Holy Week begins on Sunday, April 9th, with the Palm/Passion Sunday service at 10:00 AM and the Choir Festival at 7:00 PM. It continues with the beautiful Maundy Thursday service on April 13th at 7:00 PM in our sanctuary and a Good Friday service on April 14th at Grace United Methodist Church at 7:00 PM. It concludes with two services and a breakfast on Easter morning, April 16. For more details and some Palm Sunday music and art, Continue reading Upcoming Service Notes, Holy Week, April 9-16, 2017
Category Archives: Music News & Recordings
Service Notes, April 2, 2017, Deep in Lent
The Fifth Sunday in Lent takes us into the depths of the suffering and danger that Lent represents. Jesus has been in the wilderness without food or water, exposed to the brutal elements, for a month. He is getting weaker and more vulnerable. Succumbing to temptation or death is an increasing possibility. The lectionary scripture passages have been leading us on a parallel journey toward the cross, with tension increasing around Jesus as he confronts the religious and political establishment with actions that threaten to overturn them. They are plotting his death even as he heals and raises people from the dead and lifts the hopes of the poor and oppressed.
Next week, on April 9th, we will follow the Passion Story from Jesus’ triumphant entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to the arrest, betrayal, desertion and crucifixion on Good Friday. Here in the depths of Lent with all that coming ahead, Easter can seem impossible. How can the light shine in this darkness without the darkness overcoming it? The amazing thing is that even asking that question can raise a small, fragile but defiant candle in our hearts. Continue reading Service Notes, April 2, 2017, Deep in Lent
Holy Week 2017 Services
Please mark your calendars and extend invitations to family, friends and neighbors to these services.
Palm/Passion Sunday, April 9th at 10:00 AM, a profoundly moving service that begins with jubilant children distributing palms and then travels with its readings and hymns all the way through the week to Gethsemane, the cross and the tomb.
Palm Sunday evening, April 9th at 7:00 PM, we will continue a tradition of 51 years and host the annual Palm Sunday Choir Festival for area choral groups and musicians. Choirs from Bradford and surrounding towns will present anthems, our own John Atwood will play the prelude and postlude and you will have five glorious opportunities to sing hymns. All donations go to the work of the Inter Church Council.
Maundy Thursday Tenebrae Service, April 13th at 7:00 PM in our sanctuary–this service rivals Christmas Eve in drama and beauty, with beloved hymns, readings and candlelight. It is a joint service with Grace Methodist.
Easter Sunrise Outdoor Service, April 16th at 6:00 AM at 219 Summer Street, the home of the Buttons–a little singing, a little reading and reflecting, and a whole great big vista of God’s resurrecting Creation!
Easter Service, April 16th at 10:00 AM in the sanctuary, full of the traditional joyous readings and music.
Service Notes, March 19, 2017, One Great Hour of Sharing, Service of Compassion
This Sunday will be a Service of Compassion. We will seek to open our hearts in compassion not only to the victims of oppression, discrimination and hardship, but also to those who struggle to help them. We know the heartbreak we feel when someone in our family is suffering and we are helpless to fix the problem–this is the heartbreak Christ calls us into for the whole world, a compassion we feel that makes us deserving of compassion for our own empathic pain. It is the heartbreak of the cross. It is the wilderness of Lent. Yet we know that there is resurrection, there is emerging from the wilderness full of the Spirit’s power. This Sunday’s service will explore where we can find faith and hope within the struggle to love a suffering world.
We will take our One Great Hour of Sharing offering, and we will again try on the proposed Open and Affirming Covenant to experience how it feels within the prayerful context of worship. We will hear three scriptures about finding the hidden spring of God’s mercy and love within our messy struggles: Continue reading Service Notes, March 19, 2017, One Great Hour of Sharing, Service of Compassion
Service notes, March 5, 2017, First Sunday in Lent
Lent does not deserve the reputation that it has for deprivation. It can be a beautiful, spiritually rich, powerfully moving season. This Sunday we will sing four beloved hymn tunes, we will read one of the most reassuring Psalms, we will hear the old familiar story of Jesus suffering real temptations just as we do and showing us a way to respond that brings angels to our aid. Yes, Lent leads us into a wilderness, but it is a lovely and love-filled and fruitful one.
Here one of the wisest perspectives on Lent that I know. After it I will give more details about the service and share three extraordinary recordings. This is an excerpt from the great Lenten book of daily readings, A Season for the Spirit, by Martin Smith:
“Perhaps the word surrender should be enough for my prayer on this Ash Wednesday. Not the surrender of submission to an enemy, but the opposite, the laying down of resistance to the One who loves me infinitely more than I can guess, the One who is more on my side than I am myself. Continue reading Service notes, March 5, 2017, First Sunday in Lent
Upcoming Service Notes, January 15, 2017, Martin Luther King Jr. Sunday
“Jesus took over the phrase ‘the Kingdom of God,’ but he changed its meaning. He refused entirely to be the kind of a Messiah that his contemporaries expected. Jesus made love the mark of sovereignty. Here we are left with no doubt as to Jesus’ meaning. The Kingdom of God will be a society in which men and women live as children of God should live. It will be a kingdom controlled by the law of love.”
A young student wrote those words for a course in seminary. No one could have known when he wrote them that he would help move the world so much closer to fulfilling Christ’s vision of the law of love. He became the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and called his entire life work “an experiment in love.” He believed America had the greatest chance of becoming a model of the realm of God of any nation in history because of its founding principles of democracy and equality and freedom for all. He had that dream, and he gave his life to fulfill it. He lived and died to extend the law of love to the kind of people Jesus always did, the most vulnerable, the oppressed and the outcast.
This Sunday we honor King’s vision and his work as a model for all Christians and all churches. We will read scriptures that show how he was fulfilling the vision and work of others before him going back thousands of years. Continue reading Upcoming Service Notes, January 15, 2017, Martin Luther King Jr. Sunday
Upcoming Service Notes: January 8, 2017, Baptism of Christ Sunday
The Second of the 12 Steps of groups like Alcoholics Anonymous is this: “We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” This Sunday is all about the epiphany of seeing that Higher Power made manifest in nature and in our lives, and especially in the transformational moment when Jesus came out of the River Jordan baptized by John, blessed by God and driven by the Holy Spirit to begin his ministry (Matthew 3:13-17). The Higher Power is all about transforming our lives and our world to be more Spirit-filled and Spirit-led, to be more aligned with God’s realm of love and life and light, mercy and justice and peace.
The scriptures and music want to shake us and wake us to this truly amazing grace: we have access to this Higher Power! Isaiah says, “New things I now declare!” (42:1-9) Psalm 29 describes the world-changing Power of God in a thunderstorm coming off of the Mediterranean Sea. We can be changed and be instruments of change in our world with the help of this Power. In fact, we are not fulfilling our calling and accepting the full gift that Christ offers us if we are not living as continually transformed and transforming people. Continue reading Upcoming Service Notes: January 8, 2017, Baptism of Christ Sunday
Upcoming Service Notes: January 1, 2017, Epiphany Sunday
This Sunday falls in the middle of the twelve days of Christmas, but we will celebrate it as Epiphany (January 6th). Epiphany was one of the most important and ancient church holy days, predating Christmas itself. It has had other scriptures associated with it over the millenia, but we read the story of the Magi following the star to Jesus. (Matthew 2:1-12) The point of all the scriptures and all the Sundays of the Epiphany Season is the recognition of the manifestation of God in Jesus and in the world (including in us). We will hear Isaiah telling us to “see, and be radiant,” because when we truly see the light of God in the world and let it fill us, we ourselves shine. (Isaiah 60:1-6) What better way could there be to enter a new year?
We are blessed to have many manifestations of the Holy Spirit in this church that we can look to with joy. We will name some of them and reflect on how we can see more. Beauty opens our senses to the wondrous, transcendent presence of the creative force of love and life and light that we name God. We will hear and sing some beautiful music including three hymns and a little bonus (We Three Kings, What Child Is This, and What Star Is This, plus one verse of O Little Town of Bethlehem). The choir will sing the Bach harmonized chorale, “O Morning Star, How Fair and Bright” and a contemporary spiritual carol, “Jesus, The Light of the World.” John will play pieces by Murschhauser, Dandrieu and Pachelbel.
Below are two very different treats for the ear and soul. The first is a recording of the short and beautiful Pachelbel piece that John will play. The second is the amazing choir of the Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia, one of the oldest African American congregations in the country, singing “Jesus, the Light of the World.”
Upcoming Service Notes: December 18, 2016, Fourth Sunday of Advent, Christmas Sunday, Sunday of Love
Advent has another week to go, the week of deepest darkness that comes before the glorious Christmas dawn. The more we immerse in the spirit of Advent–making time for our spiritual life doing things like reading, praying, getting out in nature, serving people in need–the more joyous our Christmas can be. Yet joyous outbursts are part of Advent, too–we felt it last week on Pageant Sunday and we will feel it Christmas Eve in the first half of the 6:00 PM service.
We will begin this Sunday in joy, too, celebrating Christ’s birth by hearing some of the nativity story and singing “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” and “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming,” and “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” The choir will sing “Do You Hear What I Hear?” and a trio of Betsy Alexander, Bridget Peters and Marcia Tomlinson will sing “Jesus Christ the Apple Tree.” John Atwood will be playing special music involving chimes and a major Bach Prelude and Fugue that is traditionally associated with Christmas. The sermon will reflect on the “Universal, Unconditional, Unstoppable Love” that we witness in the Christmas story, and that we continue to see at work in our lives and in the world today.
Yet like Christmas Eve, we will end the service quieting into the silent night of Advent still left ahead, singing “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” and the ancient plainsong benediction one last time. John’s postlude will be the Ukrainian Bell Carol.
Here is a Simon Preston recording of the Bach Prelude and Fugue in C Major that John will be playing:
Upcoming Service Notes, December 11, 2016, Pageant, Joy, 3rd Sunday of Advent
This Sunday will be a glorious mix of high and low church art, all of it beautiful and moving. The children’s pageant will once again act out the story as our Diverse Musical Traditions Team sings the Gaither song, “Come and See What’s Happenin’ in the Barn!” We are hoping to have fourteen children participate, which is very exciting! The same team will also sing the classic bluegrass Christmas song, “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem” which has been recorded by everyone from Ralph Stanley to Emmylou Harris and over four hundred others.
Organist John Atwood will play the haunting Appalachian carol, “I Wonder As I Wander,” to complete the low church art. He will also play two pieces from the baroque high church art department, both by Johann Pachelbel, One of them will be a chorale prelude on the tune that the choir will sing as an Intoit, “From Heaven unto Earth I Come.”
Our congregational hymns will include “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” “Joy to the World” (the children will sing it with the choir at the end of the Pageant and the congregation will join in at the end) and “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus,” as well as the Benediction hymn set to the ancient plainchant Advent tune.
We will light the candle of Joy and read responsively from Psalm 126 and hear Luke 1:39-45 and John 15:9-11. The sermon title will be taken from the John passage, “So That My Joy May Be in You.” We will reflect on what it means to have Christ’s joy in us in very practical terms–it is the peak experience, the highest meaning and pleasure in life, and Christ is very clear that he wants us to experience it to the fullest. Why let anything stand in our way?
To hear two of the pieces of music that will be in the service, Continue reading Upcoming Service Notes, December 11, 2016, Pageant, Joy, 3rd Sunday of Advent