Gregg DeMey, Lead Pastor
Gregg DeMey 0:07
Welcome to Elmhurst CRC's daily dose of the word of God. It's Friday, November 11 and Sunday's coming. This is Gregg DeMey and I serve as Lead Pastor at ECRC. This week in worship, we will welcome a group of talented young musicians called Cellissimo - 13 young people and their cellos. Cellissimo will help lead us in singing songs and hymns together, and play some instrumental music that will allow for our congregation to share a time of quiet prayer and meditation on Jesus altogether.
Gregg DeMey 0:39
One of these instrumental pieces that they're going to play is called Pie Jesu by a French composer Gabriel Fauré. Fauré wrote this music in the late 1880s after his parents had died. Fauré was a Roman Catholic, so he wrote Pie Jesu, as part of a requiem. A requiem is music that accompanies a funeral service or mass for the dead. The souds a little dark, right? But check this out: different from typical requiem settings, the part of the mass that is usually called the Dies Irae was omitted by Fauré in his musical version, and replaced instead by Pie Jesu. What's the significance of this? Dies Irae in Latin means, "the days of wrath", and is the part of the mass that focuses on the judgment. In Roman Catholic theology, this kind of implies the need for ongoing purification in Purgatory. This is not biblical. Fauré instead put in this musical moment called "Pie Jesu," which would translate into English as, "pious Jesus." Although, pious is kind of a smarmy-sounding word these days, it means, Jesus who has a reverent obedience for doing the will of God.
Gregg DeMey 2:00
So that's the music that we're going to reflect and meditate to. Fauré wrote of this music, quote, "Everything I've managed to embrace in life by way of spirituality, I've written into this music. Which, moreover, is dominated from beginning to end by a very human feeling of faith in eternal rest." That's lovely. Fauré continues, "How will we come to experience this kind of rest? It's not because of the quality of the work of our own hands, our own good deeds. But we come to rest because we've come to truly rely on the work of Jesus." This is the hope for Sunday's worship service, accompanied by the emotive lyrical sounds of the cellos. Our prayers will be guided into a posture of rest. Rest in God's provision, in the present, rest in God's provision for eternity.
Gregg DeMey 2:54
Let's pray. Oh God, today we thank you for your enduring love for Jesus faithfulness and for your eternal grace. We thank you for the daily blessings and signs in our lives that you send to point us, so that we can truly rest in your enduring, deeper love. In Jesus name we pray, Amen.