Mary Lee Talbot
Staff Writer
“Hope: The Family of Abraham Gathers” is the theme for the Sacred Song Service at 8 p.m. Sunday night in the Amphitheater. The Rt. Rev. Eugene Taylor Sutton, senior pastor for Chautauqua, will preside.
This special Sacred Song Service is also a chance for this year’s Abrahamic Program for Young Adults coordinators to lead Chautauquans in worship. The coordinators include Ori Edgar, Nia-Hyatt Eldosougi, Evans Nyamadzawo and Elizabeth Schoen. Director of Sacred Music and Jared Jacobsen Chair for the Organist Joshua Stafford, organ scholars Owen Reyda and Laura Smith and the Chautauqua Choir will participate.
Since 2003, Sacred Song has been the venue for exploring the relationship of the three faiths. For that first event, Jared Jacobsen, the late, longtime organist and director of sacred music at Chautauqua, worked with The Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, then director of the Chautauqua Department of Religion, to bring San Francisco-based liturgical artist Nancy Chinn to create five banners called “The Reunion of the Family of Abraham.”
Those banners will be part of the stage design on Sunday evening. The central banner is Abraham, with Sarah and Issac on one side and Hagar and Ishmael on the other.
Chinn worked with volunteer Chautauquans to cut out the design for each banner. The banners are made of Tyvek so they would not absorb moisture and would not rip or tear easily in the wind.
Over the years, objections have been raised about the banners portraying Isaac and Ishmael because the banners include depictions of guns.
In a 2003 interview in The Chautauquan Daily, Chinn said that “the guns represent all the wars fought in the name of religion.”
“I don’t want them to be fairy tales anymore. That’s not reachable to me,” she said. “In (the) Ishmael and Isaac (banners) there are guns, and that is because for me, we are still sending our children to be sacrificed in the name of God. … As I was cutting out Ishmael and Isaac, I had a great sadness. … I sensed how tragic it is that we think we can kill another person.”
Started in 2006, the Abrahamic Program for Young Adults has brought representatives of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths to interact with other young adults at Chautauqua to talk about faith as a part of life. The program was on hiatus due to the pandemic but was revived in 2024.
Over the years, the flow of the service has changed. Several times, the APYA coordinators developed a service around the symbols of water or light. For the last three years, the program has been developed by Stafford. The service is wrapped in the traditional beginning and ending of a Sacred Song Service, the hymns “Day Is Dying in the West” and “Now the Day is Over” and “Largo” on the Massey Memorial Organ.
