Tag: Hymn

Love inspired the anger – hymn

Love inspired the anger: Hymn for Lent 3 – John 2: 13-22

 

1          Love inspired the anger
            That cleared a temple court,
            Overturned the wisdom
            Which their greed had wrought.

2          Love inspired the anger
            That set the leper free
            From the legal strictures
            That brought misery.

3          Love inspired the anger
            That cursed a viper’s brood:
            Set on domination,
            Self with God confused.

4          Love inspires the anger
            That curses poverty,
            Preaches life’s enrichment,
            Seeks equality.

5          Love inspires the anger
            That still can set us free
            From the world’s conventions
            Bringing liberty.

Andrew E Pratt (born 1948)
© 1993 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, England copyright@stainer.co.uk . Please include any reproduction for local church use on your CCL Licence returns. All wider and any commercial use requires prior application to Stainer & Bell Ltd & The Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes

Singing the Faith 253 (also published in 4 other books)
Metre: 6 6 6 5 Trochaic
Tunes: NORTH COATES; TEMPLE COURT

Once transfiguration blinded – a hymn

Some of you will remember the hymn, ‘Stay, Master, stay upon this heavenly hill’.
As the disciples want to continue in the purer air of the mountaintop, to stay eternally, Jesus
rebukes them:


No, saith the Lord, the hour is past, we go;
Our home, our life, our duties lie below.
While here we kneel upon the mount of prayer,
The plough lies waiting in the furrow there.


And the disciples respond:


There we must do it, serve him, seek him still.
The following hymn continues this theme of being lost in such wonder that we forget the needs that
we are called to meet:

Once transfiguration blinded 

1 Once transfiguration blinded 
those who climbed to follow Christ, 
seeing through a mist of glory, 
just a glimpse at once sufficed; 
just a glimpse of holy heaven, 
earth and heaven neatly spliced. 

2 Light can blind us to the sorrow, 
to the pain of poverty, 
light of holy exaltation, 
or the light of being free:
free of fear of want or hunger 
resting in complicity.

3 Lost in thunder, bathed in wonder, 
hands uplifted should we praise, 
while, in destitution, neighbours, 
wait for weeks, not merely days,
for the crumbs dropped from a table
that austerity displays.

Andrew E Pratt (born 1948)
Words © 2018 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, England copyright@stainer.co.uk . Please include any 
reproduction for local church use on your CCL Licence returns. All wider and any commercial use 
requires prior application to Stainer & Bell Ltd.
Metre: 8 7 8 7 8 7
Tune: WESTMINSTER ABBEY (Purcell)

Hymn of Seasons

From season to season, 
through death and re-birth,
this world, through its phases, 
shows love has no dearth.

Such love is for sharing, 
to do good to all,
to nurture well-being, 
to echo God's call.

Through sensitive reason 
we fathom the need
of neighbours, of nature;
we subjugate greed.

We offer each other 
the kiss of God's peace,
embracing earth's harmony, 
hatred will cease.

Through summer and autumn, 
through winter's release,
we welcome spring's coming 
with nature's increase.

All praise for the gifting 
of harvest and life,
all power to the ending 
of all human strife.

Andrew E Pratt (born 1948)
Words © 2002 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, England copyright@stainer.co.uk . Please include 
any reproduction for local church use on your CCL Licence returns. All wider and any 
commercial use requires prior application to Stainer & Bell Ltd

Metre: 11 11 11 11
Tune: DATCHET

Shaken confidence dismembers

A hymn inspired by Matthew 16: 21 perhaps, also useful in difficult times and when faith is tested.

‘From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and 
undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, 
and on the third day be raised.’

Shaken confidence dismembers 
faith that once had seemed secure, 
things that frighten in this moment, 
at one time had seemed demure.

Love is fractured, hope is fettered, 
grace obscured from sight or sound, 
while we cry in desperation, 
'where is safe and solid ground'.

Through the mist a form is shaping, 
living sign of love and grace, 
God embodied, present, human, 
seen in every neighbour's face.

Hold the truth when doubt is raging, 
when our lives are insecure, 
fold in love each friend and neighbour, 
till that love feels safe and sure.

Andrew E Pratt (born 1948)

© 2015 Stainer and Bell Ltd. 

Words: Andrew Pratt (born 1948) © 2015 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, England, 

www.stainer.co.uk. Please include any reproduction for local church use on your CCL 

Licence returns. All wider and any commercial use requires prior application to Stainer & 

Bell Ltd.

Metre: 8 7 8 7

Tune: STUTTGART

A hymn for Trinity Sunday – ‘We cannot understand…

Sunday the 4th of June 2023 is marked as Trinity Sunday. 

I have never found the descriptions of the Trinity easy to accept – they focus on how you can have three persons in one God. My own resolution of this is less to focus on the how and simply to say that we experience something of God in and through creation, God is the ground of being, of all that exists. Jesus shows us how God would be if God was human. When our lives are an image of that of Jesus then we are living with the same Spirit. 

The thread is that of Love – in creation, in Jesus and in ourselves. And so, a hymn…

We cannot understand them,
the things we’re bid to say;
our creeds seem so confusing:
yet this is what we pray:
God’s Love was the beginning,
before all life began.
This Love became incarnate,
to last a human span.

The paradox of mystery:
the image we refine
at once divinely human,
though humanly divine.
Yet death can signal ending, 
but Love still lingers on: 
perpetual, holding Spirit
when even hope has gone.

Andrew Pratt 29/5/2023 Words © 2023 © Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, England copyright@stainer.co.uk . Please include any reproduction for local church use on your CCL Licence returns. All wider and any commercial use requires prior application to Stainer & Bell Ltd.
Metre: 7.6.7.6
Tune: CRUGER (Hail to the Lord’s anointed)