This was the eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, and our songs were gathered with God's gift-giving 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
House of God Forever by Jon Foreman
Pulse 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.
Death In His Grave: We sang this song to begin our time together by singing about the gift that God gave to humanity in the death and resurrection of Jesus. In the Incarnation, God gave Godself to the world. In the Crucifixion, Jesus gave Himself for the world. In the Resurrection, God gave Hope to the world. And through all of this, God gave us a story that we now carry that critiques the assumptions we have about love, life, sin, death, and the divine-human relationship as a whole.
Come Thou Fount: We sang this song as a petition that the Spirit would tune our hearts to embrace and be grateful for the many gifts that God gives us, knowing that it's difficult to get this right even on our best days, and knowing that we have wandering hearts that threaten to skew the way we think about where our gifts come from. Also, we sang it to make a blanket statement of the "Here I raise my Ebenezer" line--an Ebenezer is a monument of sorts that signifies the gift of God's active presence that has carried us through every chapter of our lives. (I am aware that I explain "Ebenezer" pretty much every time we sing this song, but let's not pretend that isn't an obscure concept. If you already know what it means, that's great, but many people probably don't.)
House of God Forever: This song is more or less an arrangement of Psalm 23, and we sang it to voice the gift that God gives us in providing for our needs. This makes it possible for us to let go of our anxieties. I am personally not good at acknowledging this gift--worrying comes quite naturally to me and I do it all the time. I have a feeling I'm not the only one. We sang this song to put voice to the truth that God is our provider and comforter in hopes that we would embrace this idea a little more.
Pulse: We sang this song to be reminded of the gift of life that God has given to all of creation, and to lament our tendency to ignore the dignity of this gift in people who are different than us.
Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.
-JM