This week was Easter, and our songs were gathered around that theme. Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics. Below the songs, 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:
In the Night by Andrew Peterson
Death In His Grave by John Mark McMillan
Hope by Jameson McGregor
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.
In the Night: This song is a journey through the biblical narrative, cataloguing the process of struggle and victory, woundedness and healing, etc., strung together by the refrain "In the night, my hope lives on." We've added a verse to the song each week of Lent as we made our way to this week. This song as a whole is an exercise in looking back to look forward--looking at what God has done in dark places as a reassurance that God will not abandon us to our own darkness.
Death In His Grave: We sang this song to proclaim the death of Death in the death and resurrection of Jesus, and also to think about the changes this brings about for our own lives.
How Great Thou Art: We sang this song to praise God on perhaps three different levels. First, we have images of God forming worlds on the cosmic scene. Second, we have the Easter story. And third, we have the future hope of reconciliation between God and creation on a large scale. God's "greatness" in this song might be attributed to the fact that God not only made the cosmos, but takes notice of humanity within that sprawl--and not just "notice," God emptied Godself out for the good of the divine-human relationship--and so, we can expect that God will continue to be this overwhelmingly loving creator for us.
Hope: On Easter, we get the resolution to a plot we have been following since Advent. In the midst of the darkness of Advent, we held out hope that a light would come. And we found on Christmas that God lit a fire in our darkness. In the weeks since, we have watched with bated breath to see how the Light fared in the darkness. On Easter, we see conclusively that the darkness did not overcome it. This song is about that story, and it's about the analogues of that story that we experience throughout our own lives. God is still lighting fires in our darkness, and the darkness is still not overcoming them. And now, on Easter, we have reason to believe that this isn't a story, but the story.
Because He Lives: We sang this song to remind ourselves that the Resurrection has an effect on our daily lives--that it is relevant for our own outlook on life. Everything is different because of this moment. Everything has changed. Every story now gets woven into a greater story, and tragedies don't triumph in the end.
Doxology: During Lent, we put the Doxology to bed, and replaced it with Be Thou My Vision. Now is the time to bring it back. We will once again close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.
-JM