This week was the second Sunday of Easter, and our songs were gathered around the theme of....Easter. 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:
Heart Won't Stop by John Mark and Sarah McMillan
Amazing Grace by Citizens & Saints
Rise Up by Bifrost Arts
Noise by Jameson McGregor
Mystery by Jameson McGregor (adapted from Charlie Hall)
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.
Heart Won't Stop: In Easter, we find that there are no barriers that God is not willing to cross to set things right with us. The refrain of "Your heart won't stop coming after me" is about more than just a vague notion of the Love of God, but rather speaks to the redemptive force of the Love of God. This season offers us an opportunity to consider the work that God is doing in creation, and the God is drawing us into in our own lives.
Amazing Grace: The Resurrection is a transformative act of grace that has implications for the whole of creation. It is a Yes to life and the created world. This song talks about the implications of the Resurrection for our lives, and we sang it to rehearse speaking the truth about God's ongoing redemption project in our midst.
Rise Up: This song takes up the resurrection theme from a different angle; namely, that of the implications of the Resurrection for justice in the world. Christ took up the cause of the oppressed (became oppressed), entered the depths of suffering and death, and in rising again, offers a distinct kind of hope that cycles of violence and oppression are not locked into the tracks they appear to be. Christ's rising offers hope that the lowly to can rise. The chorus of the song can be looked at in two ways: a plea for God to rise up to defend the cause of the oppressed, and a call to one another, as the body of Christ, to rise up to defend the cause of the oppressed. We sang this song to begin to broaden our understanding of who Jesus is as the Risen One, and who we are called to be as resurrection people.
Noise: This song is about God painting death and resurrection onto our lives by entering into our suffering and drawing us through it.
Mystery: We sang this song to look over our shoulder at last week's songs. This is what we said about Mystery then: This is a protest song. And Easter is a protest day. In the Resurrection of Jesus, we have the defeat of death, yes, but we also have an empire and religious institution put to shame as their supposedly final assertion of power over the trouble-maker Jesus doesn't work. If the power that corrupt systems of oppression carry is falsified, these systems cannot hope to stand for long. So, the formula Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again is multi-valent, and one of those valences is of the raised-fist variety. This was true then, and it is true now.
Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.
-JM