“Amidst chaos and confusion, where can we find hope?”
Just like my church (and yours) Parkside Church is full of empty seats until further notice. Pastor Begg gives a sermon to his congregation through his church’s website. It is relevant to our times. The message starts at 16:45. May God bless you by His Holy Spirit through this recent lesson.
(CLICK HERE TO HEAR PASTOR BEGG’S RECENT TREATISE.)
CR
Wings of the Wind 
Dear friends in Hot Springs.
Greetings on Easter Morning!
I don’t know if it is a bit overdone to bombard you with another two links to Easter services in Norwegian, but anyway I am in no way offended if you do not study them! They are both from the same church I wrote a comment about to a posting further down here on Chris’s Wings-, it is the main church (it is called “domkirke”, meaning really the same as “cathedral”, but just like the cathedral in Oslo it is not at all a large, medieval cathedral) in Tromsø (up north of the Arctic circle – you can see there is snow). Norway only has one cathedral of the large type we know from Europe generally, the one in Trondheim
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nidaros_Cathedral).
The services are from Good Friday and from Easter Morning. In Norwegian we call Good Friday “Long Friday”, and I looked up the explanation of why that day would be called “good” in English and the explanation made good sense. From Wikipedia:
” “Good Friday” comes from the obsolete sense “pious, holy” of the word “good”. Less common examples of expressions based on this obsolete sense of “good” include “the good book” for the Bible, “good tide” for “Christmas” or Shrovetide, and Good Wednesday for the Wednesday in Holy Week.
A common folk etymology incorrectly analyzes “Good Friday” as a corruption of “God Friday” similar to the linguistically correct description of “goodbye” as a contraction of “God be with you”. In Old English, the day was called “Long Friday” (“Langa frigedæg” [ˈlɑŋ.ɡɑ ˈfriː.jeˌdæj]), and this term was adopted from Old English and is still used in Scandinavian languages and Finnish.”
The music on the service on Good Friday started with Vivaldi, on Sunday with Bach, and Händel at the end.
The Good Friday Service:
https://tv.nrk.no/serie/gudstjeneste-tv/2020/DNRR67500220
The Easter Morning service:
https://tv.nrk.no/serie/gudstjeneste-tv/2020/DNRR67500320/avspiller
From the Sunday service:
The minister starts with saying, three times: Christ has risen! And the choir say as a chorus: Yes, he has verily risen.
The choir consists of only a select 5 from the cathedral choir. The reason they are 5 is that the general advice now, because of the Corona virus, is that people should not make groups of more than 5 at a time.
At 4:10 they sing a very well-known hymn: “Christ rose from the dead”. The text was written by Grundtvig, a major theologian and perhaps THE major creator of a national culture in Denmark:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._F._S._Grundtvig
The hymn text was modified for Norwegian by Elias Blix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elias_Blix), who was a prolific hymn writer and a major translator of the New Testament into Norwegian.
The composer is Lindeman (cf below).
The reader (about 07:00) is wearing a Sami (Lappish) national costume, and the some of what the ministers say, is in Sami, also something in Kvensk (a Finnish language spoken in the north of Norway.) Both she and the others hold part of the service in Sami. I think you may be able to see from the texting that it is not Norwegian; for one thing it has a number of extra letters / letter modifications and accents which are not used in Norwegian.
The diocesan minister (the head minister for the parish) is the one at e.g praying at 52:20; the woman minister has a post of assisting in several parishes both in addition to the parish minister and substituting when he/she is away; the preacher of the sermon at 24:28 – is the bishop, Olav Øygard,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olav_Øygard
At 12:00 they sing the hymn for Easter Morning which is best known in Norway and Denmark: “Påskemorgen slukker sorgen” (On Easter Morning our sorrow is quenched). The composer is again Lindeman, who is Norwegian but generally as least as well known in Denmark. I remember some years ago I put the link to a Danish choir singing this hymn on Prunean’s Delight in Truth. It drew a very censorious remark from someone who claimed it was amateurish, composed by someone who didn’t know Bach and Mozart etc – there is a very special harmonic change into another key in one place in the hymn. However, the whole Lindeman family are very well known musicians, and one might perhaps just as well say that Tschaikovsky’s symphony no 6 does something “wrong” when it has 5 fourths bars in the second movement (it is unusual but not unique); not to mention Grieg’s “Church bells”, which surely has something like ‘parallel quints’ – absolutely forbidden in harmony theory (and it usually sounds more or less ugly too).
Anyway, we love the “Påskemorgen” hymn. Another Easter Morning piece of music I love is the one from the opera Cavalleria Rusticana (I think we have corresponded about that one before, Chris). You sense the hopeless, primitive and violent (Sicilian) life, but people gather for this miraculous gift of hope from heaven. From Zefirelli’s film:
Christ has verily risen.
Thank you for your kind words, Marianne.
And thank you for taking the time to write this interesting and informative comment. I’m sure my readers will be appreciative.
I had never heard of Mr. Grundtvig. The link you shared was very interesting. I’m sure my Danish roots had something to do with that.
I found it particularly interesting that the Church of Denmark forbade him to preach for seven years. I’ve only read what is in this link about his quarrel with his fellow Danish theologian (Clausen). If accurate his criticism seems well founded. He appears to have been quite the scholar and I found it interesting that he always called himself a pastor, not a theologian.
In another source I found this: “Grundtvig’s hymns abound in terms of adoration for the Savior of Man.” I’ve written a few songs for guitar and I hope they would be described in the same way.
What powerful voices in the video you shared!
Christ has risen indeed and what hope we have because of it!
Thank you again!