Saturday, August 20, 2016

Jesus Is Coming Soon -- Robert Emmett Winsett



What would you expect to hear from a 66-year old Pentecostal preacher in 1940s Chattanooga, Tennessee (which might have looked something like this picture, shown here)? Considering the era and the background of Robert Emmett Winsett, one would not have been surprised to hear him utter the words “Jesus Is Coming Soon”. He’d already lived through plenty that would give him reason to say such a thing, but the words would continue to ring loudly for a few more decades in the ears of its hearers, culminating in this poem-song’s award recognition a quarter of a century after he first sketched out his thoughts. Why would a 25-year-old song provoke such an episode? Robert might say the words never go out of style.

Robert Winsett’s Pentecostal beliefs and the times that he lived through, including their impact on him personally as well as on those around him, certainly must have molded the ideas he expressed in “Jesus Is Coming Soon”. Winsett had lost two people close to him – his first wife and a son -- some 10-15 years earlier, so he was intimately familiar with personal tragedy, though he’d since remarried and had additional children. Winsett was said to be somewhat of an introvert, preferring to be in the woods for long hours, a trait that must have contributed toward the approximately 1,000 hymns and multiple songbooks he authored over his lifetime. By 1942, his 66th year, Winsett would also have been witnessing the third war of his lifetime (Spanish-American War [1898], World War I [1914-18], and World War II [1941-45]), a particularly resonant event to make one aware of the mortality of oneself and those around him. Can you hear Winsett preaching the first words of this 1942 hymn ‘Troublesome times are here…’? They must have been effective with his hearers, who would have believed that ‘freedom …is at stake’ (v. 1). It would be much later, however, when Winsett’s words would actually earn the song the Dove Award for Gospel Song of the Year, in 1969. Were 1969’s events, amidst yet another war (Vietnam), enough to make Winsett’s words meaningful again? We can guess that Winsett and other Pentecostals were also reading apocalyptically from their bibles (including from 1 Thessalonians). Winsett’s world must have borne heavily upon him, but also made him aware and expectant for the coming heaven-bound events (see song’s refrain).     

Does Winsett’s message still make sense? Since his departure for another world, the world has hardly had reason to scoff at Robert’s sense of things. Wars and the trouble that accompany them are just one of the phenomena Winsett probably observed. Many ‘evils abound’ (v.2) terrestrially; but, heaven and my destiny there allow me to feel ebullient. Is that why Winsett’s tune to accompany his words, though entitled ‘Troublesome Times’, feels like a sprint, with a jaunty skip to them?  We believers will rise at the trumpet sound, meet each other in the skies, and greet Jesus. Takes the breath away, doesn’t it? And, it takes the wind right outta that doom era (refrain), at least for the saved. Are you dreading the doom, or looking around the corner past it?



These two links record a brief biography of the composer:
http://www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/w/i/n/winsett_re.htm

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