When Holy Communion Lutheran Church first hired me as their first-ever minister of music back in 1988,  I had absolutely no experience whatsoever as a church choir director …  and I was following the renowned Dr. John Windh, who had done such distinguished both there and at Carthage College  … so it was understandable that they wanted me to begin with a six month probationary period to see if I was going to be able to the work with the excellence to which they had become accustomed.  It was a very challenging time because I knew I was being very carefully scrutinized …. not only what I was doing, but also how I was doing it …. and six months is a long time to be perched on the precarious bubble of probation.  It’s not that people weren’t kind and encouraging – they were.  Still,  I felt like a huge letter “P” (for ‘Probation’) was hovering over my head,  waiting to come crashing down on me like the proverbial anvil in a Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoon if I made a serious misstep.

In my mind,  my probationary period unofficially came to a close on Easter Sunday when the Senior Choir raised the roof with an exultant anthem called “Resurrection,”  with a talented alto by the name of Kathy Gall singing the solo.   I feel like that was the moment when I stopped feeling like I was following in someone else’s footsteps and was finally charting my own path.   This was the moment when I took hold of the job and began doing it the way I was meant to do it, by drawing upon my own life experience and drawing from the kind of music that had been such a powerful inspiration to me in my own life.

“Resurrection” was such a song.  I still vividly remember the first time I heard it.  It was a spring evening back in 1975,  and it was a rehearsal for a contemporary Christian group I sang with at the time,  the Now Disciples.  We were in the house of our director, Cherie Carl,  crowded around the stereo speakers in her music room,  listening to a song that she had just taped off the radio.  All these years later,  I still remember exactly how that Moody Bible Institute radio announcer introduced the song:   “Next up: The Sixth Day. By request: Resurrection.”  And suddenly this dramatic song seized our attention,  as a female singer sang “I have seen Him, this day!  I have walked with Him!  I have talked with Him!”  It was the words of Mary Magdalene – and it was as though we were with her on that first Easter morning.  And when the rest of the group joyously burst forth with “He is Risen!  Alleluia!” we all had shivers running through us.  I thought it was one of the most exciting and inspiring songs I had ever heard in my life.

We all fell in love with the song after hearing it just once,  so the task before us – since we had no sheet music for it – was to listen to it enough times to figure out how to sing it, and I had the extra challenge of figuring out how to play it.   It wasn’t terribly difficult- although I remember us struggling to figure out what words were being sung at the end of the very last refrain, because they were different than what had come before.   For a while our best bet was “He was in prison!  Alleluia!”  – but eventually we figured out that the words were actually “Jesus is Risen!  Alleluia!”  (Which obviously makes much more sense!)  My recollection is also that for the first time or two,  we performed it in C major,  the same key as The Sixth Day sang it,  before Cherie asked me to transpose it up to E-flat.  (She was the soloist for it,  and the higher key would lie much more comfortably for her.)    The song became an indispensable staple for all of our concerts-  usually coming towards the very end of the night-  and of everything we sang back in those years,  this is the song I loved the most and hoped I would get to sing again someday.

That someday came 13 years after I left the Now Disciples (upon high school graduation) when I became the Minister of Music at Holy Communion – and had to choose something extra special for the Senior Choir to sing for Easter.  In my first couple of months on the job,  I had already had the choir sing a sprinkling of songs out of the contemporary Christian realm like Andre Crouch’s “Bless the Lord” and Reba Rambo Gardner’s “Lift Him Up,”  and as my first Easter at Holy Communion approached,  my heart pulled me towards “Resurrection.”  There was no such thing as YouTube back then-  and the song,  as far as I could tell, had never been published (at least not under that title) – so I had to write it out myself,  relying on my memory from all those years earlier.   But it all came back to me without any problem at all,  which is a testament to how much I loved this song and embraced it with my whole heart.

And so has the congregation at Holy Communion.  Of everything I have done there over these past three decades as minister of music, nothing has generated more enthusiasm than “Resurrection” – to the point where normally-sweet parishioners threaten me with excommunication if I were to even think of not doing “Resurrection” on Easter.   And year after year, without fail,  “Resurrection” has been sung – with Kathy as the soloist.  (To be clear,  the choir always sings at least one other anthem- and sometimes two other anthems.)    This past Easter was the thirtieth Easter in a row that this song has been sung there, and I’m happy to report that Kathy sings it just as beautifully now as she did the first time we did it;  in fact, in some ways she sounds better than ever.  And I’m convinced that a very big reason why the congregation loves this song so much is because they know and love Kathy, and appreciate the heart and sincerity with which she sings the words of Mary.   And having heard it year after year,  it is almost as though the congregation has bonded with this song the way someone bonds with a dear friend.   And I hear this from young and old alike – that skipping “Resurrection” on Easter would be as unthinkable as skipping “Silent Night” on Christmas Eve.

By the way,  I will always appreciate how receptive the choir was to singing this song when I introduced it to them thirty years ago.  Most of them had sung for years under Dr. Windh’s assured and skilled leadership and were used to singing things like Schubert’s Mass in G major – so I suspect that this was a rather disconcerting and maybe unwelcome change of pace for at least some of them.    But they were game (or at least pretended to be) and after all these years, I think this song has come to mean as much to them as it does to me and the congregation.  And it is their joyful singing that delivers this song’s triumphant central message:  He is Risen!  Alleluia!    And whether one is delivering that message in the music of Handel or in a more “toe-tapping” contemporary piece,  the most important thing is to deliver that message with beauty and sincerity and gratitude.

Sometime soon, I hope to post a recording of the Holy Communion choir singing “Resurrection.”

Recently, while poking around on Youtube, I was able to uncover that old recording of “Resurrection” that we listened to back in 1975.    The performance may not quite grip me quite as forcefully as it did when I first heard it-  maybe because it sounds so much like the prevailing pop music of that era-  but it still packs quite a punch,  and it helps me relive that first encounter with the song even more vividly.   Here it is: “Resurrection” sung by The Sixth Day, the recording that bowled me over way back when.

It was in that same search through Youtube that I uncovered the very first recording of “Resurrection” – as heard in Ray Ruff’s 1971  so-called Christian rock opera Truth of Truths.    It was only in researching this work that I was finally able to discover who composed this song that has meant so much to me for all these years.  His name is Val Stoecklein.  (I was sad to learn that he died in 1993. If he were still alive,  I would have tried to get in touch with him to tell him how much his song has meant to me over the years.)  By the way, this recording is pretty awful in just about every way-  and I think if this recording had been my first encounter with the song,  I would have never listened to it again.  It’s amazing to think that the people who put this together thought that this was “rock music.”  By no stretch of the imagination is it rock music; not even a little bit. The style here owes as much to Lawrence Welk as anything!   Whoever put this together was obviously trying to blur the lines of style a bit, which is to be commended,  but it simply doesn’t work.    Fortunately,  the musicians of The Sixth Day knew that there was a great song hiding underneath all the layers of shlock,  and I am so glad that it was their vibrant version that I heard first.