Happy Easter! Presenting Portraits by John C.Metcalfe - March 12, 1961 - "Sundays" Memories... Open Memoir...

 

SUNDAYS

On Sunday mornings when I hear...

The church bells ring through the year...

I know that kindly folk most everywhere...

Are gathered for an hour of prayer...

I think that God, indeed, must be...

Most pleased His faithful folk to see...

With those in vestments, black and white...

Before the altar candlelight...

When congregations bow and kneel...

And in their prayers God appeal...

He surely will his blessings give...

That they their lives in peace may live...

And when they sing their hymns of old...

In tones of silver and of gold...

I think the echos angels try..

To take with them to heaven high...

I wish that through the weeks and days...

Were filled with Sunday's sacred ways

For it is very likely true...

That God would like it this way too...

~~~

Hi Everybody,

I found this poem this week... I had been going through books that hadn't been touched for many years that my great-niece had gotten down for me from a high book shelf... I hope to separate out and keep what I want and forward many on to charitable organizations to possibly be read by others...

I had a black Bible in my hand when I fell. I didn't recognize it and wondered whose it was so I was moving toward the light. I don't remember how I fell, but I went down and immediately tried to get up, and failed. I think it's been about ten years since I had fallen before, so I think I'm doing pretty good these days. The Bible had something written inside and I wanted to read it... It belonged to my aunt, my mother's sister. I supposed that the way the Bible came to me is that she had decided along the way that she would give "rooms" to each of us (my siblings). I was to have her bedroom furniture and, of course everything in it at the time.

There wasn't much written in the Bible, but it was purchased and documented when she and her husband were married. I found this poem, old and brown from age, clipped obviously from a newspaper, with a hand-written date at the top. I couldn't read it, the print was too small, but I laid it here by my computer, and used a flashlight close to the letters and read each line to type...

I could picture the rather small
white Baptist Church where we all gathered, just as the poem said... The bells would ring each Sunday bright and early to let the people know in New Geneva that the doors were open and ready for their time here with our Lord... 

We lived on the main street of town... There was just one... It was the road people would come from and to--a little village that had one point of historical reference and national notice. The home of Albert Gallatin, he was the Secretary of the Treasury under Thomas

Jefferson. And, he had built a home at the top of the hill coming into town called, Friendship Hill... It's still there and is a registered national landmark so feel free to visit someday... My aunt Maribel worked there after the home was purchased by a private individual and I was often there with her while she cleaned the home... Until, of course, it was put on the National Historical Register...

Maribel Wertz owned the Bible where she recorded her marriage to Warren. This couple was known to me quite well, since they babysat for me while my mother worked everyday. Their home was just down the street from ours in what we would call these days a duplex. I would image that it was once a large house owned by one family, perhaps. The only separation was an interior hallway where bedrooms were accessed for the part where my aunt and uncle slept. And, yes, I admit, I was curious enough when young, to see if the door in the hallway would open... Oh my, it was and led directly into a bedroom! I closed that door quietly and quickly as you can imagine!

The Easter events would have started on Good Friday and end on Easter Sunday. All of the hymns were well known to everybody. It was only in later years that we started learning the newer choruses, such as the one above, "He's Alive!" which is the song, when I awoke this morning, which quickly sprung to mind, realizing it was Easter... Thanking God for His Son!

The poetry, of course, brought on memories... It was a time that I hadn't even graduated from school, had not yet left my home each day to travel to a nearby town to begin working at West Virginia University. It was an insulated time, a quiet time. We had time to ponder the beginning of spring as we saw each bloom come alive with bright colors... Tulips were those that were selected to brighten the church. Either Ruth Black or my sister, Dee, would be playing for church and Sunday School. It was the time when our lives centered around the church... Perhaps at that time of celebration, we would have planned and held a family dinner where everybody brought the food in for all to share... Me, I normally stuck with the food prepared by my family... My Mom and her sisters were great cooks!

Now, I once again am living in the country, where it is quiet and forsythia and jonquils are out as always the first flowers to bloom for spring... I'll enjoy each plant, taking their turns to grow until they bloom and produce their beauty for all to enjoy... But the country has changed so much since the 1960s... Or perhaps, it is only that I have changed. I see the world differently than during my youth. I know that there are people who are at war, fighting for freedom that others are trying to take away from them... And, I know and recognize that it is happening right now... in America, rather than just in a foreign country where we didn't need to worry so much about...

It is a different world... But

I Believe God's Truth and Love Wins 

Over Hate, Violence and War!

My Favorite Scripture...

Jesus Tells Us To Love All

We are All Made In His Image

May We Worship Our Risen Savior!

His Truth Will Win... Always!

We have no place in the Battle of America...

of this world...

The Battle Belongs to the Lord

We speak Love; We Speak Truth

Never Hate--Never Violence

May Each of You Experience The Joy

of

Just How Great He Is!

He is Indeed Alive!

Today, Worship Our Father

God of Truth...Love...and Light!

Gabby

An Easter Hymn - Christ the Lord is Risen Today!

1 Corinthians 5:6-8

Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore, celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

Themes touched upon by the Hymn "Christ the Lord is Risen Today"

First stanza: Christ is risen, therefore sing! 

Second stanza: The grave has lost its victory.

Third stanza: Love's redeeming work is done; Christ has              opened Paradise.

Fourth stanza: Following our exalted Head, like him we rise.

General Approach

In the hymn "Christ the Lord is Risen Today," the keynote of praise is sounded again and again. The beautiful lilies in church on Easter morning symbolize the message of joy and happiness and eternal life that comes to us. When we think of the bulb from which the Easter lily grows, we realize that the bulb was not dead in the sense of having no life at all. For that reason, even though there are many lilies and other symbols of the joy and the beauty of the resurrection, these things in themselves do not prove that there is a life after death. 

We speak about life after death in human beings we assume, first of all, that a corpse is dead, in contrast to a bulb which is not dead. We realize that when a person is dead there is no life in him. This realization forces us to come to a clear understanding of the significance of Easter--that Easter is more than a festival of spring. Easter proclaims new life. Easter is grounded in something different from anything found in nature which reveals renewal. Easter is the celebration of the resurrection of Christ from the dead.

Let us turn again to the account in the Holy Scriptures about the death of Jesus Christ. The death of Jesus Christ was a real deal. He died mentally and spiritually and physically when he was crucified on Calvary. His resurrection therefore is truly from the dead. He arose on the third day. Therefore Wesley says, "Sing "Alleluia.'" This is a great event. Christ is risen from the dead. Death has lost its sting!

As a consequence of the fact that Christ is risen, death has lost its sting. 

While we mourn our loved ones who are lost and we miss them, yet the sting is gone. Those who believe in God through Jesus Christ are given new life and power by the resurrection; therefore, death has lost its sting. We feel that there is life beyond this world. A man who lost his loved one felt his separation from his loved one very keenly. He understood that life would not be the same any more, and yet he felt happy that his loved one was in heaven, that his loved one would be happy there for all eternity. In that sense death lost its sting for him, and he felt joyful as he thought not of himself but of his loved one who had gone before.

When a friend died, Peter Marshall, a Presbyterian pastor and chaplain of the United States Senate, commented, "I wonder what thrilling experience she's having at this very moment." After Marshall himself died, his wife wrote that she imagined that he had found the answer to his question. He very well may have rejoiced to find that Paradise is open. A great new world has been put before us, a finer, more beautiful world than anything that we have here on earth. Truly Paradise is open.

Each of the stanzas of the hymn actually gives us the Easter message, "Like Him we rise."

As Jesus arose, we too shall live. Once when a man came out the church door after the Easter service, as he shook hands with the pastor he said, "Thank you for the message." Then he added, "Of course, I don't believe the message but I thank you for giving it." It so happened that not very many weeks afterwards this man's wife passed away. As they were making arrangements for the funeral services, the man said to the minister, "Now I've got to believe what you said in your sermon last Easter. Would you say that again at the funeral services?" The Easter message is relevant. It has a practical application to us all. Easter is not a mere occasion for a ceremony; it is not merely a day for beauty and decoration. Easter is concerned with a very essential truth, with eternal life: "Like Him, we rise."

Therefore we need to have this message of Easter close to our hearts--that even in our unconscious minds. in our basic feelings and thoughts, we catch the vital importance of it and feel that "Christ the Lord is risen today, Alleluia!... Where, O Death, is now thy sting?...Christ has opened Paradise...Like Him we Rise." Let us have this faith, and let us reassure ourselves of this faith so that we may be strong in His spirit and feel the relevance of this belief in our daily life. 

Jesus Has Risen -Vittorio Bianchini