Come, Thou Fount

I love Christmas carols. Sure, there are some that are cheesy and overplayed, and some of them have very strange lyrics (one of my favorites is from Here Comes Santa Claus, in which the singer sings "Let's gives thanks to the Lord above, 'cause Santa Claus comes tonight"). But some of my favorites, I've found, are the good old classic hymns, ones I sang in church growing up.

So I find myself fascinated when different musicians record updated versions of these hymns. One of my favorite hymns is Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing, which isn't necessarily a Christmas song, but I've come to associate it with the yuletide all the same. I've always been particularly struck by the lyrics, and its focus on our daily need for God's mercy and grace and our grateful response to it. And Christmas seems as good a time as any to celebrate that.

So when my favorite musician Sufjan Stevens released a version of Come Thou Fount on one of his Christmas albums, I was awestruck again by its beauty. Here are some of the lyrics:

Come, thou Fount of every blessing,
tune my heart to sing thy grace;
streams of mercy, never ceasing,
call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I'm fixed upon it,
mount of thy redeeming love.

Here I raise mine Ebenezer;
hither by thy help I'm come;
and I hope, by thy good pleasure,
safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
wandering from the fold of God;
he, to rescue me from danger,
interposed his precious blood.

O to grace how great a debtor
daily I'm constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, like a fetter,
bind my wandering heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
prone to leave the God I love;
here's my heart, O take and seal it,
seal it for thy courts above.

I've always been interested by the first line of the second verse: "Here I raise my Ebenezer." Until now, I assumed it meant like Ebenezer Scrooge from Dicken's A Christmas Carol, as if the lyrics are saying, "I'm giving up my inner Scrooge." But today my friend Amanda e-mailed me this link, which explains that Ebenezer is actually a Biblical reference to 1 Samuel, in which Samuel raises a monument to commemorate God's help to Israel. Samuel called the stone Ebenezer, which means "stone of help." So the Methodist pastor Robert Robinson, who penned the hymn in 1757, wrote of erecting his own monument to God's help.

I'll always think of this song as a Christmas song, I think because the birth of Christ instigates the hope that this song expresses.