The Hymns - New Words to Old Tunes

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The Hymns
New Words to Old Tunes · Willard Godinez

« Introduction, permissions and a word about meters

Six texts, each with its meter and two or three tunes it fits. Any congregation may sing them free. Please write and tell me where.

For Planting Time · For a Church's Last Service · At a Baptism · After the Hail · For the First Sunday of the Year 2000 · For the Potluck Cooks

For Planting Time

Meter: C.M. (8.6.8.6)
Suggested tunes: AZMON or ST. ANNE

Written for the Sunday each spring when we blessed the seed at my last church. Farmers brought a coffee can of seed from home and set it on the altar rail, and afterward the children carried the cans back out to the trucks.

1.	The frost has left the waking ground, the meadowlark is near; we turn the furrow, set the seed, and start another year.
2.	We cannot make the rain to fall, nor tell the sun to rise; we only open up the earth and lift to you our eyes.
3.	The wheat lies hidden in the dark, as Christ lay in the tomb; and what is buried in your care shall rise again in bloom.
4.	So bless the hands that drive the plow, the backs that bend and ache, and keep us faithful, rain or drought, for Jesus Christ's own sake.

For a Church's Last Service

Meter: L.M. (8.8.8.8)
Suggested tunes: OLD HUNDREDTH or DUKE STREET

For a little country church out on the plains that held its last service in June of 1997, after eighty-nine years. There were eleven members left, and most of them were over seventy. I was asked to preach. We sang this to OLD HUNDREDTH, and then we walked outside and locked the door, and nobody wanted to be the one to leave first.

1.	We gather in this house once more and sit where we have sat before; the windows hold the morning light, the pews are polished, worn, and bright.
2.	Here children learned your name and grew; here couples knelt and promised true; here we have wept beside the dead, and here been fed with cup and bread.
3.	The roof will stand when we are gone, the grass grow tall across the lawn; but you, O Lord, were never bound by wood and nails and holy ground.
4.	So bless the doors we close today, and walk with us along the way; we take this church, though not its walls, wherever else your Spirit calls.

At a Baptism

Meter: C.M. (8.6.8.6)
Suggested tunes: ST. ANNE or AZMON

We Methodists baptize babies, and people sometimes ask me how a baby can mean what is promised. The answer is in the second stanza. God's grace comes to us before we know enough to ask for it. Wesley had a long word for that. I have used short ones.

1.	We bring this child to you, O Lord, as we were brought before; the water from the font is plain, your grace is something more.
2.	This little one knows nothing yet of creed or prayer or law; and yet you claim us as your own before we ever saw.
3.	We promise, all who gather here, to love, to teach, to pray, to be the church this child will need along the narrow way.
4.	And when this child is grown and gone, and far from us, and free, recall the water on that brow, and whose that child will be.

After the Hail

Meter: 8.7.8.7 D
Suggested tunes: NETTLETON, BEACH SPRING or HYFRYDOL

One afternoon in July, a family in my last congregation watched twenty minutes of hail take their whole corn crop, and the garden, and the windshield of the pickup. I went out the next morning and stood in the field with the father, and neither of us said much. This is what I would have said if I had been able to. It is meant for the Sunday after, when everybody knows and nobody knows what to say.

1.	Twenty minutes, white and roaring, came the hail across the field, and the corn we watched since sowing lies in ribbons, stripped and peeled. Lord, we stand amid the wreckage, and we do not understand: all a season's work and wages beaten down into the land.
2.	We have seen the hail before this, and our fathers saw it too; they replanted, they recovered, and they leaned their weight on you. Give us what they had: the courage to go out and plant again, and the faith to trust your mercy in the hailstorm and the rain.
3.	Bless the neighbors at the doorway with a casserole and prayer; bless the banker who is patient, and the children, unaware; and when next year's fields are golden, or if hail should come once more, keep us knowing that the harvest is not what our lives are for.

For the First Sunday of the Year 2000

Meter: L.M. (8.8.8.8)
Suggested tunes: DUKE STREET or OLD HUNDREDTH

For Sunday, January 2, the first Sunday of the year 2000. Written ahead, of course. If the lights are on, sing it to DUKE STREET with the organ going full. If they are not, OLD HUNDREDTH goes perfectly well without accompaniment, and everyone already knows it by heart. Either way, the church will be there, and so will the Lord.

1.	A thousand years have come and gone since monks kept watch until the dawn and wondered, as the old year passed, if this one were to be the last.
2.	We, too, have worried at the turn, at what might fail, or freeze, or burn; we stocked the shelves and filled the jars and lay awake beneath the stars.
3.	Yet here we are, the year begun, beneath the same unhurried sun; the bread is broken, cup is poured, and you are with us still, O Lord.
4.	We cannot see what years will bring, the joys, the griefs, the songs we'll sing; but all the years that are to be belong to you, as much as we.

For the Potluck Cooks

Meter: 8.7.8.7 D
Suggested tunes: HYFRYDOL or BEACH SPRING

For the ladies and the gentlemen who make every church dinner happen and are the last to sit down. I wrote it for a volunteer appreciation Sunday, and the cooks made me sing it to them myself, alone, in the fellowship hall, before they would let me have any pie.

1.	Bless the ones who come at sunrise with the roasters and the pans, who set up the folding tables with their aching backs and hands; bless the coffee, strong and bitter, and the Jell-O, green and red; bless the hands that do the dishes after all the rest are fed.
2.	Lord, you fed the hungry thousands from a basket and a boy, and you sat at many tables where the sinners ate with joy; so we know that you are present where the bread is passed around, in the noise of plates and laughter, in the basement's happy sound.
3.	When the last of us has eaten and the floor is swept and bare, and the borrowed spoons are sorted to their owners, pair by pair, bring us home, O gracious Jesus, to the table you have spread, where the cooks at last are seated and the servers will be fed.

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Last updated September 20, 1999