This was the fourth Sunday after Pentecost, and our songs were gathered with the faithfullness of God 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:
House of God Forever by Jon Foreman
Wandering by Jameson McGregor
Future/Past by John Mark McMillan
Fever by Jameson McGregor
There's A Wideness in God's Mercy by Jameson McGregor (adapted from F. Faber)
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.
House of God Forever: We sang this song to express Psalm 23 together. If we're honest, this psalm calls us to make claims about the way we trust God that are more intense than we can honestly say most of the time. Because of this, House of God Forever pulls us along--asks us to claim a greater reliance on the faithfulness of God than we might carry at this moment, but this draws us closer to living in that place.
Wandering: This song contrasts God's faithfulness to us with our own attempts at being faithful that usually have a self-serving bend to them. The point isn't to beat ourselves up about this--I think this is something we should combat and of which we must be aware, but it is also part of what it is to be human. Instead, the point is to recognize that God's faithfulness to us is unwavering. Because of this, we can fail again and again and still be pulled along on the Way of Christ.
Future/Past: This song presents the grandeur of God and underscores the fact that God has called us "friends." Taken with the idea of God's faithfulness, this song bolsters our assurance that God is with us in the same way in the midst of the joy and the pain of life, and that, just as our past has been marked by this, we can remain confident that our future will be as well.
Fever: This song makes a metaphor of the relationship between fever and virus. Fevers are used to restore order to the body when it has been invaded by a virus/bacteria--to move toward regaining the status quo. Fever imagines a scenario in which the thing that we keep pulling ourselves back to is in fact the worse thing, and it seeks out a wilder pathogen to overtake the attempts to restore "order." As for what this means, I think that's pretty pliable--you could probably find your own meaning in it.
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 then: This is a song that deals directly with mercy in the context of Jesus, but that is far from the only lens we can use when looking at There's A Wideness in God's Mercy. For instance, the Spirit's transformative presence with us is no doubt an example of the wideness of God's mercy. As we traverse the varied terrain of our day-to-day, we do so in cooperation with the Spirit, who is shaping us and our stories into something new, beyond the measure of our minds.
Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.
-JM