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Suffrages: Remembering the Needy

    The sixth (and penultimate) suffrage in Morning and Evening Prayer is drawn from Psalm 9. The putative author of this Psalm is the righteous person (“David,” who is described in Psalm 1 as not walking in the counsel of the wicked but instead following the ways of the Lord). In Psalm 9, the speaker gives God thanks, promises to rejoice in him, and reminds us who hear the psalm of God’s righteous judgment which, among other things, brings the wicked to naught. Such oppression as is going on now shall not go on forever, for the Lord, who “has set up his throne for judgment,” will remember the oppressed; “he will not forget the cry of the afflicted.” At verse 18 we read: “For the needy shall not always be forgotten, * and the hope of the poor shall not perish for ever.” The suffrage puts Psalm 9:18 into our daily prayers:

    V.    Let not the needy, O Lord, be forgotten;

    R.    Nor the hope of the poor be taken away.

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 First observation: Just by saying this suffrage, the prayer is answered in ourselves. When we ask that the needy not be forgotten, by that very prayer we remember them. One way God addresses the needs of “the needy” is through us remembering them. Of course, it needs to move beyond words of a prayer into actions that we participate in. But as the old parable has it, a road of a hundred miles begins with a single step.

    

Nonetheless, we are asking (as Psalm 9 makes clear) that God remember the needy. This is a venerable mode of praying: to “remind” God of what he has promised, to state before God what sort of character he has determined himself to have. Prayer may, for instance, remind God of what he has done in the past and ask him to act accordingly in the present. The preeminent prayer of remembrance is the Eucharist, which answers the request that Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross not be forgotten! “Do this in remembrance of me.”

 

We want God, who has the power to bring righteousness to full effect all over the world, to act. We want him to remember: and by voicing that desire we ourselves stop forgetting the needy. And anytime we act on that desire, we find our action united to Jesus’ in a surprising way. “You did it to me,” he famously says in Matthew 25. Jesus is the power of God in solidarity with the needy.

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Second observation: The words “the hope of the poor” are infinitely suggestive. The poor, generally, hope not to be poor. More concretely, they hope to receive such things as it is uncommon (but not unknown!) for us to lack: a place to sleep, food to eat, some clothes to wear, some protection from the elements and from those who would do us harm. Hopes like these live in the heart, so we are asking God to strengthen the poor in their spirit lest hope disappear and they succumb to despair. Along the way, simple human kindness can nourish hope, for every kindness is a little sacrament of God’s benevolent will.

 

Yet “the hope of the poor” means more than all this. It means, ultimately, God himself. One of God’s names is “the hope of the poor,” who hope in the promise of seeing God face to face and living in the light of his glory. “The hope of the poor” means heaven and salvation and beauty beyond words. 

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Which leads me to my third observation. To have “the hope of the poor” is to know you need God. And here, dear readers, is where you and I are so often in temptation. When we have a place to sleep and food and clothes—and a bank account! a retirement fund! a car! a credit card! health insurance!—when we have all this, it is very easy to forget that we need God. It is easy, that is, to lose “the hope of the poor.”

 

I of course am speaking to myself first of all here. When every morning and evening I pray, “Let not . . . the hope of the poor be taken away,” I am praying of course for those in great need. But I am also praying for myself (which leads us to the final suffrage, about which I plan to write in a few weeks).

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Out & About: Sunday, September 14, I am preaching at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, Dallas, to celebrate the feast of the Holy Cross. The Eucharists are at 9 and 11:15 a.m. (Holy Cross is one of the patronal feasts of the cathedral, since that congregation was joined with the cathedral in the past decade, and hence it is kept on the Sunday.)

 

This Sunday evening (still Sept. 14), the Good Books & Good Talk seminar will discuss Nicolas Diat’s A Time to Die. We meet from 5 to 6:30 p.m. at St. Matthew’s Cathedral. If you wish to come, you are welcome: Park in the reserved cathedral section of the apartment building garage. When you walk out of the garage, Garrett Hall will be ahead of you on the right of the green. (The cathedral will be to your left.) We meet in Garrett Hall on the 2nd floor. There will be someone at the door to let you in starting about 4:45.

 

Ethics class: I will be teaching the Christian Ethics course at the Stanton Institute on five Saturday classes from January to May 2026, in person at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas. You can register now. Details: https://edod.org/our-diocese/stanton-institute-for-theology-and-practice/. Drop me a line if you’d like to see the syllabus. Auditors do the reading; those who take it for credit have writing assignments along the way; no exams.

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The Hour of Banquet and of Song

The tune was commissioned by the 1940 Hymnal to go with these words, though they, the words by Horatius Bonar, had been in many preceding hymnals with a different tune. I remember first singing it a half-century ago out of that hymnal. “This is the hour of banquet and of song; / this is the heavenly table spread for me; / here let me feast, and feasting still prolong / the BRIEF, BRIGHT HOUR of fellowship with thee.”

The opening stanza sets forth the Eucharist as a banquet with singing; it is “the heavenly table” and it is personal to the singer: all this that God has done is “for me.” It is an hour of fellowship with God, a “brief, bright hour,” with the final words “with thee” putting God in rhyming parallel with the singer, “for me.” George Herbert (and of course many other poets) have described God’s work as a feast done for each of us personally. The power of this is emphasized by the tune, Canticum refectionis (dumb-literal translation, “song of the refectory”), whose last line has a special feature: two extended half-notes followed by a downbeat that give stretched-out emphasis to the words “brief, bright hour” (which I put in ALL CAPS above).

Then follows the middle stanza on the transience of the Eucharist. “Too soon we rise; we go our several ways; / the feast, though not the love, is past and gone, / the bread and wine consumed; yet all our days / thou STILL ART HERE with us—our shield and sun.” The hour of the church service ends; we leave and go on our various “ways.” The candles are put out; the silver is cleaned and stored away; the doors are locked. But this is not the whole truth of the Eucharist: “thou still art here with us.” God is with us throughout our lives. He protects us and he gives us the light to see, and he is always doing this. The three words emphasized by the tune this time are “still art here”: God remains here, regardless.

In the middle of their time with Jesus, some disciples were on the top of a mountain and they saw him glowing with the light of God, a light no longer hidden within his flesh. But the hour passed, the light faded, and they went down the mountain and continued on to Jerusalem where, perhaps only months later, on the night before the cross, they had the Last Supper.

Our life is always one of occasional visions, moments of transcendence, the experience of “fellowship with thee,” experiences where we know God’s creative and redemptive love for us. These occasional visions are sacramentalized in the Eucharist. But then life goes on, must go on, rightly goes on in ordinary “ways.”

The final stanza takes us to the end. “Feast after feast thus comes and passes by, / yet, passing, points to the glad feast above, / giving us foretaste of the festal joy, the LAMB’S GREAT MARriage feast of bliss and love.” The last line here, which I have quoted from the Hymnal 1982, was different in 1940: “the Lord’s eternal feast” it said. (Bonar’s words were yet different still.) It is good, I think, to picture the heavenly feast as a marriage; it comes, as the end of Revelation depicts, as a marriage of heaven and earth, and it is hosted by Jesus who, as Augustine said, married divinity and humanity in his Incarnation. There might be a better word than the (alas overworked) “great” but the point remains sound: the Eucharist is our foretaste of “the Lamb’s great marriage feast.” 

Let’s pull together the three syllables the tune emphasizes in the last line of each stanza: “brief, bright hour” — “still art here” — “Lamb’s great mar[riage feast].” They emphasize our present enjoyment, God’s persistent presence, and the promised postmortem reality of heavenly “bliss and love.”

It’s #316 in the Hymnal 1982 (#206 in the 1940 Hymnal). May I commend it to your memorization? 

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Out & About: Sunday, September 14, the Good Books & Good Talk seminar will discuss Nicolas Diat’s A Time to Die. We meet from 5 to 6:30 p.m. at St. Matthew’s Cathedral. Everyone is welcome to attend; if you read the book, you are also welcome to talk! Directions: Park in the reserved cathedral section of the apartment building. When you walk out of the garage, Garrett Hall will be ahead of you on the right of the green. (The cathedral will be to your left.) We meet in Garrett Hall on the 2nd floor. There will be someone at the door to let you in starting about 4:45.

The subsequent fall seminars will be Oct. 19 on Dr. Wortle’s School by Anthony Trollope, and Nov. 9 on Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot.

Ethics class: I will be teaching the Christian Ethics course at the Stanton Institute; five Saturday classes from January to May 2026. You can register now. Details: https://edod.org/our-diocese/stanton-institute-for-theology-and-practice/

Posted by The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin with

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The Rev. Canon Victor Lee Austin. Ph.D., is the Theologian-in-Residence for the diocese and is the author of several books including, "Friendship: The Heart of Being Human" and "A Post-Covid Catechesis.: 

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