This was the twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost, and our songs around the theme of shame. 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:
Heart Won't Stop by John Mark McMillan
Death In His Grave by John Mark McMillan
Noise by Jameson McGregor
There's A Wideness in God's Mercy by Jameson McGregor (adapted from F. Faber)
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.
Heart Won't Stop: This song is centered on the idea that nothing can sever use from the love of God. The shame we carry is a false narrative about who we are that is shattered by the love of God. The true narrative about who we are says that we are God's beloved children. That's not to say there is not a place for guilt when we do what we should not, but instead that we are not capable of amassing a guilt that cancels out the love of God.
Be Thou My Vision: We sang this song to practice asking God to override the false, shame-driven, narratives about ourselves that we replay time and again in our heads.
Death In His Grave: We sang this song to proclaim the story of Jesus' death and resurrection, reminding ourselves in a more particular way why our shame narratives are false. The things we do are not able to change who we are in light of what Jesus has done for us.
Noise: This song made an appearance because of this line in the chorus: when i was a broken promise, You made me another one. There are several ways you could interpret that line, but for the sake of this week, let's go with this one: God does not leave it up to us to reconcile the rift in the divine-human relationship. God is reconciling us to Godself, and our inconsistent leaning-in to this doesn't get to override what God is doing.
There's A Wideness in God's Mercy: We sang this song to look over our shoulder at last week's songs. This is what we said about There's A Wideness in God's Mercy last week: This song confronts our tendency to try to talk ourselves out of any confidence in God's faithfulness to be God-for-us--as though we could disqualify ourselves. Instead, it reminds us that the love of God is not limited by our own sense of what kind or degree of mercy we deserve.
Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.
-JM