HYMN FOR PENTECOST 19 The Heav'ns Declare Thy Glory, LORD
Text: Isaac Watts (1674-1748) Tune: Lowell Mason (1792-1872)
1 The heav'ns declare Thy glory, LORD;
in every star Thy wisdom shines;
but when our eyes behold Thy word,
we read Thy name in fairer lines.
2 The rolling sun, the changing light,
and nights and days Thy pow'r confess;
but the blest volume Thou hast writ
reveals Thy justice and Thy grace.
3 Sun, moon, and stars convey Thy praise
round the whole earth, and never stand;
so when Thy truth began its race,
it touched and glanced on every land.
4 Nor shall Thy spreading gospel rest
till through the world Thy truth has run;
till Christ has all the nations blest
that see the light, or feel the sun.
5 Great Sun of righteousness, arise,
bless the dark world with heav'nly light:
Thy gospel makes the simple wise;
Thy laws are pure, Thy judgments right.
6 Thy noblest wonders here we view
in souls renewed and sins forgiv'n;
Lord, cleanse my sins, my soul renew,
and make Thy word my guide to heav’n.
REFLECTION
Psalm 19, considered by many to be the most glorious poetry in the Psalter. It is recommended by some lectionaries for this Sunday as is Psalm 118 to which Jesus refers when discussing his parable of the owner of the vineyard.
The message of the parable is the wonder of God’s unending and passionate love for us. The parable makes me catch my breath when the landowner says he will send his son because, surely, they will not hurt him. If he wasn’t suspicious of the evil the tenants were capable of by then, he is certainly trusting and loving, beyond anything we might expect. Despite all that, he sends his son and the wicked tenants kill him as well. This is love indeed and tells us much about God in Christ.
Watts shrewdly uses the trope of comparison to shape his hymn into a psalm of praise for the Son/Sun who has come to “make the simple wise.” Watts does what the church has done since Peter and Paul—he uses the Psalms to say who Jesus is. In Jesus we see more clearly how God’s “Word touched and glanced in every land.”
The Isaiah lesson for this Sunday shows another side of our God as he works to cleanse the vineyard and leave only a stump to flower again. This account may well have been in the minds of Jesus’ audience when he told this parable. As the Advent hymns foretell, it is from this branch our Savior will come to save us from the wreckage we have visited on the our world.
While Jesus tells this to his contemporaries to convict them, we should be careful to see that these words can well be applied to our feckless generation. We can apply it to our day as we watch the perfidy one generation has visited on its descendants now being turned around. I am writing this just after watching Pope Leo XIV saying mass to over 700,000 people in Paris. Generation Z, statistics show, may be turning to the Christian faith in astonishing numbers. God is working in many and surprising ways to awaken faith in the most barren places, much to our surprise and joy. Pray we do not seek to kill it.
HYMN INFO
Isaac Watts is without doubt the father of English hymnody. Raised in the Calvinist tradition of strictly paraphrasing psalms as the only hymn book allowed, he began a new tradition of writing hymns based on the psalms, adding images from the New Testament as well. His use of traditional English poetic meters established a sense that all hymns are to be in Small, Common or Long Meter, plus a couple other ballad like forms. Some say he taught poets like William Blake and Emily Dickinson how to write poetry as almost all their poems can be sung to tunes from the Watts’ hymnal.
Lowell Mason is the most influenctial composer of hymn tunes in 19th century America. A native of Massachusetts, he moved to Savannah, Georgia where he worked in a dry goods company and bank. Meanwhile he served as church musician and worked to bring the best of European melodies into the hymnals of the day. He traveled to Leipzig, Germany where he was deeply affected by the congregtional singing in Thomas Church where Bach had served. He resolved to teach congregations to sing hymns better. His Fifth Avenue Presbyterian church in New York became known as the best singing congregation around. In 1859 he published Sabbath Hymn and Tune Book, which became a popular and fundamental hymnal for all church musicians in America.
The hymn below begins with Isaiah 7 and ends with the Matthew 21 parable.
LINKS
Martijn de Groot
Hymns of Grace
Biblogic
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