Hymn of the Day: "Cast Out, O Christ", ACS 1016
Text: Mary Louise Bringle, b. 1953
Music: CONSOLATION, A. Davisson, Kentucky Harmony, 1816; arr.Theodore A. Beck, 1929–2003

This hymn names many challenges: hate, dread, grief, fear, and shame. We ask Jesus to remove them from our lives. His actions are not confined to those long-ago miracles of casting out demons, calming storms, and entering locked rooms. Rather, Jesus continues to bring life, hope, and health to us today. We pray that our lives may be transformed to spread God’s love and joy to the world. The plaintive yet sturdy tune reflects the bold confidence with which Martin Luther says we loving children are instructed to pray in his explanation of the Lord’s Prayer in the Small Catechism.

Hymn of the Day: “O Living Breath of God” ELW 407
Text: Osvaldo Catena (1920-1986), tr. Gerard M. Cartford (1923)
Tune: VARVINDAR FRISKA, Swedish folk tune

This Pentecost hymn by Osvaldo Catena was first published in Camcionero Abierto, vol. 4 (1979). Gerhard M. Cartford translated it for Libro de Liturgia y Cántico (1998), through which it comes to Evangelical Lutheran Worship.

Osvaldo Catena was a Roman Catholic priest who dedicated his life to living and working among the people of the slum areas of Santa Fe, Argentina. He was a gifted musician and wrote many of the songs that have renewed Latin American liturgy. When Catena was appointed a liturgical adviser for the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), he had already begun using Argentine folk music in worship. He said, “I realized the music I used was like a strange language I spoke. People did not understand me. So I thought Liturgy could be a way to understanding, since it is the expression of the community praying as it sings. That is how I began composing my first songs for the Mass. We organized a choir…and in that group a process of reflection took place, for the vocation of a musician is not just something intimate and personal, but also the voice of the whole community. Music became the accompaniment of life.”

Gerhard Cartford was born in Madagascar, the son of missionary parents. He spent the years 1950-1951 doing research on Ludvig Lindeman and folk music in Oslo, Norway. That played into his doctoral dissertation ten years later, Music in the Norwegian Lutheran Church: A Study of Its Development in Norway and Its Transfer to America, 1825-1917. Dr. Cartford says this very popular "Swedish folk tune" VARVINDAR FRISKA may be Norwegian or may best be described as Scandinavian. In the Norwegian Norsk Salmebok in a slightly different version it is referenced as a Swedish folk tune. Pablo Sosa says it was probably taken by Catena from a collection of songs in Spanish by the Austrian musicologist Kurt Pahlen, where it is given as a "Norwegian children's song.

Choir Anthem: Unless you Lead Me, Love/Thomas Keesecker

Keesecker's setting of poetry by 13th cent. mystic Mechtild of Magdeburg invites us to dance and sing with the love that created the world. The music is not simplistic in its message or writing, and this anthem is a wonderful combination of metaphor, poetry, and beautiful melodic writing.

Mechthild of Magdeburg’s ideas are inspiring in their own right, but are all the more amazing considering the era she lived in (1207-1282) – a time from which women’s voices are mostly lost in the mists of time. What seems today as a literary jewel, was a “stone of offence” back then, because a FEMALE Beguine composed writings with a theological content in vernacular German and not in Latin, and she referred to a divine authorization for her mission. Her criticism of church dignitaries, religious laxity and claims to theological insight aroused so much opposition that some called for the burning of her writings. How fortunate we are that her words survive so we can bask in her reflected light.

Thomas Keesecker has served as a musician in Lutheran and Roman Catholic parishes in Virginia, Montana, and Maryland. His award-winning choral music has been published by several publishers. His studies at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and the Catholic University School of Music in Washington, D.C. prepared him for a career in which he has mixed classical technique and jazz improvisation. During the last decade, he has explored the nexus of creativity and healing and its implication for liturgical musicians.

I cannot dance, Lord,
unless you lead me.
If you want me to leap with abandon,
You must intone the song.
Then I shall leap into love,
From love into knowledge,
From knowledge into enjoyment,
And from enjoyment
beyond all human sensations.
There I want to remain,
yet want also to circle higher still.

Organ Voluntaries: March Upon Handel’s “Lift Up Your Heads,” Alexandre Guilmant (1837-1911)

Félix-Alexandre Guilmant was a French organist and composer. He was a student of his father, then of Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens, he became an organist and teacher in his place of birth. In 1871 he was appointed as organist of la Trinité church in Paris, a position that he held for 25 years. From then on he followed a career as a virtuoso; he gave concerts in Europe as well as in the USA. Guilmant created the Schola Cantorum in 1894 with Charles Bordes and Vincent d'Indy. In 1896 he succeeded Charles-Marie Widor as organ teacher of Conservatoire de Paris. With André Pirro, he published a collection of scores, Archives des Maîtres de l'Orgue (archives of the masters of the organ), a compilation of the compositions of numerous classical French composers in ten volumes, from 1898 to 1914. He proceeded in the same manner for foreign masters of the organ, publishing l'Ecole classique de l'Orgue (Classical School of the Organ),

Guilmant was an accomplished composer, particularly for his own instrument, the organ. His organ repertoire includes his 18 collections of Pièces dans différents styles (Pieces in Differing Styles), of which today’s Voluntary is a part.

Hymn of the Day: “Thine the Amen” ELW 826
Text: Herbert F. Brokering (1926)
Tune: Thine, Carl F. S chalk, (1929)

Herbert Brokering wrote this hymn text at Holden Village, the retreat center for renewal in the Cascade Mountains near Chelan, Washington. It was the tenth hymn he wrote in as many days in the summer of 1981. Each morning Walter Bouman led a Bible study, and on the following morning it was reviewed through the singing of a hymn by Brokering, who said, "We sang each study the following morning. This hymn is on the great eucharistic theology in Revelation. It was to be a then to the now."'The "Now" refers to Jaroslav Vajdas "Now the silence" (#460). The hymn comes to Evangelical Lutheran Worship through With One Voice (1995).

At this same Holden Village summer session in 1981, Carl Schalk was the composer for Brokering's hymns. He remembers the schedule like this. "After each morning's Bible study by Walter Bouman, Herb Brokering would fashion a new text, which he had to have finished by about noon that day. I had to write a tune and accompaniment by about three in the afternoon since I had to get it to the print shop, which closed at four in the afternoon, for duplication so we could use it the following morning. This pattern continued each day for two weeks.” One day Schalk mentioned to Brokering that since he (Schalk) had set a text by Jaroslav Vajda called “Now" that Brokering might write one called "Then." Within a day or so Brokering "had written a text in which almost each line began with 'Thine. Thus the idea of Then' became ‘Thine.' The tune was published with this text as an anthem in 1983 and in Christians, Awake! A Hymn Supplement (1989). It appeared in the same year in The Carl Schalk Hymnary
(1989), where it was called THEN. The name was subsequently changed to THINE.

Opening Voluntary: Reflection on Savannah, David Blackwell (1961)

David Blackwell is an award-winning composer and freelance arranger, writer and editor. Undoubtedly one of our finest educational writers, his music is published in the UK and US and performed worldwide. We begin the final service of the Easter season with his setting of the hymn tune “Savannah,” or “Love’s Redeeming Work Is Done.”

The original tunne was composed by Johannes Thommen, (1711-1783). Born in Switzerland, Johannes Thommen was a pietist. He traveled through Scandinavia singing hymns and accompanying himself on his 10-string guitar. He contributed to the Zion's Harp, a collection of hymns and songs.

Sending Voluntary: VICTORY (The Strife Is O'er, the Battle Done), Michael Helman (1956)

To close the Easter season I’ve chosen a setting of “The Strife Is O'er, the Battle Done.” Its tune, VICTORY, comes from the choral mass Magnificat Tertii Toni by the Italian Renaissance composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, specifically from the “Gloria Patri.” The opening phrases of the Gloria were adapted by William Monk into the tune we sing now. He also added the final “alleluias” to this very popular hymn.

Michael Helman is currently Director of Music/Organist at Faith Presbyterian Church in Cape Coral, Florida. Prior to moving to Florida in 2006, Michael was Director of Music/Organist for fifteen years at St. Paul’s United Methodist in Wilmington, Delaware.

Hymn of the Day: “O Blessed Spring” ELW 447
Text: Susan Palo Cherwien (1953-2021)
Tune: BERGLUND, Robert Buckley Farlee (1950)

The images of “O Blessed Spring” draw the singer into the seasons of life with warmth and beauty. Many hymns have a theological treatise to prove. Each stanza advances information like a legal case that culminates in a closing argument in the final stanza. By contrast, each stanza of “O Blessed Spring” unfolds like a bud into a blossom. The singer comes to the final stanza, not with the triumph of a well-made theological argument, but with a sense of wonder that comes from glimpsing sacred mystery.

A baptismal image was the source for “O Blessed Spring.” Susan Palo Cherwien describes her inspiration: “Above the baptismal font in Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd in Minneapolis hangs a striking bronze sculpture by the late Paul Granlund, a sculpture which embodies the image of John 15:5 ‘I am the vine; you are the branches.’ Granlund cast a tree with four branches depicting the four ages of human life, with Christ as the central trunk. This bronze provided the structure for the text ‘O Blessed Spring,’ the words of which are woven around a central Christ image.”

In stanza two of the hymn, Mrs. Cherwien equates the “summer heat” with “youthful years” and “uncertain faith, rebellious tears.” During the season of autumn (stanza three), the limbs of the tree are ripe with “heavy harvest.” This season offers “beauty, wisdom, love.” Stanza four explores the season of winter where “We breathe our last, return to dust.” Yet, “in Christ, our souls take wing”; thus the lifecycle is complete in the “promise of spring.” The final stanza introduces a baptismal, sacramental tone, the original inspiration of the hymn, in “this blest mystery” as

Word and water thus revive
And join us to your Tree of Life.

Mrs. Cherwien is a freelance writer and musician. She received her bachelor’s degree in church music and voice from Wittenberg University, her Abschlussprüfung (final examination) in voice from the Hochschule der Künste Berlin, and a Master of Liberal Studies from Mundelein College, where she focused on spirituality, ritual, and the arts.

Though in the ELW this text is paired with another tune, the poet originally wrote the text so that it would fit the melody O WALY WALY, an English folk melody.

Choir Anthem: Creator Spirit By Whose Aid, Vernon Hoyle (1948)

With a text by John Dryden (based upon Veni Creator Spiritus), Vernon Hoyle gives us a broad, grand anthem in the English cathedral style.

Curiously The poems of Dryden show high excellence in fields widely different from another. He was for years the leader of the English stage, a writer of tragedy, comedy, and tragi-comedy. Though the gross immorality of his dramas has long made them unreadable, his influence on poetry has been enduring. His name has recently assumed a new importance to the students of hymns, from a claim made on his behalf in regard to a considerable body of translations from the Latin published after his death. Until recently, Dryden's known contributions to hymnody consisted of only three pieces, the best known of these the translation of “Veni Creator.”

Vernon Hoyle was born in Hatfield, South Yorkshire. In his sundry capacities as chorister, organist, choral director, composer, arranger and editor he has been active in Anglican church music for over fifty years. His compositions and arrangements, many of which are published, comprise educational works and choral music, much of this for the Anglican church.

Opening Voluntary: “Easter Hymn”, Michael Bedford

As Eastertide nears its completion, I hope you will enjoy a few quiet moments with a meditation on the usually boisterous “Jesus Christ is risen today.”

Michael Bedford is Organist/Choirmaster Emeritus of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma. After 50 years in the church music business, and 25 of those years at St. John’s Church, he is now retired. Currently he serves as President of the American Guild of Organists. In his spare time he continues to compose and write mystery novels.

Closing Voluntary: “Dance: Gaudeamus Pariter” Mary Beth Bennett (1954)

Today’s Closing Voluntary is a setting of the hymn tune Gaudeamus Pariter, by Johann Roh (1487-1547), which leads us to speak of pseudonyms. Johann Roh was a native of Bohemia. Roh was his name in Bohemian, but when he wrote in Latin he called himself Cornu, and when he wrote in German, he called himself Horn. In the ELW, this tune is paired with the text “Come, You Faithful, Raise the Strain.”

Mary Beth Bennett is a recognized performer, improviser and composer living in historic Richmond, Virginia. She serves on the adjunct music faculty of the University of Richmond, and is Director of Music Ministries at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church in Gloucester, Virginia.. She has previously held various positions in Washington, D.C., including at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.