There’s just something special about Sunday night worship. Don’t you feel it? Yes, Sunday mornings, no matter the denomination (mostly), are the special designated gathering times for multiple chapters within the body of Christ, where we praise, worship, pray, have communion (sometimes), listen to the Word of God being preached and taught (hopefully), and so on. Certain Sundays are special too, like Palm Sunday, or Resurrection Sunday, or Pentecost Sunday, or Advent 1, or Christmas if it falls on a Sunday. Then some churches have services during the week, very often on Wednesday nights. My church in New York had some type of service every day that the pastoral staff led, but the choir I was in sang on Tuesday evenings, Wednesdays midday, and Thursday evenings. And then of course there’s Holy Week, where every day is significant, and for good reason.
Maybe it was because I was born on a Monday morning, but I
also felt as if Sunday night (and not, say, Friday night) marked completion:
completion of a week, completion of a cycle of work and rest and housework and
homework and fun activities, and so on. It’s interesting because in the Western
world, dreading Monday mornings is something of a Sunday ritual, especially on
Sunday nights. By God’s grace, I haven’t felt that in a very long time, and I
hope and pray that that doesn’t ever change. Instead, I feel rested, complete
for (or from) the week, and ready to begin anew the next cycle. I then think of
Scripture which says this:
Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished. And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made. Genesis 2:1-3, NKJV
OK, we seem to have shifted the weekly calendar ahead a day,
but sticking with the pattern, shift or no shift, I find this rest and feeling
of completeness kind of akin to what Saturday night would have felt like back
in those days.
I have a dream, a sort of pipe dream, where I hope to found
if not a church then a music mission/ministry where we have regularly-occurring
services or times of gathering, to praise God, but also where I can share and
showcase original work as well as highlight favorite works of others that are
Biblically sound as well. It’s a dream that has kind of gradually come together
over the years, not something I set out to do when I was in my 20s or anything.
In the Episcopal church, it is said that they read aloud a
lot of Scripture during the service, supposedly more than other denominations.
(After having been attending my current church, Good News Christian Center, for
the last six years, I officially beg to differ.) But there certainly wasn’t a
shortage of Scripture that was read! Each Sunday morning service included an
Old Testament reading, a reading of an excerpt from one of Apostle Paul’s
letters, and a Gospel reading. And then the sermon is supposed to take off from
one or more of those readings.
From the music side, my experience has drawn from the
Classical style, as far back as the early Renaissance era, to current music
(some of my choir directors were also composers!). Textually, we always covered
at least one Psalm (or excerpt from a Psalm), as well as other set text,
depending on the service. Looking back, some of my favorites were those that
were rich in Scripture (such as John Ireland’s “Greater Love Hath No Man,”
Malcolm Boyle’s “Thou, O
God,” and Samuel Wesley’s “Blessed be the God And
Father”, just to name a few; I even blogged about Ireland’s composition in
this post here).
But one other note was that these were the types of anthems to be performed on
Sunday nights (caveat: of course, many other Episcopal churches and/or churches
of other denominations perform these on Sunday mornings or even in midweek
services! I’m not saying that these pieces and those worship dates are mutually
exclusive!). Pieces that were not performed super-often, in part because they
were more complex and stood out from the crowd. Heck, from a choirboy /
solo-soprano standpoint, the premier solo that the best choirboy got of all the
pieces in the entire school year was that one Sunday in the middle of Lent when
we performed Felix Mendelssohn’s “Hear my prayer” (part 1; part 2).
But the point of all this is that these compositions were
also rich in Scripture, and not merely creatively good and technically complex
musical pieces to perform. After the prophetic word I received in 2019 that God
would provide new melodies for me to compose, I felt it on my heart to work
toward setting as much of the Bible to music as I could. Of all the books in
the Bible, the Psalms are the most likely to be set to choir music or
congregational music. (As of now, a plurality of the choir compositions that
God and I have written have been set to such texts!) But there are other
portions of Scripture that are primed to be set. Ireland’s composition draws
from books like the Song of Solomon (scandalous!), the Gospel of John, Peter’s
first letter, and Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth that has been
preserved (we denote it “1 Corinthians”). Boyle’s composition draws from
the Psalms and a brief verse from the book of Isaiah. Wesley’s composition
draws from the beginning of Peter’s first letter.
It’s not that we didn’t do the best of the best anthems
(both scripturally and musically) at other services or on other days; it’s just
that the best of the best always seemed to take place on Sunday nights. And
given that God deserves our best, I think it is fitting that more music is
written that exemplifies it on both counts. Even now, I still don’t think there
are enough such pieces that fit that.
