This was the eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, and our songs around the theme of discipleship. 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
Fall Afresh by Jeremy Riddle
Heart With No Companion by Leonard Cohen
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.
Just A Closer Walk With Thee: We sang this song to begin our time together by expressing a desire to be more fully formed in the way of Christ. Of particular note is the second stanza, which highlights that we are not left to carry the burden of our failures in following Christ alone.
Death In His Grave: This song rehearses the story of Jesus' defeat of death. We sang it because the whole of the Christian faith hinges on the resurrection of Jesus. Within this song, we celebrate the self-emptying of Jesus for our sake, showing us what love looks like, as well as the power of the resurrection to break the fundamental cycle of life and death. This is the story that we are seeking to model as followers of Christ, constantly dying and rising in different ways, hoping to learn something about life and love.
Fall Afresh: We sang this song to acknowledge our dependence upon the renewal of the Spirit to grow as followers of Jesus. Be it on a great or small scale, we all experience the cycle of renewal and stagnation in the life of faith--the cycle in which our brains seek out an easier status quo than we are called to--and we thus continually need the help of the Spirit to pull us forward.
Heart With No Companion: This song is a love letter from God to the afflicted that offers the shattered Love of God to those who feel like their lives lack meaning. It carries within it a promise that those who experience the existential anguish of not being able to be what they know they have been created to be have not been forgotten. Furthermore, it is a message that who you are and what you do are two very different things (in the song, you have a captain with no ship, a mother with no children, a prima ballerina with no dancing, etc.). Within the context of this week's songs, it is a word to the person who feels like they aren't "good" at being a follower of Christ, reminding them that they carry an identity that transcends their religious prowess.
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 acknowledge the presence of the Spirit in every living thing, to petition God to reconnect our awareness to this interconnectivity, and to show us what this means for the way we love one another.
Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.
-JM