My oldest daughter, Sarah, serves on the vestry at her Episcopal church and prepared this devotion for a recent meeting. I asked her to share it with my readers.
Some of you have heard me joke before about how I don’t like the way the Episcopal hymnal changed the words of some hymns I know. Having grown up evangelical, I learned them how I learned them! So there are times the words we sing feel so foreign to me, which is disconcerting when the tune is familiar.
The one I like least is the edit to my favorite hymn, “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” I love this hymn so much that a print of the music hangs in my home. And to be fair to the Episcopal hymnal, it’s not the only one that has changed the words. The second stanza was written as, “Here I raise my Ebenezer; hither by thy help I’m come.” Sometimes it actually says “mine Ebenezer.” At some point along the way, somebody decided English-speaking Christians were too dumb to understand the word “Ebenezer,” I guess. But that is how it was written.
Robert Robinson, the writer of this hymn, was born in England in 1735. When he was a young boy, his father died, and the family was in a very difficult financial position. His mother sent him to London as a young teen to apprentice with a barber. By Robinson’s own account, he started to run with the wrong crowd. When he was 17, he and his gang went to a revival where a well-known preacher, George Whitefield, was speaking – intending to disrupt it by poking fun at the Methodists. What happened instead was that Whitefield preached on Matthew 3:7, where John asks the Sadducees and Pharisees who warned them of the wrath to come. This got into Robinson’s mind, and he began to think he should change how he was living. A few years later, he experienced what he called “full and free forgiveness through the precious blood of Jesus Christ.” He joined the Methodists, was appointed to serve in a church in Norfolk by John Wesley himself, and wrote this hymn to accompany his Pentecost sermon in 1758 – when he was 23!
So what on earth is an “Ebenezer”? It means “stone of help.” It’s a reference to 1 Samuel 7:12, when after God had given a great victory to Israel, “Samuel took a stone and . . . named it Ebenezer, saying, ‘Thus far has the Lord helped us.’”
So an Ebenezer, then, is a stone that marks how God has helped us through difficult things. Take a moment to read the lyrics of the second stanza, and as you do, think about the difficult times you’ve been through. We’ve certainly been through some as a vestry, and there are likely more to come. Many of us have been through difficult times in our personal lives recently. But we are not alone; God helps us through.
It irks me when I see people posting on social media about getting something they prayed for and saying, “God is faithful!” Because if that’s true — if God is faithful — then God is faithful when good things happen and when bad things happen, when we get what we prayed for and when we don’t. God’s faithfulness never changes. It’s only right that we raise an Ebenezer in thanks.
So the next time we sing this song, which in the Episcopal hymnal says, “Here I find my greatest treasure,” I invite you to join me in a little bit of rebellion. Maybe just quietly, to yourself, sing the original words instead, and think of how you might raise an Ebenezer in response to God’s faithfulness in your life.
–Sarah Huxford Camp
Wye Huxford 