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:
Fall Afresh by Jeremy Riddle
Burn It Down by Jameson McGregor
All Creatures of Our God and King
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