Category: Psalms

Update 2/8/22: Sheet music for this blog is now available at gregscheer.com.

I had an unfortunate opportunity to reflect on mortality this summer when my friend Christina Mandang was hit by a car. Her sudden and senseless death at the age of 38 reminded me once again how fleeting our lives are. It is truly ashes to ashes and dust to dust, with precious little time in between. The good news is that the God who breathed life into dust to create Adam and who resurrected Jesus from the grave, is the same God who has promised to raise us from death to eternal life. Now that’s Good News!

When Christina died I was reflecting on all this and a short refrain came to me, “from the dust you shall raise us up.” I sang it to myself as I mourned her death, wrote it down, and it has remained in my idea folder ever since. Ash Wednesday gave me another chance to consider all these life and death issues, and I revisited that short refrain. I decided to pair it with the words of Psalm 103 in which God, the loving Father, “remembers we are dust.” This was an especially appropriate image, because my friend Janice had just lost her father, Frank Diehl.

Here is my sung prayer of thanksgiving for Christina and Frank, and my sung prayer of hope for the rest of us: From the Dust, You Shall Raise Us Up.

I don’t make a habit of posting other people’s music at my blog, but in this case I thought I’d make an exception. You can read the story and hear a recording of Zac Hick’s “All People that on Earth Do Dwell” at the COS website, and you can download my piano and SATB arrangement here. Rock on, Zac!

Last week I met with my Nepali friends Peter and Prasad to work on a on a song. Since the song was for a combined service of Basic English Service attendees and our main congregation, we decided to write a song based on Psalm 133 with verses in Nepalese and refrain in English. The process of co-writing in two languages was fun and the result (if I may say so myself) was very successful. Take a look at the PDF or listen to the MP3.

At COS we’re doing a series on stewardship and this Sunday’s theme was “Stewards of Community.” We normally use the lectionary Psalm, but I thought it would be more appropriate to use Psalm 133 this week. My favorite setting of that Psalm is Barbara Boertje‘s “How Very Good,” and my initial thought was to pair it together with readings from the Psalm, John 13:34-35, and singing Taize’s “Ubi Caritas.”

But you know me–I just can’t leave stuff alone, and I started playing around with an idea to add solo verses to Barbara’s song. My study of the Psalm tells me that the oil represents–thinking broadly–the anointing that made Israel God’s people, and the dew represents God’s blessing through food and creation. Looking through New Testament eyes, we could interpret the oil as Jesus our anointed High Priest and/or the baptismal waters that set us apart as God’s people. The dew could become the bread and wine which are a foretaste of the eternal life promised at the end of Psalm 133.

With that in mind–and with Barbara’s permission–I wrote 2 verses to go with the original song. We sang it this Sunday morning and it worked well. The verses feel like they’re cut from the same cloth as the refrain and it expands Barbara’s original idea to include the text of the whole Psalm, without increasing the difficulty of the congregation’s part. Listen to the MP3 or take a look at the PDF. (The score doesn’t include the piano part for the refrain. I just pasted it in for the time being.)