Hymn: “In Christ There Is No East or West” – John Oxenham (1852-1941)
Common Tunes: ST. PETER, McKEE, ST. STEPHEN
Inclusive hymns like this one are a fairly new phenomenon so
far as hymns go. William Dunkerly’s pseudonym was John Oxenham, and in 1908 he
wrote these words which break down many of the church’s self-imposed barriers,
especially those related to race and cultural backgrounds. For me at least, it
speaks to the widening of the tent of God’s grace in several directions, and I
love singing this hymn.
The church where I am a member has a mission group in Peru
this week (including my minister of music), so this hymn has come to mind a few
times, especially its last line: All
Christly souls are one in him throughout the whole wide earth.
It is, however, their participation in service to the
greater kingdom about which today’s hymn-line speaks. Serving Christ by serving
others - nearby or in some distant land – is one of the binders of our faith.
In the world of painting, each medium has a different binder…
the substance which holds the pigment together. At its basic explanation, there
are flakes of color which will not hold together without a binder; the binder
with which we’re most familiar is, of course, linseed oil – or oil painting
like Rembrandt used here. Without a binder, those flakes of color are basically
worthless; they can’t be attached to a canvas to produce a thing of beauty
and/or value. But when mixed in with linseed oil, they are suddenly useful.
(That is way too simple an explanation of a more complicated process, but you
get the point!)
The Christian body has many binders: love, acceptance, grace/mercy,
faith… the list goes on and on, and we sing about most of them: Bind us together with cords that cannot be
broken, for instance. And, of course, we evangelicals would say that the
blood of Christ is our primary binding element.
One of the strengthening binders for any group is service – or working together
for the common good or toward a common goal.
In my full-time ministry, most of the projects I oversaw
were musical in nature; but working together toward a musical-production goal
is a great ‘picture’ of what we’re talking about here. One year at First
Baptist in Waxahachie (where I’m now a choir member), we had over 250 people involved on stage in a Christmas
production – in a church that ran about 500 in worship. 250 children through
senior adults running around in bathrobes pretending they were Judean! Ah,
those were the days! But the point is that those major projects bound those
people through music and drama… the binders.
But the real beauty is when God’s people work together with
folks from other congregations… other ethnic backgrounds… other countries…
other races… to achieve a goal. Mixing together skin pigments, using service for
Christ as the binder.
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