I’m going to circle back to the beginning of our Psalms for All Seasons class when we looked at Psalm 122, which the Revised Common Lectionary assigns to the First Sunday of Advent for Year A.
The psalm is written from the perspective of someone standing in Jerusalem, remembering the beginning of the long pilgrimage.
I was glad when they said to me, “Let us go to the house of the LORD.” Now our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem.
The pilgrim admires Jerusalem, which unites the worship of the Lord with the justice of the king, and calls for his companions to pray for peace for the city.
The responsorial setting for the psalm in Psalms for All Seasons is “I Was Glad When They Said To Me” (PFAS #122) which is from a composition by David Haas and is written to be sung as a canon.
There are four other settings of Psalms 122 in Psalms for All Seasons. My favorite, which we ultimately sang in church during the First Week of Advent, was “Rejoice, Rejoice, Come Sing With Me” (PFAS #122A). We used it as an opening hymn with Joseph Slegers as our song leader. Each line consists of a leader’s part, followed by a response from the congregation. The response is “This is the house of God” for the first stanza and “We seek the peace of God” for the second. The text doesn’t keep closely to Psalm 122 so we used the psalm as a call to worship and responded with the hymn.
The remaining settings have very different moods. “I Rejoiced When I Heard Them Say” (PFAS #122B/LUYH #508) is a somber hymn by Bernadette Farrell that follows the text of the psalm closely in its five stanzas. The refrain of “Shalom, shalom, the peace of God be here/Shalom, shalom, God’s justice be ever near” could also be used as a response. (Here’s a sample of the song.)
Much more joyful are “Let Us Go Rejoicing” (PFAS #122E) by Bob Hurd, which doesn’t appear in Lift Up Your Hearts, and “With Joy I Heard My Friends Exclaim” (PFAS #122F/LUYH #66), which does. The latter has lyrics from the 1912 Psalter (but apparently didn’t appear in earlier CRC hymnals) and is set to the English carol SUSSEX CAROL.
Other CRC hymnals include several other settings of Psalm 122, which we didn’t sing in class.
Lift Up Your Hearts also includes a short chorus based on verse 1: “I Was Glad” (LUYH #514), by M. Thomas Thangaraj, who has written hymns in Tamil for use in India.
The gray Psalter Hymnal has one setting of Psalm 122, “I Was Glad When They Came to Call Me” (PH87 #122). The blue Psalter Hymnal has three: “My Soul Was Glad” (PH57, #262), “With Joy and Gladness in My Soul” (PH57, #263), and “My Heart Was Glad to Hear the Welcome Sound” (PH57, #264).