PROCLAIM THE GOOD NEWS DEVOTIONAL 4
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Come thou Fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace; streams of mercy never ceasing call for songs of loudest praise. Teach me some melodious sonnet sung by flaming tongues above. Praise the mount, I’m fixed upon it. Mount of Thy unchanging love.
I only have a couple of hymns memorized. I can pluck phrases out of my memory for many others, especially if I’m trying to sing along while fumbling for the right page, but there's only a couple that I can sing outright in-total without the book. Come Thou Fount is one of those. It’s also one of those hymns I can’t make it through without crying. Inevitably a sob will get stuck in my throat and I try to choke it back in the E♭.
Here I raise my Ebenezer, hither by Thy help I've come. And I hope by Thy good pleasure safely to arrive at home. Jesus sought me when a stranger wand’rin’ from the fold of God. He, to rescue me from danger, interposed His precious blood.
I’ve been an Episcopalian long enough, and renewed my vows so many times over the years, that my brain has started to gloss over each of the questions of the Baptismal covenant. We start the words of this question, “Proclaim the Good News of God in Christ,” but my brain hears, “Will you seek to invite people to your church?” I will, with God’s help. “Will you share your faith with someone you know” God help me. It’s the first question in the Covenant that starts to take us outside ourselves and involves our relationships with others. But I’ve found that I have spent far more time worrying about how the person outside of me will react, and haven’t always thought about what it is I would even want to proclaim about any of this.
Oh, to grace how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be. Let Thy goodness like a fetter bind my wand’rin’ heart to Thee. Prone to wander, Lord I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love. Here's my heart, oh take and seal it; seal it for Thy courts above.
I ended up memorizing this hymn the summer I served as a hospital chaplain. I worked on floors that saw a lot of trauma. All of my patients bore physical and spiritual scars. I was knee deep in the world’s brokenness and trying to share God’s love, while myself struggling with my own brokenness.
The hippie coffee-shop church I was going to that summer had an off-season skeleton-crew of musicians, who played this song nearly every week during communion. Its words etched onto my heart as I was nourished by the sacramental sign of God’s grace every week. The hymn became my prayer. It gave me the words to take what hurt, what’s broken, what makes me want to shrink away…it gave me the words to take my whole heart and ask for God’s seal on it. To say that Jesus is out seeking me even when my insides were wandering, limping away. To celebrate the Grace which bound me together. It taught me how to sing God’s love. It taught me how to proclaim where specifically that grace has taken a desertous place and filled it with blooms.
Lent is a season of self-examination, a season to find where in us is sore and what in us tries to wander away. Lent is the time for us to figure out if this is actually good news for us or not, to clean the wounds and make ready to receive the balm, the healing, the grace, the Blood of Jesus. Lent is a time for us to figure out what exactly in our lives needs that refreshing good news.
What about all of this has been good news to you? What in you needs Jesus the most? To what is your heart tuned?
God’s mercy comes to you in streams that never stop flowing. That’s something good to sing about.
