From the Dedication Anniversary primer: Opening Hymn: “Christ Is Made the Sure Foundation” (LSB 909) This hymn was written for the day we are keeping. The Latin is anonymous and old, dated anywhere from the sixth century to the ninth, and its meter matches hymns of the Mozarabic rite, which points toward Spain; the earliest copies survive in tenth- and eleventh-century manuscripts from Britain, Spain, and France. What we sing is only its second half. The full poem, Urbs beata Hierusalem, “Jerusalem, blessed city,” was split in the Middle Ages for the dedication of a church: the first half, on the heavenly Jerusalem, was sung in the evening, and the second half, which begins Angularis fundamentum and treats the Jerusalem present in Christ in our own worship spaces, was sung the next morning at Lauds. John Mason Neale headed his 1851 translation exactly so, “Morning Hymn for the Dedication of a Church.” Those same Latin stanzas produced a second English hymn that looks unrelated, “Christ Is Our Cornerstone” (LSB 912); ours keeps the Latin meter and that one does not. The image is from 1 Peter 2, where the baptized are living stones laid on the living Stone. The tune is adapted from Henry Purcell.