Arts and Music at Redeemer

The Sunday of the Passion  choir and organ

Choral Psalm 22  anglican chant/Hopkins

Choral Anthem  Adoramus te Christe/Jacques Berthier

Maundy Thursday   women’s schola, soloists, and organ

Organ prelude  Variations on Pange lingua glorioso/Nicolas de Grigny

Choral Psalm 78  plainsong, after Hildegard of Bingen

Choral Anthem  Panis Angelicus/Giuseppe Baini

Duet   Tantum Ergo/Nicolas Gigault
Erica Row & Christina Siemens

Solo   A Song of Lamentation/John Karl Hirten

Stacey Porter

Good Friday    choir and organ

Choral Anthem  Behold, Before Our Wondering Eyes/ Walker & Berberick

The Great Paschal Vigil   choir, soloists, trumpet, and organ

Choral Canticle  Come, let us sing to the Lord!/Dorothy J. Papadakos

Solo   Alleluia, from Cantata 51/J. S. Bach
Erica Row

Trumpet Offertory Aria/Flor Peeters
Judson Scott

Choral Anthem  Be Still and Know/Ana Hernandez

Organ Postlude  Allegro vivace assai, from Sonata No. 1/Felix Mendelssohn

The Sunday of the Resurrection  choir, soloists, trumpet, and organ

Trumpet Prelude Largo & Allegro/J. F. Fasch
Judson Scott

Solo   Victoria, mein Jesus ist erstanden/G. P. Telemann
Glenn Guhr

Duet   Maria Magdelena et alter Maria/Sulpitia Cesis
Christina Siemens & Glenn Guhr

Choral Anthem  Jesu, Joy of Our Desiring/J. S. Bach

Trumpet Postlude Moderato & Allegro/Guiseppe Torelli

Judson Scott

II Pascha    soloist and flute duet

Solo   I know that my Redeemer liveth, from Messiah/G. F. Handel
Christina Siemens

On the night of the Great Vigil, local jazz musician and Redeemer parishioner Hunter Close performed a musical interpretation of Ezekiel 36:24-28.

Hunter says that John Coltrane’s album “A Love Supreme” is one of his inspirations for this piece.

Ezekiel 36:24-28

Say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: I will take you from the nations, and gather you from all the countries, and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. Then you shall live in the land that I gave to your ancestors; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.

Click here to listen

On the night of the Great Vigil, I read a short story that I wrote about Israel’s deliverance through the Red Sea.

In honor of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, this story is free to read and adapt under a Creative Commons license.

- Wade

Download the PDF file here

Listen to the audio of the reading here

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Karl Oles presented a creative interpretation of the Creation story on the night of the Great Vigil.

Download the PDF file here

Listen to Karl’s reading here

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The idea of “faith as performance” comes to the fore in a very blatant way during Holy Week.

On Passion Sunday we reenacted the Passion of our Lord, taking the parts of Pilate, the Pharisees, the crowds, and Christ himself during the liturgy.

Then during the Great Vigil on the following Saturday, several of us presented the night’s readings through creative interpretations: music, fiction, spoken word, and dance. (I’ll post a couple of the pieces here over the next few days.)

Stanley Hauerwas addressed faith as performance in this interview on Homiletics online:

HOMILETICS: Your recent book on Bonhoeffer, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence — I thought “performing” was an interesting word. Faith as performance.

HAUERWAS: That was very intentional. One of the things that liberal democratic society has encouraged Christians to believe about what they believe is that what it means to be a Christian is primarily belief![laughter]. So you hold to these 26 absurd propositions before breakfast, you know.

This is a deep misunderstanding about how Christianity works. Of course we believe that God is God and we are not and that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit but that this is not a set of propositions — but is rather embedded in a community of practices that make those beliefs themselves work and give us a community by which we are shaped. Religious belief is not just some kind of primitive metaphysics, but in fact it is a performance just like you’d perform Lear. What people think Christianity is, is that it’s like the text of Lear, rather than the actual production of Lear. It has to be performed for you to understand what Lear is — a drama. You can read it, but unfortunately Christians so often want to make Christianity a text rather than a performance.

- Wade

Holy Week at Redeemer is not for the weak–especially if you are in charge of the music program! At the end of the service on Palm Sunday I was reminded of an article in the American Guild of Organists’ magazine which listed old newspaper accounts of organists who had died on Easter morning, often in dramatic ways. However, I’m sure an extra trip to Starbucks will be all I need after Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, The Great Paschal Vigil…and, lest we forget, midnight champagne reception!

Thankfully, my energy is matched and rewarded by the choir and instrumentalists involved in the liturgies. The services and community life at Redeemer have such amazing contrasts during this period:

Lenten fasting
communal meals

solemn processions
the joyful pageantry of children

choir families in difficult times
vibrant, focused singing

the darkest psalms
the brightest hymns.

I look forward to sharing these ever more deeply as we move into Holy Week.

In the words of a hymn we’ll sing tomorrow night from Wonder, Love, and Praise:

Draw us to you and with your love transform us:
the love we’ve seen, the love we’ve touched and known;
enlarge our hearts and with compassion fill us
to love, to serve, to follow you alone.

(”You laid aside your rightful reputation”, Rosalind Brown)

–Sheila

I am very excited to announce our very first call to artists for our gallery. We are looking for artists to submit 2 dimensional work, in any medium and style, expressing the Stations of the Cross for an exhibit which will be on display beginning April 1st (Palm Sunday) through May 25th. The deadline for entries is March 12th, 2007. Please see our official call to artists for more details.

Peace and happy creating!

Angela