Welcome to Sundays at Home
Good morning and welcome to Trinity! So glad you are tuning in virtually for today’s service. As we worship remotely, each week you’ll find Sundays at Home with Trinity Episcopal Church. We will be featuring the full service recording, as well as the sermon and anthem on their own.
If you would like to join us for an in-person service we have two options for Holy Eucharist. An 8am service in our sanctuary (without music) and then a full service at 9am in the Bishop’s Garden each Sunday. Simply bring a chair, mask, and a heart for worship.
Once again, thank you for tuning in and for being faithful with your time, talents, and treasures.
Grace and Peace!
Rev. Jonathan V. Adams
Worship for September 5, 2021
Please view the embedded video of our service below by clicking on the grey arrow in the middle of the image.
During the summer, our Trinity Kids series will be featuring previously recorded episodes.
About the Music:
Most of the music this week was chosen around the themes of faith and healing as found in the lessons. The organ prelude is based on the African-American spiritual “There is a Balm in Gilead”, a reference from the Old Testament book of Jeremiah, 8:22. In the New Testament, the Balm of Gilead is interpreted as a spiritual medicine that is able to heal Israel (and sinners in general). This jazz influenced arrangement is by Joe Utterback (b. 1944), an American jazz pianist and composer who is also a long-time church musician.
Hymn 493, “O for a thousand tongues to sing” is a text by Charles Wesley, probably the greatest hymn writer of all time. Born into an Anglican family, Charles is said to have penned more than 6500 hymns. The “father of American church music”, Lowell Mason, adapted the German tune AZMON for this text. While he and his brother John were studying with a Moravian scholar in London, Charles struggled with extreme doubts about his faith till he ended up bedridden with the sickness. He was deeply affected by the care given him by a group of Christians and his strength gradually returned. He considered this a renewal of his faith, and one year later Charles wrote an 18 stanza hymn commemorating this renewal of faith. Verses 7-12 of this hymn now stand alone as the hymn we know today.
Our tenor section leader, Julian Baldwin, will sing Robert Schumann’s setting of Joseph von Eichendorff’s poem “Mondnacht” (Moonlit Night) at the Offertory. Although not particularly sacred in nature, this poem, written in 1837, is about the longing for Resurrection as a kind of salvation in Christianity. Eichendorff was a very religious man, and this poem apeaks about finding your way to God (home), showing the comfort you can receive in death and arriving in God’s paradise, trusting him and not being afraid. “Mondnacht”, the 5th in a cycle of 12 songs called “Liederkreis”, alludes to memories of travel, of starry moonlit summer nights, feeling at one with nature and the yearning to just fly home. Musically, the voice and piano parts are of equal importance.
Finally, a trumpet tune by the great English baroque composer Henry Purcell (1659-1695), known as “The Cebell”, is our concluding voluntary. A “cebell” is a dance-like musical piece characterized by a division of two beats per bar.