Sydney Carter song texts

[Haruo]

Sydney Carter is widely known and sung in church as the author of "Lord of the Dance" ("I danced in the morning when the world was begun"). In preparing my songlist for a worship resource I hope to publish by this time next year, I've been looking at some of his other songs, and there are two that I'm particularly liking. Reactions invited.

FRIDAY MORNING

(this is not Sydney Carter performing it)

PRESENT TENSE


Your holy hearsay
Is not evidence;
Give me the good news
In the present tense
What happened
Nineteen hundred years ago
May not have happened—
How am I to know?

The living truth
Is what I long to see;
I cannot lean
Upon what used to be.
So shut the Bible up
And show me how
The Christ you talk about
Is living now.