'Common Ground' Song 95 ‘O Lord, the clouds are gathering’

Composer: Graham Kendrick, © Make Way Music 1987.
Official YouTube video and lyrics at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xfv9OI59_7o
Based partly on Lamentations chapter 4
Featured image: the Epiphany window in St Bartholomew, Burstow, Surrey, burial place of the first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed.

Today is Epiphany, when after the Twelve Days of Christmas, that season of remembering Jesus’ birth is put behind us for another year. But we do not forget the impact that his birth had. We recall the visit (maybe a year or more later) of the magi / wise men / kings with their gifts. ‘Epiphany’ means a sudden new understanding of hidden truth, and that is what they had in Bethlehem: ‘they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him.’ (Matthew 2:11). The light of the world, as John calls Jesus, had come into its darkness and revealed God’s love in a new way.

Graham Kendrick rose to fame among Evangelical Christians in the 1980s with his catchy tunes and lyrics that spoke out beyond the walls of the church, calling us to mission in the society around us. When he wrote this song nearly 40 years ago, he was addressing current issues then in what seemed a dark time for the world: increasing poverty and inequality in British society, an increasing awareness among the international community of the scandal of poverty in developing countries (sparked by the Ethiopian famine of 1984), and various wars around the world. A generation on, it seems that nothing has changed; if anything, it has got worse. Some of these words could have been written for 2026: ‘while precious children starve, the tools of war increase, their bread is stolen’ [Gaza? Ukraine?] … ‘dark powers are poised to flood our streets with hate and fear’ [far-right rhetoric] … ‘O Lord, you stand appalled to see your laws of love so scorned and lives so broken’ [pretty much anywhere in the world].

So what can we do? The answer in these lyrics is twofold. Firstly, we must confess. I wrote on Saturday about individual confession, but there is another way in which the church confesses sin. Just as Jesus is the intercessor (the go-between) representing humanity to God, so the Church is the go-between representing the whole of humanity to Jesus. Where there is corporate guilt (institutional bias, commercial greed, warmongering by nations), amazingly it is the Christian Church that is expected to confess that sin of which other people are guilty. Why? Because as the ‘bride of Christ’ or to use a different metaphor, his brothers and sisters, he listens to us. We bring to Jesus the sin of the world, that he might bear it on his cross and redeem it.

That is the second part of the answer, in the final verse: ‘Yet, O Lord, your glorious cross shall tower triumphant in this land, evil confounding’. We may have no hope in human solutions to suffering and injustice, but we can hope in Christ. He is the only one who can call sinners to repentance; he is the only one who will, in the end, return to make all things new and bring eternal peace. That is the epiphany, the revelation, which we celebrate today.