From the Interim Rector

Third Sunday after the Epiphany    

Collect

Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation, that we and the whole world may perceive the glory of his marvelous works; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings    

Services

7:45 a.m. Holy Eucharist Rite I  

Celebrant and Preacher: Ronald D. Pogue

Eucharistic Minister: Nancy Jackson 

Lector/Intercessor: Terri Koontz 

Usher: Wilson Eastland 

9:00 a.m., Holy Eucharist Rite II  

11:15 a.m., Holy Eucharist Rite II    

Others Serving This Sunday

Music     
Hymns  

530, 550, 660, 653             

Click HERE for a link to an online index to the 1982 Hymnal that will allow you to read the texts and listen to the tunes for Sunday's hymns.

Organ   

This is the Good Shepherd Prayer List. Each day at noon, the persons on this list are lifted up in prayer. On Sundays during the Prayers of the People, the Intercessor pauses while we pray aloud or silently for each of those on the prayer list, which is published in the bulletin. You are also invited to add these names to your personal prayer list.  

Be in worship on Sunday morning for a very important announcement from the Rector Nominating Committee!

Hymn 530 was originally set to the tune Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland (tune at Hymn 54), an association that undergirds the advent themes that underlie the missionary concern of the text. The text was later matched with the present tune, which first appeared in Geistreiches Gesangbuch (Halle, 1704) with Heinrich Held's text "Gott sei dank durch alle Welt." The tune was known under the name Lübeck in Episcopal Hymnals until our present Hymnal, which restores the original German association. Each of the four phrases of the tune begin with a pattern of three rising notes and the last line is in the same as the second line but transposed a fifth lower.

The matching of text and tune of Hymn 653 first occurred at Repton School in Derbyshire, England, some years before it actually appeared in print. Matched as tune and text, it presents an unusual situation in that not only was the text no intended for singing as a hymn, but neither was the melody initially conceived as a hymn tune. The text is taken from John Greenleaf Whittier's seventeen-stanza poem "The Brewing of Soma," first published in 1872. The poem described the brewing by East Indian priests of a "drink of the gods" and its intoxicating effect on worshipers. He concludes the poem with a six-stanza prayer for Christians beginning "Dear Lord and Father of mankind." Because of its essentially non-Christian origin, recent hymnologists have questioned the appropriateness of Whittier's stanzas for use in Christian worship, but the inherent beauty of these stanzas of text won the day.

The motet O sacrum convivium by Thomas Tallis has enjoyed a secure spot in the choral repertory for the past few centuries. It was first published in Cantiones Sacrae of 1575, a collection that Tallis and William Byrd published together and dedicated to the Queen. Tallis's style features the voices imitating one another, setting each line of text to different music, unifying elements such as intervallic repetition (a fourth or fifth announces the start of most phrases), and brief melismatic passages on important syllables. "Cross relations" happen with great frequency in English music of this period, a term that describes chromatic contradictions between two notes sounding simultaneously (or in close proximity) in two different voices. These somewhat startling moments are not "wrong notes" but are the byproduct of horizontal vocal lines weaving in and out of each other's way.