Immanuel’s Land
When I was in high school, a colleague of my Pastor’s passed away and left behind an enormous library—something like 10,000 volumes. My Pastor enlisted the help of a few of the guys in the youth group to help him transport the books from the widow’s house to Master’s Seminary where they would become part of their collection.
Incidentally, the Dean of Master’s Seminary, John MacArthur sent a semi-truck on loan from one of his parishioners, a high up mucky-muck in the Hershey chocolate company. For hours we loaded books onto this truck while smelling the sweet aromas of our favorite chocolate bars. Anyway, in thanks for our help, we were each allowed to keep one book. My choice? A little black, leather-bound edition of The Christian Book of Mystic Verse compiled by A.W. Tozer. Inside the pages of this collection, along with many other deeply formative texts, I discovered Ann Cousin’s Immanuel’s Land. It contains nineteen stanzas and is truly a worthwhile journey to read them all.
I set several of the poems in this little black bound book that still sits on my shelf and whose cover is now barely hanging on. This continues to be one of the favorite melodies I have ever written. The recording is from our album Sleep Easy which you can purchase here.
Come Thou Fount
This is another one of those hymns that has such a timeless melody and contour along with painfully honest lyrics that it has been arranged effectively in a number of different ways in a number of different traditions. Like my arrangement for Be Thou My Vision, I constructed a melodic interlude to add some extra space between the strophic verses. I took the first phrase of the third stanza and then transposed down a sixth to echo the original. When I lead this, I give each phrase to a different instrument to emphasize the parallelism in different colors. My favorite combination is an electric guitar with some reverb and delay on the first line in a higher register and then piano in octaves on the second line.
I also altered the harmonic structured, putting it in the relative minor and giving it a really repetitive ground bass that has a minimalist sort of feel. This lets the band create a really thick and ambient groove that allows the melody to soar above the arrangement.
Also similar to the Be Thou My Vision arrangement, I’ve added some more space in a bridge section that repeats, “Here’s my heart Lord.” For me, this is the central thought of this song; that the life of faith is one of constant confession that we are not strong enough on our own. We admit that we are prone to wander, not just in our salvation, but in our sanctification as well. We confess that despite our love for God, we do what we don’t want to do (Rom 7) and turn our backs like the prodigal son and leave the father. The journey of faith is a continual giving of ourselves back to God, for it is only him that can put his seal upon us—the seal of our baptism into the father son and holy spirit. This is such a baptismal hymn for me. The fount is one of living water that cleanses and restores.
At the end of the bridge, the arrangement transitions to a reharminization of the first verse with a pedal on D. Our response to God’s forgiveness and incorpartion into his body in baptism is always praise. It is God who seals us and it is He who teaches us to sing. It is the beginning and end of a song about wandering. We do not end without hope, but in the joy of the fount, drowning in the forgiveness and redeeming love of a God we—though we wander—sees us afar off and runs to us to receive us back.
Lamb of God
In our liturgy, we add the Lamb of God during the two penitential seasons of Advent and Lent just after the acclamation, “Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us; therefore let us keep the feast!” It is found in the Gospel of John 1:29, when John the Baptist sees Jesus and is the first to name him as the anointed one. He also predicts Jesus’ death as the sacrificial lamb, the one who was born to die.
This setting repeats the phrase the traditional three times. It does differ in that it ends with another statement of the text “Lamb of God.” As I wrote this, I was so filled with gratitude for what Jesus has done for us, that I just wanted the last thing to be sung to be this beautiful name of Jesus, “Lamb of God.”
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Humble Thyself in the Sight of the Lord
This is a SATB arrangement of Bob Hudson’s 1978 chorus Humble Thyself in the Sight of the Lord (copyright Maranatha! Music). I remember learning this song in youth group as a junior high student and it has stuck with me ever since. When Micah 6:8 showed up in the lectionary for a service I was planning music for, I added a cantor line setting of that passage to this arrangement to give it a Taize community style.
Obeying the Lord requires the humility to submit ourselves to his will and his ethic. Doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God is no easy, one time decision. Like the repetition of this piece, it requires the daily breathing of humility and submission to the Lord’s way.
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