First Presbyterian Church, East Moline, IL
May 31, 2026, Trinity A
2 Chronicles 5:11-14; Colossians 3:12-17
Notes on the Hymn Sing
Today actually is Trinity Sunday, on which the church is called to reflect upon the mystery that the same God who is one is also three - "God in three persons, blessed Trinity," as our first hymn of the day puts it. Trinity is an occasion on which an earnest preacher can get tripped on some fine point of doctrine if not careful, ending up somewhere between serious error and outright heresy. Having a hymn sing today, therefore, sounded like a good idea.
The three hymns that appear in the regular places in the service are reflective of the day's focus on the Trinity; they are not among the requests given for the hymn sing. That includes Hymn #8, possibly recognized by some as "the Navy hymn" but in fact a fine Trinitarian hymn. In addition to the five here, there is one more request included in the service, but it seemed useful to place it in the response spot after the offering and let it recur for a few weeks at least.
The first hymn of the sing is a long-familiar one in the church, with its original Irish text dating back to at least the tenth or eleventh century. It takes a particular Irish form known as a lorica, which is a form of prayer for protection; two other hymns in Glory to God, #6 and #543, also take the form and function of the lorica. The Irish text was first translated in 1905, and adapted to verse for singing in 1912, by two Irish women.
(sing, standing)
The next two hymns both come from a twentieth-century impulse toward a loosening of congregational song from particular forms and structures in place for many decades by this time. The author and composer of this first hymn was quite insistent that the verses were meant to be sung by a soloist or soloists, with the congregation singing the refrain in full. Since I didn't think to acquire a soloist, we will all sing the whole song.
(sing, sitting)
Like the previous hymn, "On Eagle's Wings" comes from that twentieth-century song movement that was rooted in the Catholic church. This one you might remember being included in the presidential inauguration ceremonies of January 2020.
(sing, standing)
Our next hymn harkens back to the earlier twentieth century. Its author indicates that, unlike many popular and long-lasting hymn texts, this one was not prompted by any particular event in his life; it simply grew out of his familiarity with two particular scriptures (James 1:17 and Lamentations 3:22-23), particularly in the King James Version which was most prominently in use in the 1920s.
(sing, sitting)
The story behind the creation of our final hymn in this set has something to say about student-teacher relationships. To wit; the tune was composed by the famous composer and teacher Charles Villiers Stanford as an accompaniment to the familiar hymn text "For all the saints." It caught on quickly and became quite popular, but two years later in editing the English Hymnal, Ralph Vaughan Williams replaced the Stanford tune ENGELBERG with his own SINE NOMINE, which remains paired to that text today. (And yes, Stanford had been one of Vaughan Williams' composition teachers. Gotta wonder how that relationship was.) It took almost seventy years for a hymn editor to suggest to the hymn writer Fred Pratt Green that he create a new text for the tune, and this pairing has become almost as fixed as the "For all the saints" pairing.
(sing, standing)
It is interesting to me that, with the exception of "Be thou my vision" and the Doxology to come later, all of today's requested hymns are from the twentieth century. It's probably just as well that such hymns have their day as ever more texts and tunes are created in these early decades of the twenty-first century.
