c. 2003 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Well before Easter Sunday dawns, the Rev. Nolan Williams Jr. already knows a key hymn he’ll direct at Metropolitan Baptist Church in Washington: “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today.”

“The message is so appropriate for the season and certainly for the day,” said Williams, the predominantly black church’s minister of music. “The setting of that hymn _ it just makes for such a glorious worship experience and Easter is all about glory.”

Several blocks away at Foundry United Methodist Church, a mostly white congregation, Eileen Guenther couldn’t agree more.

“That is the hymn without which Easter wouldn’t be Easter at Foundry,” said Guenther, the church’s minister of music and liturgy. “I’m not a big believer in doing the same thing but this is one of my traditions. This hymn is the first hymn for Easter.”

In these days of worship wars and ongoing debates on appropriate church music, on Easter Sunday there comes a resounding agreement on the great hymn for the holiday. Of course, there are many runners-up in such a contest, but the hymn with words by prolific composer Charles Wesley and tune by an unknown composer takes the prize.

“Even churches that use contemporary worship still will find a use for that hymn,” said John Witvliet, director of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich.

“`Christ the Lord Is Risen Today’ is so memorable,” he added. “Kids love singing the Alleluias. It just sings well.”

Evangelicals, mainline Protestants and Catholics will join in that refrain _ a rare confluence of sometimes different musical tastes _ literally all singing the multinote “Alleluia” at the end of each line of verse.

“I think `Christ the Lord Is Risen Today’ is a singular example of that,” Witvliet said. “That one hymn pretty well crosses just about every group and that may be one of the few.”

Perhaps the pre-eminence of the hymn was foreshadowed by the names of its words and tune. The text of the hymn dates to 1739, when Wesley’s 11 stanzas were published under the title “Hymn for Easterday,” according to the “Companion to the United Methodist Hymnal.” The tune, known simply as “Easter hymn” is from a 1708 musical collection called “Lyra Davidica.”

Guenther, a lecturer in church music at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, says the words and music are a perfect match.

“It is a great text and it is a tune that completely supports what the text is about,” she said. “The Alleluia is sort of like the jubilus, an ecstatic `Alleluia,’ something that comes completely from the heart.”

In its almost 300 years of existence, the hymn has evolved through multiple arrangements and languages.

Williams, music editor of the African American Heritage Hymnal, has written a descant, an extra part for the highest singers in a choir or congregation, for the hymn.

“It’s just designed to make the hymn just very glorious and there’s nothing like soaring sopranos on Resurrection Sunday,” he said.

Different hymnals across the country include editors’ choices among the multiple stanzas by Wesley. And church songbooks spanning the globe carry it in various languages. In the Spanish version of the United Methodist Hymnal, “Mil Voces Para Celebrar,” it’s called “Christo ya resucito.”

“I’ve seen it in several African hymnals,” said C. Michael Hawn, a global church music expert at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Hawn said it’s not surprising to see the words in Yoruba in Nigeria or in Shona in Zimbabwe.

“It’s just kind of the quintessential hymn in the West,” he said. “And so therefore it would have been taken by the missionaries.”

Carl P. Daw Jr., executive director of the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada, said “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” has become an unbroken holiday tradition.

“It’s partly because it’s been sung for so long, there’s such a deep memory,” he said. “It’s nearly always the case that for important occasions, people tend to go back into memory rather than to try to do something new.”

(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

Although musicians cite “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” as the top choice for Easter Sunday, they offer a range of runners-up.

“Come, Ye Faithful, Raise the Strain” and “Hail the Day That Sees Him Rise” _ the latter of which, also has “Alleluias” at the end of each line _ get the votes of Guenther at Foundry United Methodist. Williams, of Metropolitan Baptist, names “Because He Lives,” a Bill and Gloria Gaither hymn, and “He Lives,” a popular hymn in African-American congregations whose first words are “I serve a risen Savior.”

Daw, of the hymn society, cites the 11th-century “Christians, to the Paschal Victim,” and the much newer “Christ Is Alive,” composed by Brian Wren for his English congregation for the Easter Sunday that came 10 days after the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

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(Editors: Here are the first two verses, according to one hymnal, of the hymn “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today”:

Christ the Lord is risen today, Alleluia!

Earth and heaven in chorus say, Alleluia!

Raise your joys and triumphs high, Alleluia!

Sing, ye heavens, and heart reply, Alleluia!

Love’s redeeming work is done, Alleluia!

Fought the fight, the battle won, Alleluia!

Death in vain forbids him rise, Alleluia!

Christ has opened paradise, Alleluia!

Source: The United Methodist Hymnal

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