I seem to remember there’s a hymn in that particular songbook with a number and then “a” after it. Can’t remember which number though.

I’ll try to remember to bring you another one at Pepperdine.

Gracias - sin embargo, no se admiraban el numero, sino el himno.

Thanks! However, the number wasn’t revered, only the hymn [Anthem] itself.

Until I was in the fifth grade I could have swarn we sang about A “night with Ed and Pin-yon”…and I wondered who the heck was named “Pin-yon” and where was “Ed” in the Bible?

Hard to type and feed a baby…..

I had the interesting experience of attending worship at a “Northern-most” cofc, and I heard ALL the 50’s phrases like “guide, garden directus” (definately LATIN - Southern Latin) and it was like a “flashback” to my 40’s-50’s homechurch in a small town. Three songs and a prayer. Now that’s ONE target-rich environment for Zoe!! The fields are still teeming, Mike. (I’m so sorry I missed you at Zoe Conference.) I sent my nieces some Zoe CD’s in that northern-most congregation…they’ve never heard of them. Heh heh…I may have made a few people uncomfortable as I raised my hands toward the heavens during one hymn. But…the music was appropriate for my action, and it’s what I felt!

I’m not sure, since I find even the final verse of 728B inscrutable, but I suspect that the book had been legally planned with 728 numbered items, and all copyright permissions had been granted on the basis of publication in a book of 728 numbered items. Thus 728B was a way of stretching without having to renegotiate everything so that the book could have 729. But I’m not sure. I do live in Louisiana where that book was published, and many years ago, long before that book was published, there was a state highway which bore the number 99 1/2, evidently because highways numbered from 100 up received a lower priority, notwithstanding my father’s attempt to convince me as a lad that LA 99 1/2 was just the left lane of LA 99. In my post for November 9, 2006, I observed that Louisiana is paradise. Now, one of the reasons why our license plates can claim that we are in paradise (”Sportsman’s Paradise”) is our entrepreneuring outlook down here. It happens not only with numbers but also with words. The State Constitution posits that “the Legislature shall define and suppress gambling.” So one day the Legislature defined a casino as being something other than gambling, and, voilà, a casino became not gambling but gaming. The 728B Anthem is insightful in its insistence that in God “we live and we survive.” In casinos, it is doubtful that we do either.

Kathy:

El himno se admira en español. ¡Bravo!

The Anthem is revered in Spanish. Superb!

Thanks for the post and link to my shop. I have thoroughly enjoyed the discussion that it started.

I also thought you might like to see a few new designs that I put up today. http://www.cafepress.com/728b

-Jeremy

Put “Our God, He Is Alive” into a good search engine, and you will probably come to it. One location is
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1023357 . The number it had in a widely used hymnbook is 728B. There were 728 numbers, and then “Our God, He Is Alive” possibly came out after the agreements and printing arrangements had been made for the first 728.

Brian:

I’m pleasantly surprised that the FHU prof had the audacity to question The Anthem, but I cautiously avoided stating that the final verse “makes no sense whatsoever.” What I did write was that I “lack the ability to discern” the sense that is there. Further, in staunch Campbellian hermeneutics, the age of miracles having ceased, yet here one witnesses a noun which is simultaneously objective and nominative, like the cow with two heads, a phenomenon which Cotton Mather could ascribe only to supernatural cause. Although nothing unclean can enter into heaven, The Anthem avers that God holds “the germ” within His hands. Be nice to The Anthem until one day when “We Shall Overcome” and “the crooked shall be made straight and the rough ways shall be made smooth,” presumably even in 728B, and we shall understand.

My husband and his brothers wrote alternative lyrics to a hymn or two. “A Beautiful Life” became “the spam song.” And they put their hands over their hearts when singing 728b.