Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away

This Sunday’s worship service will be built around a wonderful collection of hymns, the Word proclaimed and the Word sealed in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Table.  I am very eager for the service.  Come Sunday morning, you will want to be with us!

The service will begin with Debbie McCowin and John Rackley preparing us for worship with a piano-horn rendering of the old gospel song, His Eye is on the Sparrow. Click Here for Patti Sandy’s version of the song.

As we move through the service, each song will be from the American tradition of folk, gospel and spiritual songs and hymns. From the hymnal we will sing How Firm a Foundation as our opening hymn and I’ve Got Joy Like a River in response to the assurance of God’s forgiveness.  In preparation for Communion we will sing What Wondrous Love Is This and Let Us Break Bread Together and we will leave worship and go into the world singing I’m Gonna Live So God Can Use Me.  But the piece I may be most excited about is in the “anthem” slot.  John and Debbie will again bring horn and piano to another old gospel song, this time I’ll Fly Away (click here for a traditional blue grass version or here for Johnny Cash or here if you’d prefer Jars of Clay).  

Sunday’s bulletin will include a brief background piece on each hymn, and you will see that the roots of I’ll Fly Away are deep in the cotton fields of the south.  The power of so many folk, gospel and spiritual songs and hymns is that they speak particularly to an American context, though for many of us that context has grown distant.  Still, however, they speak to our hearts.  We can see the faithful couple, an invalid and her crippled husband, whose joy was in the fact that they knew the God whose eye is on the sparrow (and I know he watches over me).  And somehow we understand that the story of slaves who would gather for worship before dawn singing “Let praise God together on our knees” is also our story.  

It is fair to say that the theology of these homegrown lyrics is not always profound, often based more on experience than rooted in the Word or anchored by confession or creed.  And so we are driven to the firm foundation of God’s excellent Word.  Sunday’s service will, in the end, be centered on the Word proclaimed through the sermon and sealed through the Sacrament.  And, again, I am eager for the service.  We will probe the story of the Upper Room and, I believe, will encounter the Living Christ as we humbly accept his invitation to the feast. 

I’m pretty sure that Park people will respond well to this service, opening their mouths (and maybe clapping their hands) as we sing and their minds and their hearts as we receive the Word.