The title of this week’s piece is a bit of a misnomer: it’s not from an open mic night, but from a morning church service. There’s also no singing—at least, not from me! I’m just tickling the ivories. *Tickle, tickle!*
The piece here is one of my favorite Christmas carols, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” We did sing it for morning service this past Sunday, 27 November 2022 at my little country church, but I was warming up and having a bit of cheeky fun beforehand.
Now that The Age of The Virus is pretty much over, my school has resumed its normal schedule of weekly events, most of which were shuttered during those two, long, pointlessly fearful years. Part of that schedule is Chapel on Thursday mornings.
Years ago, we had a regular chaplain, a crusty ex-Marine and Episcopal reverend whom I loved dearly (his widow gave me several of his shirts and a leather bag, which I still carry to this day). After his passing, we went through a parade of youth pastors of various stripes and backgrounds, and briefly brought in a charismatic black man who shouted inspirationally at the students (and frequently showed up late, or not at all).
We now have a young Spanish teacher—a very sweet, unassuming fellow, who is probably six-and-a-half-feet tall—who will serve as our chaplain. However, he’s a shy man—a gentle giant—and wasn’t quite ready to dive into Chapel this year. As such, the administration asked me to deliver the first little lesson of the year.
It’s a responsibility I took seriously, but also willingly. I prayed about what I should cover, and while flipping through a devotional from The Daily Encouraging Word, I found a good lesson from James 1:19 about listening.
It was a good, broad message that is applicable even for non-believers, and I thought it’d make a good, quick lesson for students, who often need to be reminded to listen closely and not to jump to conclusions (many adults—myself included!—need to be reminded of this lesson, too!). The five tips are directly from the DEW devotional, but I added in some verses I’d been mulling over from Proverbs.
It was remarkable to me how the Holy Spirit placed these related verses in front of me as I was putting this little talk together. I’ve been reading and rereading Proverbs, reading one chapter a day for each day of the month, and it’s really deepened my understanding of the wisdom contained therein. It just so happened that there was a great passage from Proverbs 25 the morning I was to give the chapel lesson, so it fit in nicely.
To God Be the Glory!
It’s the tenth edition of Lazy Sunday posts dedicated to looking back at Supporting Friends Friday features. I think after this Sunday I’m going to give the SFF retrospectives a break for a bit, as I’ve nearly caught up to the present day with them.
This weekend’s mix is of a more literary and theological bent:
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
It’s Good Friday in the Western Church, so I thought I’d spotlight the friends that need our support the most: our local churches.
Your local churches will obviously be quite different than mine, but I would encourage every Christian reader to give to your local church this weekend. If you are not tithing to a church already, start doing so! Only 5% of churchgoers tithe, but American Christians earn $5.2 trillion annually. Imagine the transformative impact if every Christian gave ten percent. That could feed, clothe, and shelter a lot of people. It would also be an incredible witness to Christians’ commitment to their faith.
Here’s hoping everyone had a wonderful Christmas! Today it’s all about church and after-Christmas sales.
Technically, we’re still in the glorious Christmas season. That whole “twelve days of Christmas” isn’t just to flesh out a tedious novelty song; Christians used to (and many still do) celebrate Christmas for twelve days, marking the major events of Christ’s young life. Really, Christmas ends on Epiphany, on 6 January. It commemorates the Wise Men’s’ visit to the Christ Child, which represents Christ’s manifestation to the Gentiles.
Granted, I probably won’t be writing about Christmas on 6 January 2022 (we’ll see!), but I’m not opposed to squeezing in some more Christmas fun.
To that end, here are some three recent Christmas classics:
Merry Christmas!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
In the spirit of yesterday’s post, which also dealt with a passage from Ecclesiastes, I thought I’d dust off an old post from my The Desperate Search for Meaning Series, which I completed back in 2019. A double-shot of Ecclesiastes, and the long-winded (but condensed here) wisdom of Pastor Monday is always a nice treat.
With that very brief introduction, here is October 2019’s “The Desperate Search for Meaning IV: Vanity“:
My pastor delivered an interesting sermon this past Sunday (23 May 2021) entitled “Recognizing the Passing Seasons of Life.” The sermon pulled from the famous passage from Ecclesiastes 3, explaining that “To everything there is a season” and there is “a time for every purpose under heaven.”
I’ve always loved Ecclesiastes and its central insight that without God, everything is meaningless. The perpetual turning of the seasons—the cycle of birth, preparation, harvest, and death—is similarly meaningless—an endless cycle—without God.
Pastor Monday took a slightly different approach, one that is still very important: we so often abuse, misuse, or waste the time we have. The season of preparation—planning ahead, planting our seeds, tending to them, etc.—is frequently squandered; as a result, the harvest is lacking. We all want the harvest without the preparation, but a harvest that lacks preparation is no harvest at all—or a harvest of dust.
Yesterday marked the first December church service of the year, so I was finally able to whip out some Christmas carols for morning service. My pastor’s personal favorite carol is “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” so that was our first congregational singing. But he requested an interesting pick for the second singing: “Away in a Manger.”
“Away in a Manger” is not always top-of-mind for me when it comes to Christmas carols, but it possesses the same sweet simplicity (and triple feel) of “Silent Night.” It’s also very easy to play, which makes it nice to crack open when practice time is short (“Hark!,” by contrast, is a bit more complicated, especially with its profusion of secondary dominants and moving to minor in the last couple of phrases). The melody is very sweet, and easily harmonized in thirds.
I’ll be writing about more Christmas carols this season. I hit most of the high-profile ones last year, so it’s going to be fun to dig into some of the more obscure carols over the coming weeks. But to ease into Monday, I figured I’d look back to last year’s post on “Away in a Manger” [note: I’ve cut out the lengthy preamble about the pending impeachment at the beginning of the original post, so as to focus exclusively on the hymn itself]:
Last night I attended a men’s monthly Bible study at a church in Lamar. My neighbors had been inviting me for a couple of months, but when that mythical third Monday would roll around, I’d always have some outstanding obligation (mainly rehearsal for the Spooktacular). Since I’m running for Town Council again in January, I figured it would be good to feed my soul and my political ambitions simultaneously (they also brought sub sandwiches, so I was pretty well-fed holistically by the time I left).
The evening was spiritually, culturally, and politically encouraging. These men were fired up for Jesus, our country, and Trump, in that order. After everybody caught up a bit and after some introductions (I was the new guy at the meeting), the conversation gradually turned to politics, starting (I believe) with the necessity for a border wall, and Biden’s hare-brained pledge to tear it down.
From there, it was a free-ranging discussion, including vigorous airings of grievances; laments for the state of our nation; pledges to resist excessive government mandates; and repeated admonitions to trust in God. Our Scripture reading was Psalm 138. The Psalm is a reminder that God is in control, and will support us in our hour of need. Here’s verse 7, from the New King James Version:
7Though I walk in the midst of trouble, You will revive me;
You will stretch out Your hand
Against the wrath of my enemies,
And Your right hand will save me.
It being October, I tend to focus on the spookiness of the season. I love Halloween, ghost stories, and scary movies, but it’s important not to get too bogged down in the chills.
So as I was going through posts from October 2019, I stumbled upon one of my old favorites: “The Joy of Hymnals.” My small church roped me into playing piano for Sunday morning services maybe two years ago, and it quickly rekindled an old love of hymns and hymnals.
Hymnals are my favorite items to find in old second-hand shops and antique stores (the latter of which often selling them at an egregious markup). It’s fun to see which hymns do—and, more importantly, don’t—show up in any given hymnal. I particularly like slender volumes, the kind that were meant for carrying from service to service or camp meeting to camp meeting, and which tend to possess hymns from the canon, if such a thing exists, of hymnody.
I even recorded and released a very lo-fi EP, The Lo-Fi Hymnal, which consists of crude recordings of my Sunday morning playing. That short collection also includes a PDF version of today’s TBT feature.
Here is “The Joy of Hymnals“:
