he shared that observation, he made the statement that appears at the beginning of this entry. The analogy of worship as spiritual food has stuck in my mind for a long time with several permutations.

One of those is the image of a family holiday celebration like many that I experienced growing up. Because so many people come together with so many different taste preferences, there is often a wide variety of food available. With so much variety, it is easy to identify the picky eaters … just look at the food on their plates. When child will only eat a few different foods it is no surprise. When an adult refuses to expand his or her taste palate, it implies immaturity. I confess that I was a picky eater as a child (and, yes, even into my teens and perhaps early 20’s), but I have outgrown at least some of that pickiness. (Have so … have so …)

I could say more on the subject, but I will end with this: We have a church homecoming gathering this weekend and we’re all going to be together for worship in one service. There will be a wide variety of “food” available in the worship service – musical and non-musical. Will you be picky or will you enjoy a balanced diet?

That’s enough to think about for now.