Would you believe we used to sing this in junior high school–O, Sinner Man, Where You Gonna Run To?
Take a Caribbean spiritual, move it to the northern reaches of the Irish Sea, add a few seals… and you can see that this hymn is a message to us all, wherever we may be.
The wisdom of this world is blowing up in our faces, our so-called leaders can’t handle it, and I just can’t bear to write about it just now. The lyric is right: We shoulda been a-prayin’.
Our only refuge is in the name of the Lord.
Let’s here O, Sinner Man–sung amid the cold, cold waters of the sea around Scotland.
I’m not normally up this early, and I’m sure I’ll pay for it later.
I love this rendition of O, Sinner Man–a West Indian spiritual transported to the cold waters of Scotland and played on a mandolin. But of course the hymn’s real message is in the lyrics.
No hymn requests came in yesterday, so I had to resort to my favorites. This is one of them: a Caribbean spiritual, Oh, Sinner Man, transported to the cold waters off Scotland–and it’s wonderful.
It’s raining and raining, a grey and dreary day, doesn’t feel much like Labor Day weekend at all… which somehow brought this transplanted spiritual to my mind as a hymn to start the day. Transplanted from the Caribbean to the cold, grey waters around the northern British Isles. See the seals, and the chunks of ice floating around? That means it’s cold.
And the point is–they don’t get away with it. God will collect a bill of justice. And unless one accepts that Jesus Christ, God’s Son, has already paid it–well, not all of Hell is hot. Some of it is very terribly cold.