Setlist 5-29-2016

This was the second Sunday after Pentecost, and our songs were once again gathered with the Holy Spirit in mind. Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics. Below the songs, you can find recordings from Sunday morning of a few of them, and below the recordings, there is an example of one way you might think of these songs in light of this week's theme. If you want to talk about any of these, feel free to comment at the bottom of this page or email me atjamie@ubcwaco.org.

Songs:

Just A Closer Walk With Thee

Your Love Is Strong by Jon Foreman

Be Thou My Vision

Pain by Jameson McGregor

Holy, Holy, Holy

Doxology

How They Fit In:

There are many ways to think about the significance of songs and the way they fit together–-this is simply one way you can look at these songs in light of this week’s theme. 

Just A Closer Walk With Thee: In the wake of Pentecost, we have entered into ordinary time, though the Holy Spirit is still very much on our minds.  Just A Closer Walk With Thee is in many ways a song we might think of as being directed toward Jesus, but the Spirit is our connection to the Person of Jesus.  Furthermore, the presence of the Spirit among us is central to our following Jesus, as Jesus lived by the Spirit.  With this in mind, the core petition of this song is addressed to Jesus, but seeks the guidance of the Spirit.

Your Love Is Strong: This song is essentially a meditation on the Lord's Prayer, with an emphasis on being transformed into Kingdom people.  When we think of transformation, we think of the Spirit--the Spirit is the One who does the weaving of our stories, who dwells in our interconnectivity and helps to shape us.  We sang this song to ask the Spirit to continue this work.

Be Thou My Vision:  As with the previous two songs, we sang this song as a petition to the Spirit to shape us into people whose vision, wisdom, security, and hope, are all oriented toward the love of God.  

Pain: I had the opportunity to share this song a couple of months ago at a service at Baylor that was a Space for Lament for people affected by sexual violence.  This song is ultimately about how damaging pain of all kinds can be when buried inside of us, and how God is able and willing to take the weight of our pain.  By that, I don't mean take it away, though I believe in time God moves us forward on a journey of healing (however that might look), but instead I mean that God takes the weight upon Godself--that we don't carry it alone.  The second verse of the song has a more particular kind of pain in view: that of keeping secrets, of sweeping our own evils under the rug and carrying around the guilt.  God carries this pain with us as well, and enacts healing for these situations.  Last week, the institution of Baylor began the process of reckoning with its own evils.  And this reckoning has the potential to be painful in many different ways.  But God is in the midst of this kind of pain too.  I recently put out a video of this song, which you can watch here:

Holy, Holy, Holy: We sang this song to look over our shoulder at our songs from two weeks ago (I was out of town last week).  This is what we said about Holy, Holy, Holy then: We sang this song to begin our time together singing about the particularity of God, as we acknowledge the Spirit as part of the Trinity for the first time in the Christian calendar this year.

Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.

-JM

Setlist 5-15-2016

This Sunday was Pentecost, the day that we remember the coming of the Holy Spirit as the initiator of the movement we now call the Church.  Our songs were gathered with this in mind. Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics. Below the songs, you can find recordings from Sunday morning of a few of them, and below the recordings, there is an example of one way you might think of these songs in light of this week's theme. If you want to talk about any of these, feel free to comment at the bottom of this page or email me at jamie@ubcwaco.org.

Songs:

Holy, Holy, Holy

How Great Thou Art

Fall Afresh by Jeremy Riddle

Burn It Down by Jameson McGregor

All Creatures of Our God and King

Doxology

Recordings:

From time to time, we'll post live recordings of the songs from Sunday morning.  These recordings aren't what you would call polished--sometimes guitars are out of tune, sometimes the vocals are off--but they are records of moments we've shared together.  Here's one from this week.

How They Fit In:

There are many ways to think about the significance of songs and the way they fit together–-this is simply one way you can look at these songs in light of this week’s theme. 

Holy, Holy, Holy: We sang this song to begin our time together singing about the particularity of God, as we acknowledge the Spirit as part of the Trinity for the first time in the Christian calendar this year.

How Great Thou Art: We sang this song to focus on our worship of God in three particular realms--God as Creator, God as Savior, and God as Transformational Presence (Spirit).  In order to do this, we rewrote the third stanza to read, "O Breath of Life, when I recall the moment//You came down low to dwell within our midst//You tune my eyes to see Your subtle movement//You draw us forth, to all begin again."  The structure of this song is essentially three passes at pointing out something about God, and responding with praise, the ever-simple "How great Thou art."  When we sing this together, we are simultaneously expressing praise in that moment, and also learning the proper response to coming into contact with the activity of God.

Fall Afresh: We sang this song to engage the Pentecost moment through considering our own need for the presence of the Spirit among us, as we battle against our own complacency regarding our own transformation into people who are more like Jesus.

Burn It Down: In the book of Acts, as soon as the Spirit comes on the scene, walls begin to fall down.  Walls that took the form of communication barriers, government powers, particular understandings of the story of God and the people of God, prejudices the fledgling church had absorbed from their culture, and probably many more.  This kind of destructive behavior is also evident in the prophets of the Old Testament.  By the power of the Spirit, they were able to speak truth to power--words that amounted to firebombs against the walls that had been built to make the religious feel pious, good, and safe, while simultaneously keeping the poor and cast out from engaging the Hope of God.  It is safe to say that the Spirit is in the habit of knocking down walls that would hinder the Gospel and keep Hope from people who need it most.  This song is about this "destructive" side of the Spirit, and ultimately petitions the Spirit to fold us in to this rebellion and use us to knock down these walls.

All Creatures of Our God and King:  We sang this song to look over our shoulder at last week's songs.  This is what we said about All Creatures of Our God and King then: We sang this song to champion Easter hope for all of creation--God did not just do something significant for humanity in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  Everything is different now, and the whole of creation is now headed for its own Resurrection.

Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.

-JM

Setlist 5-8-2016

This was the seventh week of Easter.  Our songs were gathered with this in mind. Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics. Below the songs, you can find recordings from Sunday morning of a few of them, and below the recordings, there is an example of one way you might think of these songs in light of this week's theme. If you want to talk about any of these, feel free to comment at the bottom of this page or email me at jamie@ubcwaco.org.

Songs:

Death in His Grave by John Mark McMillan

All Creatures of Our God and King

Because He Lives by Bill and Gloria Gaither

Noise by Jameson McGregor

Come Thou Fount

Doxology

Recordings:

From time to time, we'll post live recordings of the songs from Sunday morning.  These recordings aren't what you would call polished--sometimes guitars are out of tune, sometimes the vocals are off--but they are records of moments we've shared together.  Here are a couple from this week.

How They Fit In:

There are many ways to think about the significance of songs and the way they fit together–-this is simply one way you can look at these songs in light of this week’s theme. 

Death in His Grave: We sang this song to begin our final Easter service with a song from our first Easter service, singing about Jesus' victory over the powers of Death.  During Advent, we collectively voiced a longing that God would "change everything." And at Christmas, we rejoiced because God in fact did change everything--God's becoming God-with-us created a new kind of future for the world--one marked by hope.  On Good Friday, this Hope was shattered and put in the ground.  Then on Easter, we saw two things: (1) God was willing to go much farther than we thought to set things right with us--the gap between what it is to be God and and what it is to be human is unimaginably large, but then, having crossed that, God stepped further still into death, and then broke through this full-stop into a new kind of life; and (2) we saw God's real answer to our Advent longing.  In light of Jesus' victory over death, everything changed.  I've posted a video for Death in His Grave before, so I'm not going to do that again.  As I was writing this, though, and thinking about Easter as a further answer to the longing of Advent, I thought about the final Advent song we sang in December.  Here's the video for that song:

All Creatures of Our God and King:  We sang this song to champion Easter hope for all of creation--God did not just do something significant for humanity in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  Everything is different now, and the whole of creation is now headed for its own Resurrection.

Because He Lives: We sang this song to focus once again on one way the Resurrection can affect our daily lives--namely, by giving us the drive to get out of bed, knowing that life is not meaningless and that God is working to put every broken piece back in place.

Noise: This song does a couple of things: (1) It narrates the history of the divine-human relationship, underscoring God's choice to be God-for-us even when we don't do a good job at being us-for-God.  (2) It emphasizes the fact that, because of the Incarnation and the suffering that Jesus endured, God understands our pain--both physical and emotional--and does not count our acknowledging or responding to our pain against us.  The significance of this song in light of Easter is that God's human experience feeds back into God's faithfulness, and though we time and again will become "broken promises," God has given us the Promise of Easter--this emphatic Yes to life.

Come Thou Fount: We sang this song to look over our shoulder at last week's songs, and also to look ahead to Pentecost next week.  This is what we said about Come Thou Fount last week: In some ways, we might think of Easter as a season in which we devote particular attention to a story about God showing up in the midst of tragedy and transforming despair into Hope.  Come Thou Fount is a petition for the Spirit to transform our minds and hearts into faculties that know how to worship God in light of who God has been for us.  The second stanza talks about raising an Eben-ezer, which we can think of as a monument to God's faithfulness--a reminder of God's showing up for us in the past.  With this in mind, we might think of Easter as a whole as an Eben-ezer we have grafted into our Calendar.

Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.

-JM

Setlist 5-1-2016

This was the sixth week of Easter (and Easter itself for the Orthodox Church).  Our songs were gathered with this in mind. Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics. Below the songs, you can find recordings from Sunday morning of a few of them, and below the recordings, there is an example of one way you might think of these songs in light of this week's theme. If you want to talk about any of these, feel free to comment at the bottom of this page or email me at jamie@ubcwaco.org.

Songs:

Wandering by Jameson McGregor

Come Thou Fount

Fall Afresh by Jeremy Riddle

Heart With No Companion by Leonard Cohen

Wayward Ones by The Gladsome Light

Doxology

How They Fit In:

There are many ways to think about the significance of songs and the way they fit together–-this is simply one way you can look at these songs in light of this week’s theme. 

Wandering: This song is about the relentless faithfulness of God to God's commitment to be God-for-us by being God-with-us.  Throughout the Easter season, we are compelled to think seriously about the significance of Jesus' death and resurrection for the divine-human relationship.  A main theme of Wandering is our tendency to observe the movement of God and, intentionally or not, attempt to harness this movement for our own purposes.  It is no secret that Jesus' followers were fully expecting His mission to culminate in an overthrow of Roman oppression and the inauguration of the Kingdom of God.  They saw what Jesus was doing, thought it meant temporal power and deliverance, and thus thought the crucifixion was the end of the story for them--that they had gotten up their hopes for nothing.  On the other side of things, the Jewish authorities that partnered with the Romans to have Jesus eliminated thought they were protecting the movement of God as they understood it, and sought to protect what they held to be the Truth in killing Him.  In the Resurrection, we see Jesus return not with vengeance, but with love--an emphatic yes to God's creation.  God chose to be God-for-us even when we chose to be against God.  Why?  Because that's what God is like.  God is telling a story with us, but God is fully willing and able to cut back against our attempts to derail the story.

Come Thou Fount: In some ways, we might think of Easter as a season in which we devote particular attention to a story about God showing up in the midst of tragedy and transforming despair into Hope.  Come Thou Fount is a petition for the Spirit to transform our minds and hearts into faculties that know how to worship God in light of who God has been for us.  The second stanza talks about raising an Eben-ezer, which we can think of as a monument to God's faithfulness--a reminder of God's showing up for us in the past.  With this in mind, we might think of Easter as a whole as an Eben-ezer we have grafted into our Calendar.

Fall Afresh: We sang this song to look over our shoulder at last week's songs.  This is what we said about Fall Afresh then: We sang this song as a prayer, voicing together our desire for the Spirit to be with us.  In this season, it is fitting to dwell on the fact that the Spirit of the Living God is in fact the catalyst of the Resurrection.  The Spirit is the power that makes dead things live again. In the call to worship yesterday, we acknowledged that there are many kinds of death that we experience, not all of which involve our hearts ceasing to beat.  Change of all kinds is a kind of death, and change seems to be a fundamental part of life.  The Spirit is constantly working to raise us to life--life to the fullest.  So, as many of us are on the edge of new seasons of life (either because we are moving to new schools, new jobs, or because we are ready to break out of a rut we've been in), we sang this song to petition the Spirit to raise us up once again.

Heart With No Companion: This song imagines a greeting that stretches across the gulf of sorrow and despair to give hope to those who feel worthless, aimless, or simply stuck.  This greeting is comprise of a love that is "vast and shattered," which we might imagine as the kind of love that Jesus embodied; the kind of love that Jesus carried through torture, crucifixion, and death.  On Easter, I finished our series of Lent readings by talking about Jesus as a Mirror that was shattered and put back together, but with a series of cracks.  This image might help think about this song--the kind of misery that Jesus experienced allows His love to greet us in the midst of our own struggles.  Furthermore, if the shattering of Jesus means Hope for creation, this love carries with it the Hope of meaning into the most stalled-out circumstances we might face.  

Wayward Ones: We sing this song every time we take communion to remind ourselves of a couple of things.  First, we are a broken people--though we are seeking to become more like Jesus, we often fail at this.  Second, Christ has given Himself for us despite our brokenness.  We take communion to remember the sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf, even though we did not, and do not, deserve it.

Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.

-JM