To celebrate our 6th anniversary, we went to dinner last night, then to Barnes & Nobles to pick up a CD. Although the wife dawdled too long amongst the books and felt too rushed to select a musical goodie, I found mine. It is Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil or Vespers. It is, hands down, the best choral cd I have (yes, it is the only choral cd I have, but it's great nonetheless).
The liner notes say that Rachmaninoff wasn't the closest friend the Eastern Orthodox Church ever had, but this work goes a way to displaying something of his spiritual side. Designed to be used in an all-night Orthodox Church service, the selections are mostly Biblical texts and mostly Psalms (!), and all in Russian (I think). It is almost devastatingly beautiful...I can almost feel my sermon prep getting better.
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The sermon from Sunday morning is up: Proverbs 11:9-31, "What difference does Christ make?"
mp3
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As we work through the wisdom of Proverbs in the preaching series, I have an apocryphal addition: The wise know their food and keep it; the foolish leave their Snack Packs in the church refrigerator for over a week and expect the pastors to have more self-restraint than they. It was tasty.
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If you're not a fan, you should be. If you are a fan, did you know you can listen to NPR's Car Talk on the internet whenever you'd like? I would try to figure out why this show about car repair is so great, but that would probably ruin some of the mystique.
2 comments:
Laura and I went to Romantic Rachmaninoff Night at the Symphony on the Prarie in July. 'Twas rather awesome.
My dad has a funny story about Snack Packs.
"Dawdled" is not a very nice word ;) I was doing a brief study in Eastern Mysticism--very trendy, very bizarre, very dark.
And really, Snack Packs are gross.
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