Love's Endeavor, Love's Expense

 One of the many fun parts of my job is picking out new music for the choir. I can listen to new music online, or sit down with a stack of anthems and immerse myself at the piano. In school we focused mostly on music written 100 or even 300 years ago. Works by the great masters are still my staples, but I find I also have a need for new texts and music. A new hymn or anthem can be disarming in how it finds ways to expand my sense of God and address issues peculiar to modern life.

In past eras of church life, and still in certain Christian cultures and denominations, the focus of Lent and especially Holy Week is on Jesus’s acute suffering and the graphic nature of his Crucifixion. These things can’t and shouldn’t be overlooked, but to focus on them too much detracts from the self-sacrificial love at the heart of Jesus’s final hours.
 
In light of this, I was glad to come across a new anthem, “Love’s Endeavor, Love’s Expense,” which the choir plans to sing on Palm Sunday. As Holy Week fast approaches, I hope this beautiful poetry draws you closer to Jesus, to the fascinating paradoxes of power in weakness and life out of death, and most of all to his unconditional love for you.

Morning glory, starlit sky,
Soaring music, scholar's truth,
Flight of swallows, autumn leaves,
Memory's treasure, grace of youth:
 
Open are the gifts of God,
Gifts of love to mind and sense;
Hidden is love’s agony,
Love’s endeavor, love’s expense
 
Love that gives, gives evermore,
Gives with zeal, with eager hands,
Spares not, keeps not, all outpours,
Ventures all, its all expends.

Drained is love in making full,
Bound in setting others free,
Poor in making many rich,
Weak in giving power to be.
 
Therefore he who shows us God
Helpless hangs upon the tree;
And the nails and crown of thorns
Tell of what God's love must be.
 
Here is God, no monarch he,
Throned in easy state to reign;
Here is God, whose arms of love,
Aching, spent, the world sustain.

W. H. Vanstone (1923-1999)
 
—  Ginny Chilton, Music Minister