Seventh Sunday after Epiphany: February 23 2014 You are Holy

Seventh Sunday after Epiphany

February 23, 2014

I promised this week a discussion of “music that praises God as Holy” in our worship.  My reason is the opening verse of the first reading we hear today.  The reading from Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18 contains the Holiness Code, which begins “Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.”  The Code gives us reason to take action – to care for the poor and to enact justice for our neighbor – as a response to the holiness of God.

Each Sunday in our celebration of Holy Communion, we sing the quintessential hymn of praise to God who is Holy.  The Sanctus (Latin for “Holy”) begins with the thrice repeated “Holy, Holy, Holy” as if to over-emphasize the solemnity of the designation of “Holy Lord.”  The hymn continues:

Lord God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory.  Hosanna in the highest.  Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.  Hosanna in the highest.  

This powerful language praising an awesome God has several scriptural sources.  The first part of the hymn references Isaiah 6:3, which scholar Philip Pfatteicher describes as “Isaiah’s breathtakingly majestic vision of the transcendent otherness of the All-Holy in confounding contrast to the mortality and impurity of humanity.”  Pfatteicher’s thicket of words might be more easily interpreted by referencing the great communion hymn “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence” (ELW 490):

Let all mortal flesh keep silence, and with fear and trembling stand; ponder nothing earthly minded, for with blessing in his hand, Christ our God to earth descending, comes full homage to demand.

Isaiah’s majestic vision was paraphrased by Martin Luther in the German vernacular hymn “Isaiah in a Vision Did of Old” (ELW 868).  This hymn, included in Luther’s German Mass of 1526, uses equally colorful and fantastic language to describe the encounter with the Holy one, ending with a phrase “and all the house was filled with billowing smoke,” a reference to the incense sanctifying the space.   

The Sanctus continues with a Hosanna and “Blessed is he” that comes from Psalm 118: 25 – 26.  

Per Harling’s “You Are Holy” (ELW 525) is an expression of God’s Holiness that doesn’t project the same sense of grandeur or remove as the hymns referenced above.  We sing this hymn as our sending hymn, and the sense of dance and celebration implied by the jazz influenced rhythm is perhaps appropriate as a demonstration of our joyful response to God’s holiness.  We are brought back down to earth, to the familiar, and sent out in response, to care for the poor and to enact justice.  The words of the hymn maintain some of the mystery of God, but we sing with a little more spring in our step!