The Joy of His Praise
Vol. 57 No. 22 The Third Sunday after Easter April 26, 2026
Last Sunday at Evensong, Fr. Andrew Mead, OBE, and Rector Emeritus of St. Thomas Fifth Avenue, offered these reflections on the occasion of the Admission of five new Choristers to the Girls’ Choir of St. John’s.
Our lessons today (Exodus 33, John 21) each tell of intimate personal encounters with God – Moses with the Lord at the Tent of Meeting, and Saint Peter with the risen Lord Jesus by the Sea of Tiberias. These “I and Thou” encounters involve awe, love, sin and our limitations (including Moses’s and Peter’s), forgiveness and healing, strengthening…on we could go.
These encounters are not confined to Moses and Peter and famous saints and leaders. In different ways, they happen to everyone who is drawn to the Lord, ways that are suited to the person and the need of each of us. You can start with Holy Scripture and go through the history of the people of God down to the present to see this wonder of God’s grace.
I’ve been a priest for over a half century, and it has been one of the greatest privileges of ordained ministry to witness, or to hear of, people’s encounters with the Lord; and how thereby they were “born from above” either early or late in life. Even though they are extraordinary, they are also universal.
What does one do in the wake of such an experience of grace? One thing is to sing. The experience seems to call for more than just words. There is a saying, “He who sings prays twice.”
Two examples from the Bible. When Israel was delivered from Pharaoh’s army at the miracle of the Red Sea, Moses and his sister Miriam (with her tambourine) sang out, “I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously. The horse and its rider hath he thrown into the sea.” Those verses are very likely among the oldest in Scripture. Again, almost two millennia later, after Jesus had washed his disciples’ feet in the Upper Room and shared his last supper with them, they sang a hymn before going out to face what came next. Song, music, is not an additional extra in the life of faith. It is basic to the life of faith. Jesus’s last words from the cross were fragments of the Psalms he knew so well. They were his songbook.
For nearly twenty years, I was rector of Saint Thomas Church in Manhattan, where there has been a Boys’ Choir School for over a century. Each year, the new choristers were clothed with their white surplices when they qualified to be full choristers. More recently, for a month each summer, the Choir School hosted girl choristers, and their excitement was contagious. Whether boys or girls, the joy among the newly clothed choristers provided one of the great pleasures of being there in the Rector’s stall. Today here brings it all back.
So I say to the young choristers being clothed with their surplices this evening: May the joy of singing the Lord’s praises remain ever with you. I recall “old boys” from Saint Thomas visiting and telling me their time in the choir was the experience of a lifetime. Some even became professional singers, musicians and composers; or even clergy.
However your life develops, may the knowledge of the Lord and the pleasure of singing his praises, remain with you all the way. —ACM
Admission of Choristers
At Evensong on Sunday, April 19, 2026, the following persons received the surplice in token of their admission to the Choir of Girls at St. John’s Church.
Lila Colón
Callie Cooke
Emmiline Koweh
Mailani Reeves
Helena Talsness
“Bless, O Lord, us thy servants, who minister in thy temple. Grant that what we sing with our lips we may believe in our hearts, and that what we believe in our hearts we may show forth in our lives; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. ”