Creator of the Stars of Night

It's nearly Advent again. A whole year has passed, and a few measly posts here. I much prefer writing in the no-discipline-required venue of my family blog.

Casting my net for good Advent songs to introduce to our congregation, I was ecstatic to find that High Street Hymns has done a version of "Creator of the Stars of Night". It's beautiful, the melody is a perfect match for the words, and the simple chorus that they added is a good balance to the complexity of the verses (which in some versions date back to 9th century Latin). Unfortunately they only included 2 verses and had lots of interlude and chorus time. You can really only sing "Come, oh come" but so many times before you forget what you're singing about and your mind wanders. So I think I'm going to use their tune, with no capo so it's a little low for the congregation but more singable than their very high version, and with these slightly tweaked lyrics:

Creator of the stars of night,

Your people's everlasting light,

O Christ, Redeemer of us all,

We pray You hear us when we call.

To You the suff'ring deep was known

that made the whole creation groan

'til You, Redeemer, should set free

Your own in glorious liberty.

Come, Savior, come.

Come, oh come.

Come, Savior, come

to us.

When this old world drew on toward night,

You came, but not in splendor bright

as monarch, but as humble child

of Mary, blessed mother mild.

Come, Savior, come.

Come, oh come.

Come, Savior, come

to us.

Come in Your holy might, we pray;

redeem for us eternal day

from every pow'r of darkness, when,

Lord, You will judge all sons of men.

To God the Father, God the Son,

and God the Spirit, Three in One,

Laud, honor, might, and glory be

from age to age eternally.

Come, Savior, come.

Come, oh come.

Come, Savior, come

to us.

The song has an easy, lilting rhythm that one of my band members described as being akin to a drinking song. I'd say maybe an end-of-the-night, everyone's fading away to their homes drinking song. It's really easy and catchy, an atypical praise song but one which I hope is still very congregation-friendly.

I ended up going to the 1940 Anglican hymnal and revising the verses from there. In verse 2, I changed "travail" to "suffering", because though I love "travail" I wanted to be realistic--who really knows what it means anymore? I had it slightly wrong and would have changed it to "trouble" until I checked the dictionary. In verse 3 I changed "blameless mother Mary" to "blessed mother Mary" because "blameless" doesn't seem accurate to sing in a Protestant context. We believe in the virgin birth, but "blameless" implies a whole lot more than that. I gave verse 4 the boot, because run-of-the-mill, Army Protestants just don't have quite the attention span of hardcore plainsong-singing Anglicans. The content is good, but I didn't think it added much to this particular song. And I had to account for the extra length from the chorus.

Like "O Come O Come Emmanuel", this one is perfect for Advent because of its echoes of the second coming. The Savior came once, and He is coming again. What a reminder to prepare the way! I also love its echoes of creation, when God made this beautiful world of nothing. My daughter has a Tiny Bear's Bible that is not only fuzzy and good for cuddling with (picture above), it also has some quite nice poetry such as this powerful depiction of creation:

He flung stars into space! He painted the sky!

He lit up the sun! He taught birds how to fly!

I like this verse but am on the fence about including it:

God, grieving that the ancient curse

should doom to death a universe

has found the medicine of grace

to save and heal a wounded race.

Maybe I'll have an alternate version of the song that we do sometimes. That's the beauty--one of the few--of using Powerpoint in church. You can change lyrics with minimal confusion.

A much darker version of the lyrics exists here. That website traces its origins back to the 7th century--how crazy is that? About 1300 years and we can still sing the same things about God.

Hebrews 13: ⁷ Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you.

Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.

⁸ Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

In a way, those who came before us in the faith are our leaders, who speak the word of God to us through song. They suffered, died, lived lives of love, and passed on the faith, all for God's glory. Let's sing these old songs with gratitude.

For us fights the Valiant One

(A Berg, not a Burg, but I didn't have a picture of a Burg.)

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,

the holy habitation of the Most High.

God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved;

God will help her when morning dawns.

The nations rage, the kingdoms totter;

He utters his voice, the earth melts.

The LORD of hosts is with us,

the God of Jacob is our fortress.

~from Psalm 46~

We 'll be attempting to sing "A Mighty Fortress is our God" in church tomorrow.

This shouldn't be news to anybody, but it's a fantastic hymn. And it also requires a dictionary and an attention span. As Joe McKeever (someone about whom I don't know a thing except what I saw in this article when I googled "Lord Sabaoth") pointed out here, each verse is dependent upon the one that came before. No verses hit the cutting room floor on this one. Anyway, it clocks in at a very reasonable 4.

It also probably isn't news that Martin Luther himself wrote it in 1529 ("Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott") and based it on Psalm 46; it's also called the "Battle Hymn of the Reformation". When I was deciding whether we should do it and reading through, the words "the body they may kill" jumped out at me. My, that's grim! Are we really going to sing about being executed for our faith tomorrow? Isn't that sort of...passé? What an incredibly sheltered life I lead. We worry about Christian or theistic references being scrubbed out of public life, while Christians in other countries worry about being martyred. Themselves. Like, for real. Here's one example. Here's another.

Well, here's what I learned. A "bulwark" is just what it sounds like--something strong that keeps danger out. It can be a literal wall, a figurative support, or in the plural, a wall that goes around the deck of a ship to protect what's on the deck, like sailors. I like that last one best. Something about the idea of weathering the storm with God's protection speaks to me. (But maybe that's because I've never been besieged in an ancient castle surrounded by marauding rival tribes. Maybe then the "wall" would speak to me more.) (On a side note, if we're sailors, how does that fit in with Chaplain Kim's announcement that we are not part of the Navy or Air Force of God--there is just the the Army of God according to Scripture?!)

Lord Sabaoth seems to mean something like "Lord of Hosts" or "Lord of armies". It doesn't seem to have much to do with the Sabbath as far as I've read. This alternate translation of Luther's lyrics has that line translated as "Of Sabbath Lord, and there's none other God" while the standard translation says "Lord Sabaoth His name, from age to age the same". They both rhyme much too well to be close translations, don't you think? I wonder which one is right. Well I don't have time to delve into that. Romans 9:29 calls God the Lord of hosts in the ESV while the KJV & NASB say Lord of Sabaoth. It's a pretty cool phrase if you know what it means. There is one place in which the alternate translation wins hands down: Verse 2, stanzas 3 and 4. The one we'll sing reads "...were not the right Man on our side, the Man of God's own choosing" while the alternate is "...but for us fights the Valiant One, whom God Himself elected." Reading all of both translations, though, it's easy to see that for the sake of perspicuity we are singing the better version.

Tim Challies recently linked to a post about an early Protestant martyr (Rowland Taylor in 1555). The author quotes some of his parting words to his family as recorded in Foxe's Book of Martyrs:

"I say to my wife, and to my children, The Lord gave you unto me,

and the Lord hath taken me from you, and you from me: blessed be the name of the Lord!... Trust ye therefore in Him by the means of our dear Saviour Christ's merits: believe, love, fear, and obey Him: pray to Him, for He hath promised to help. Count me not dead,

for I shall certainly live, and never die.

I go before, and you shall follow after, to our long home."

The first song we're doing Sunday--chosen long before I read that quote--is "Blessed Be Your Name".

If you can't stomach the organ, I like this guy's version. Chord chart here.

Peculiar Pain

One day...
"I felt like," my husband began in a way which let me know he was reflecting on this morning's church service, "the words...to the worship songs were particularly meaningless today." Agreed! I could hardly bring myself to sing some of them, and at this point I told him so. It turned out that our silences during much of the singing was due to the same reason. We were experiencing the peculiar pain of human-focused worship songs. (Remove one nonessential word from that sentence and you get human-worship songs. Not good.) We just weren't "feeling it", and the songs we were expected to sing with proper enthusiasm and, perhaps, hand-raising, were so completely focused on our own feelings that I did not feel that I could honestly sing them, based on how I happened to be feeling today. Plus, if I voiced those flashing, non-punctuated PowerPoint phrases, I wouldn't be singing about God, I would be singing about me.

I'm a sinner saved by grace who still lives in a world chock-full of sin and the resulting pain and suffering; I'm being sanctified by Jesus, but on some days I'm still up to my eyeballs in sadness, depression, doubt, or just plain bad attitude. So it's not helpful to me to sing about myself, but more importantly it borders on the blasphemous to fill God's place in the song with me. Why should I sing about my emotions when I could be singing about God's attributes? Why sing about my response to Him when I can sing about what He's done for me? Even when the songs are written with the best of intentions (as I am sure many of them are) the lyricists seem to have chosen the second-best option--writing about the prodigal son returning when they could be writing about the Father standing with open arms to greet him.