THE FIRST LESSON Acts 2:42-47
THE SECOND LESSON John 10:1-11
SERMON "Listening Together for the Shepherd"
WORSHIP NOTES
"Christ is Risen! He Is Risen Indeed!" These words we spoke in greeting to one another on Easter Sunday are alive in the scripture, liturgy, and music through which we worship this Fourth Sunday of Easter.
The liturgical season of Easter, which is also called Eastertide, began on Easter Sunday and lasts for 50 days until Pentecost Sunday on May 11. During the Easter season, our prayer of confession is replaced by a liturgy that focuses on God's grace, through which we are saved.
The liturgical color for Eastertide is white. During Eastertide, the artwork by American folk painter and Quaker Society of Friends minister Edward Hicks (1780-1849) that hangs on the brick wall of the sanctuary serves to evoke the memory of our spiritual journey through God's peaceable kingdom this Lent.
The Fourth Sunday of Easter is also known as Good Shepherd Sunday because in each year of the liturgical cycle, the Gospel is always taken from the 10th chapter of John where Jesus speaks of himself as the "good shepherd." Therefore, much of the music through which we worship today also reflects imagery of the shepherd and flock.
The choir's anthem is a setting of the hymn "The King of Love My Shepherd Is" by Edward Bairstow (1874-1946). Bairstow was an Oxford graduate and an organist at York Minster Cathedral for 33 years. Though chiefly an organist, he was a master of text painting, which allows a line of music to derive its character from the text being sung. In the anthem, this text painting is heard in the dark organ sound as the men sing about "death's dark veil", and in the sounds of a wandering and lost sheep represented by a disconnected and almost non-melodic soprano line sung to the text "perverse and foolish oft I strayed." Through such settings, Bairstow's contributions to the Anglican choral tradition have influenced sacred church music and will enhance our worship of Christ, the Good Shepherd, this morning.
