This week was the seventh Sunday of Epiphany, and 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:
Amazing Grace by Citizens & Saints
Rise Up by Bifrost Arts
Lifted/Lifting 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.
Amazing Grace: We sang this song to begin our time together acknowledging the grace of God as it is revealed in the person of Jesus, and the way that this grace has impacted and continues to impact our lives.
Rise Up: This song contrasts the disposition of the God of justice with the inconsistent presence of justice in the world, and rises to a plea for God to act and set things right in the world. It serves a double-purpose: to confess the truth about who God is and to raise a petition for God to show up, and also to remind ourselves of the way we should seek to conduct ourselves in the world if we are to call ourselves people of God.
How Great Thou Art: This song is an exercise in wonder. It allows us to practice connecting the wonders of creation, the redemption story that unfolds in the Bible, and the reconciliation Hope we carry, to the One who is responsible for all of them. This is ultimately the same function of the season of Epiphany.
Lifted/Lifting: This song is about being more fully formed in the way of Christ. When we encounter the Person of Jesus through the Bible, a sermon, etc., we are unable to erase this experience, and are thus changed in some way. When we embrace that Person and seek to become more like him, we are further changed. Somewhere in the midst of this, one might say that a veil is lifted, revealing both who God is and who we are. But the journey toward being formed in the way of Christ is a life-long pursuit. We keep changing and the veil keeps lifting. This song confesses this reality, and asks that the Spirit would continue to transform us, to cultivate the fledgling Hope we carry into full bloom, and to spread the fruit of this hope through the world where the Light is not overcome, yet there is still darkness.
This song is still a work in progress, but I recorded a rough demo of the way it exists now, in the event that you want to listen again:
Holy, Holy, Holy: We sang this song to look over our shoulder at last week's songs. This is what we said about Holy, Holy, Holy last week: We began with this song to start off our morning calibrating our attention to the Triune God, confessing that our comprehension of God is blurred by our human condition, yet also confessing what we do know to be true: God's might, mercy, power, love, and lordship over all of creation.
Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.
-JM