lutheranhymns | Entries tagged with stewardship

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I don't really think we need that semicolon, but here we are. Somewhat fittingly, wrapping up the stewardship section on Thanksgiving Day--this may turn into another blog post but I feel like having a religious worldview makes it pretty reasonable to be like "oh, it's autumn, our culture has a harvest festival to give thanks for abundant food and ultimately, direct our thanks to God," without having to be like "what if patriotism OH NO" about it. Anyway. This isn't really a harvest song, it's about following Jesus, and is kind of notable for mentioning the apostle Andrew without his more famous brother Peter. Andrew is described as the first disciple Jesus called, and therefore the one commemorated at the beginning of the church year (late November, also fitting). This also gave rise to a blog post many many years ago on another site about the significance of the fictional character Andrew Wiggin's name.

This is an example of the "one verse gets used for the offertory for a few months at a time" genre, we sang the second verse a lot. It makes sense, it's about how we should follow the examples of our ancestors by bringing the fruits of our labors, metaphorically or otherwise. But then we get the line about "the church of Christ is calling us to make the dream come true"! And it immediately clarifies that it's about Christ's love renewing the world, but that doesn't stop me from being amused and distracted when that line comes. "Make the dream come true!" Like, what dream? A fairy-tale story? The dream team of basketball? Your favorite board game partnership? As they say in "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat," any dream will do.

Fairly high tenor line, and fast-moving, too--lots of moving eighth notes even when the melody doesn't have them.

"God makes the clouds drop fatness" is kind of bizarre--like, God having an opinion about fatness is almost as good as God's wrestling opinions. But I think this might be related to an Advent chant (adapted from Isaiah) about "drop down, ye heavens, from above." That could also explain "the hills leap up" (God makes the mountains and valleys flat) and "crowns the year" as a harvest/end-of-year song.

Another one for the "harvest" mini-section rather than "things to sing for your pledge drive" (although October is often pledge drive month, at least in normal years, so who knows, maybe this was all deliberate). It's an elaboration on the parable of the wheat and the weeds (here translated as "tares," which you pretty much never see outside this context), and the implications are kind of sketchy, but then, the parable itself is kind of sketchy. "Good people and bad people are mixed together like wheat and weeds in the fields, and it's impossible to uproot the bad without destroying the good, so let's just wait till the end of the time so the angels can throw the wheat in the fire like they're chomping at the bit to do. P.S. God, please help us be good wheat. P.P.S. it's fine if you want to hurry it up and come already. But you're the boss."

The hymn is better than I'm making it sound, but it (repeatedly!) tries to rhyme "come" and "home," so maybe not by very much.

This one stands out for the rhythm/combinations of short notes. There are triplets (one beat split into, allegedly, three equal notes), and also sixteenth-eighth pairs (one beat split into three notes, but it's .25-.25-.5, and the .5 links into another full beat), plus random eighth rests to fill space. I wonder if it's supposed to be "syncopated" or "swung," or if they actually want you to distinguish between the equal thirds and .25/.25/.5 splits.

Sometimes when the offerings are being brought to the front of the church the congregation sings a relatively short response, maybe only one verse of a longer hymn--it's the kind of thing that they rotate in and out every few months. I'm not sure whether this specific hymn was used this way at one of my churches, but it feels like it certainly could have been; it's brief, and as the title suggests, it's precisely about asking God to accept our offerings!

(Sometimes instead of just copying the text the bulletins screenshot the hymn and then try to crop out the unused verses, which is its own proofreading adventure.)

The arranger, Alice Parker, has done a lot of arrangements, including a choir anthem version of "I Shall Not Be Moved," a gospel song that became the protest song "We Shall Not Be Moved."

This is still kind of in the mini-section/theme of harvest, there are lots of creation metaphors but very little about directly giving things to God--the first line even continues "like empty vessels," that doesn't sound like someone who's contributing to the stewardship fund drive :p

Our Scandinavian friend Hedwig strikes again, along with quality consonant-guy Trond Kverno on the melody.

This is a harvest-themed text so it makes sense that it would be in this section, there are several others about returning the fruits of our labors to God, but it is kind of amusing that its title is basically the name of another (albeit very long) section.

Edge case of Jesus=Proper Nouns; we get capital "Wisdom" following shortly after "Father." In this context it's probably a reference to the personification of Wisdom as a woman seen in Proverbs, who is sometimes equated with the Holy Spirit, but it's pretty surprising to see that without anything else like Son, Lord, Light, etc. referencing Jesus.

A lot of feminine rhymes that are masculine ones in disguise (it's this melody), but we get some originality with "sown fields/mown fields," "tilling/milling."

(I think that's also a deity in Game of Thrones, but that's someone else.)

Another appearance of Abbot's Leigh. Like "Great Commission," this one features a refrain in the last line.

The text is pretty good--blends images from the stars of space to workers in the fields to increasing knowledge. And, apparently, it was written by an Archdruid.

The time signature is one of those wander-y "it's 2/4 except for when it's 3/4" melodies.

On the surface it seems like a lovely message--we ask God to be with us in all our creative endeavors, which is something I should be able to get behind, as a creative person. Maybe it's just unfamiliarity, but it doesn't quite "click"; a lot of the subtext of the stewardship section is things we can sing during the pledge drives, and there's a disconnect between "let God inspire our creativity" and "also, give money plz and thx." Maybe it's just the broader vocation question of "what do you do when the things you like to do and ways that seem to be serving others don't really overlap." The rhyme scheme, while attempting to be dense, is also not that compelling (house/arouse/rejoice? pray/day/integrity?)

Not a lot going on here--this is a "second person woes" case because we need the rhyme "be/thee" twice! It's not quite "last verse same as the first" because only the rhymes are repeated, but still not a whole lot of originality.

"receive/give" is audacious as a rhyming pair, I'll put it that way.

The left hand (tenor/bass part) is odd, at one point it has a chord that's C sharp against B flat. It gets a little weird because technically there are a bunch of different ways to write anything in musical notation, but the short version is, it's not very common to have both sharps and flats in the same place at the same time.

So this is kind of interesting. The music here is the original one for this text--the composer and lyricist are father and daughter, respectively, which is adorable. However, the text was later adapted to a different tune, which will appear elsewhere. And I don't mean "the next song in this section, we'll get to it when we get to it," but "in another section entirely!"

My choir has sung a third arrangement of it, which is fairly easy except it slooooows doooooown every couple verses so we always had to watch that.

The verb "take" covers a lot of ground in English--the intended interpretation is asking God to take our various body parts and use them for God's own will, but it's not too hard to twist into "take away," as in, we need to be ready to sacrifice anything for God. Which I guess wouldn't be so bad if it was a little easier to perceive God's plan in the midst of everything.

Edit: I just realized, the lyricist is named Frances (female) and she had a brother named Francis (male). And I thought my parents were asking for trouble with similar-name choices, yowzer.

What's the melody?

I know this tune as "The Lone, Wild Bird," which is a choral anthem. The melody is pentatonic, which means it only uses (a specific) five notes of the scale rather than the full seven.

Isn't that also an a capella group?

Pentatonix was named after that musical style, not the other way around.

Does that carry over to the harmonization?

No, a couple B-flats show up in the tenor and alto parts.

Is the composer famous for other things?

Famous would be a stretch, but she's contributed several other Swedish hymns, such as Thy Holy Wings ("cutesy-twee" and also the great flood).

Is this one as cutesy?

No. It's also not as popular, though, so make of that what you will.

How's the Shannon density?

Somewhat low--every verse is A-B-A (repeating text).

What's with the 2 in brackets?

A lot of songs are in 2/4 or 4/4 time, which means there are 2 or 4 beats to a measure (mini-unit of sound). So usually the lengths of notes will add up relative to that. But sometimes you want to sing 3 notes, evenly spaced, in the time that it would normally take to divide 2 beats, so you write them as if each of them lasted for a half-beat and put a [3] on top to say "divide these three evenly to fill the 2-beat span."

This is somewhat rarer: it's in 12/8, so basically each measure consists of four units of 3. But here, they want to take one of those units of 3 and break it into 2 instead of 3, so the [2] means "these two notes together take up 1/4 of the measure."

Do the composers/arrangers/translators have awesome names?

Oh yes! I-to Loh, who I think we've seen before, joins forces with Daisy Nshakazongwe! This probably sets the record for greatest length discrepancy between transcriber/translator, but I'm not 100%.

How's the translation?

I don't know the language quoted at all (Tswana?? maybe??) but "To God our thanks we give" is translated as "Reamo leboga," while "our thanks to God we give" is "modimo wa rona." So either this language is very very sensitive to word order (which could be! there are lots of awesome language features out there and I only know a very small bit about them), and/or there was some paraphrasing going on.

Is the alto part kind of boring?

Some measures are repetitive, but it does get down to low G, which is a change of pace.

What's the deal with the refrain?

Not sure. This is the same English text as #680, but that one didn't have a refrain, so presumably this got included in the "alterations" to the translation.

How accurate is the Spanish translation?

It seems somewhat direct? The standout thing is that verse two is in second person in English, and third in Spanish. Not sure whether the workaround is because of gender (not wanting to refer to God as "he") or what. We also get a line about giving bees their honey in Spanish only.

So is the English the original?

No, it was actually written in German in the 17/1800s, and then translated! I assume the Spanish->German translation is direct and they didn't just play telephone via English, but I'm not sure.

Is the German version included?

Nope. Maybe trying to make up a quota of Spanish-language lyrics, and German wasn't in demand?

Does this song have much to do with stewardship?

Not directly? It's about giving thanks to God, so that could come in the form of giving back, but I mostly think of it as a Thanksgiving/harvest song.

What is the source of the music?

Listed in the index as "Welsh traditional." Not to be confused with "Welsh folk tune" and "Welsh tune," which are two separate entries (!)

What are the truths that still confound you?

Not sure; for a while .999 was up there. (Wikipedia featured article!)

What's this alternate tune business?

Just that, a suggestion for the name of alternate tune you can sing the lyrics to.

Can't you sing them to any tune with the same number of syllables? Isn't that why they also print how many syllables each line has?

Well, yes. I guess this is just a particular recommendation.

So you then have to look up the other tune to find it?

Yes, hopefully it's in the book. In this case it's "Hymn to Joy," which is just "Ode to Joy" hymn-ized.

Is Ode to Joy a good fit for this song?

I'm not sure. I think of that melody as a little too peppy for "ah yes, give money to church! so we can 'spread the gospel word'"! Albeit I come from a culture where "errgh, missionaries of the past, how dare they have tried to spread the gospel word, shudder" is the order of the day, so who knows.

Are the lyrics that bad?

Not really. The second verse about "we have talents and time we can use for lots of different things, including church" is kinda uplifting.

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I may be around tomorrow, but after that the blog will be afk for a week or so due to fun travels!