This was the thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, and our songs were gathered with God's faithfulness to us despite our brokenness in mind. Or, taken from the vantage point of Josh's sermon, God's making wine out of wild grapes. 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 atjamie@ubcwaco.org.
Songs:
Wandering by Jameson McGregor
Future/Past by John Mark McMillan
Breathe For Me by Jameson McGregor
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.
Wandering: This song takes up the theme by noting our tendency to attempt to manipulate the movement of God for our own purposes. Time and again, we go through life as though God is a tool that we can use. We don't always do this on purpose, but it's a posture we slip into rather easily. This posture presents itself so easily because God has partnered with humanity to tell a story. God could no doubt tell this story by other means, so it's a baffling mystery that time and again God chooses to be faithful to us when we are not faithful to the calling of God. Or maybe it's not mysterious at all. Maybe that's just how God is.
Future/Past: This song is a further response to the theme of Wandering. Beyond God's faithfulness, it traces several layers of God's grandeur, and notes the surprising fact that God has called us friends. The divine-human relationship is an unequal partnership. It's the kind that leaves the lesser party (us) wholly caught up in the undeserved grace of God to allow us to enter into a project of which we are not worthy. God stands before us and beyond us, and somehow still stands with us.
Holy, Holy, Holy: We sang this song to step further into the train of thought to meditate upon and proclaim God's holiness. God's faithfulness to us is baffling in light of God's holiness, but this surprising grace itself becomes a central point of what it means for us to say that God is holy.
Breathe For Me: This song was going to be an interpretation of Breathe on Me, Breath of God, but it ended up without a single line from that hymn. So it is its own song. It is in many ways a prayer that acknowledges the parts of the human experience that make us bad partners in God's project, and asks God to step in and do what we cannot--to transform us into vessels of Godself who carry out God's project faithfully. It's an admission that we can't do this on our own--that we can't will ourselves into capable partners in God's redemption project.
Pulse: We sang this song to look over our shoulder at last week's songs. This is what we said about Pulse then: We sang this song to look over our shoulder at last week's songs. This is what we said about Pulse then: 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