I've been looking through the hymnals, comparing and contrasting. Last night, I noticed one called "Stay With Us." The last line of the first stanza is "Jesus, be our great surprise." I had no idea what that was all about. Continuing to look at this song, it didn't mean much to me. There was also a line about "Walk with us, the road will bend: make all our weeping, wailing end." The road will bend? What road? Bend where? Why does it matter if the road will bend? After a bit, I noticed that the Scripture reference was Luke 24, so I figure this song is a take-off on the story about the Emmaus disciples, but still, it doesn't seem to say much.
Having been caught giggling over the "surprise" line, I wondered what other things this poet had written. So we looked up another LSB hymn by Brokering. We found "Alleluia! Jesus Is Risen." It's one of those hymns that seems way too sparse on verbs. I really dislike those hymns that are noun upon noun upon noun, images thrown out there, instead of sentences constructed (with verbs and nouns) to state something. Well, this second Brokering hymn we looked at is an Easter hymn and has the line "Breaking our bread, giving us glory: Jesus our blessing, our constant surprise." We laughed. This guy likes the word surprise. And what's with "constant surprise"; isn't that oxymoronic?
My teenager's query in response to this hymn was - what would happen if the pastor, distributing the elements during communion, said, "Open your mouth and close your eyes, and I will give you a big surprise."
By this time, we wanted to know if "surprise" is in every hymn this guy writes. So we turn to the next one: "Thine the Amen, Thine the Praise." Ah, another hymn where the verbs are all gerunds or are in subordinate clauses -- no predicates, that is, no verbs actually doing something. And sure enough: "Thine the kingdom Thine the prize Thine the wonder full surprise." (Precious little punctuation too.)
By now, a couple of us are cracking up. That's probably terribly impious of us and I probably shouldn't admit it in public. But I still don't quite get Jesus as "our surprise." Turned to the final hymn by Brokering in LSB, and found it was "Earth and All Stars." That's certainly no surprise.
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Why do you find it funny? Kantor Richard Resch from the seminary always said that tunes/music take you someplace. I guess we could say that texts take you someplace too. The word "suprise" takes me to the gift opening at a birthday party or a special "suprise" party. These places are trivial and render Jesus resurrection as a "suprise" a bit on the trite side. Recently one of my parishoners almost died in a tragic auto accident. Can you imagine the surgeon coming from the operation and saying to the wife, "I have a suprise, your husband didn't die after all." Or "Suprise, he's alive!"
ReplyDeleteTo me it doesn't quite do justice to the wondrous miracle of these blessed events.
That reminds me of an assignment I had in which I was required to write my own Canterbury Tales in rhyming couplets. There was this one word I used in every single one, just because it rhymed so nicely with some other word I wanted to use. For the life of me, that word is totally escaping me right now, but anyways, that's my story.
ReplyDeleteThanks for calling me yesterday. Sorry I didn't catch you. I am trying to finish this project for school and not lose my mind completely among other things. :-/ I'll try you sometime tomorrow? Maybe I'll catch you.