Here are the hymns we will sing during our Ash Wednesday mass:
PROCESSIONAL HYMN: “Forty days and forty nights” (#55)
SEQUENCE HYMN: “God the Father, God the Son” (#229)
SERMON HYMN: “Lead us, heav’nly Father” (#567)
COMMUNION HYMNS: “Let thy Blood in mercy poured” (#190) and “Here O my Lord I see thee” (#208, PENITENTIA)
CLOSING HYMN: “Lord, who throughout these forty days” (#59)
During the Offertory, the Choir will sing the first four stanzas of “Jesus, I will ponder now,” a hymn by the German Baroque poet Sigismund von Birken (1626-1681). The musical setting is from an earlier Lutheran cantor and music teacher, Melchior Vulpius (ca. 1570-1615).
Here are the stanzas the choir will sing:
Jesus, I will ponder now on thy holy Passion;
with thy Spirit me endow for such meditation.
Grant that I in love and faith may the image cherish
of thy suff’ring, pain, and death, that I may not perish.
Make me see thy great distress, anguish, and affliction,
bonds and stripes and wretchedness and thy crucifixion;
Make me see how scourge and rod, spear and nails, did wound thee,
how for man thou diedst, O God, who with thorns had crowned thee.
Yet, O Lord, not thus alone make me see thy Passion,
but its cause to me make known and its termination.
Ah! I also and my sin wrought thy deep affliction;
this indeed the cause hath been of thy crucifixion.
Grant that I thy Passion view with repentant grieving
nor thee crucify anew by unholy living.
How could I refuse to shun ev’ry sinful pleasure
since for me God’s only Son suffered without measure?
During Communion, the choir will sing William Byrd’s setting of Ave verum corpus.