If you’ve followed my blog, or my sermons, you may have gathered that hymns are an important part of my spirituality. I’ve been surrounded by them all my life and they have helped to shape the way I experience the love of God in Jesus Christ, and fellowship in the body of Christ.

As I’ve been working on my sermon today, the gospel being the parable of the prodigal son, fragments of an old gospel song have kept coming back to me. The refrain is

Welcome, wand’rer, welcome!
Welcome back to home!
Thou hast wandered far away:
Come home! Come home!

I’m not sure how often we sang it when I was growing up, but for some reason it touched me deeply. Looking at the text after thirty years, it’s a little bit maudlin, and definitely evangelical, and focuses one’s attention on the parable in question toward areas I don’t find particularly interesting. Still, there’s something about it.

The tune I know  it sung to was written by Ira Sankey, who wrote hundreds of hymn tunes, working closely with Dwight Moody. That much I remembered. I was surprised to find out that the text was written by Horatio Bonar. Bonar was a prolific hymn writer and several of his works are in the Episcopal Hymnal 1982, including “Here, O My Lord, I see Thee face to face”–one of the great Eucharistic hymns.

More about Horatio Bonar, including many of his hymns, is here: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/b/o/n/bonar_h.htm and more about Sankey here: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/s/a/n/sankey_id.htm