This was the twentieth Sunday after Pentecost. 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 a brief example of one way you might think of these songs. 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
There's A Wideness In God's Mercy by Jameson McGregor (adapted from F. Faber)
Wild One 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.
How Great Thou Art: This song offers us the chance to rehearse responding to the wonder of what God has made, what God has done, and what God will do, with an acknowledgement of God's greatness. In Ordinary Time, this becomes important because how we respond to this wonder is indeed a part of discerning what it means to be the people of God in our particular time and place.
Death In His Grave: We sang this song to tell again the story of Christ's entering into suffering to the point of death and emerging victorious over Death and sin. This story is the foundation of our hope, and one of the most revelatory moments regarding the lengths to which God is willing to go to set things right with us, and it is also an image of the re-Creation that God is actively working in history.
There's A Wideness in God's Mercy: This is a reminder that we offer ourselves and one another about God's grace and mercy toward us. We are quite adept at thinking of ways which we might be excluded from the love of God--thinking that it might be true for other people who are less flawed than we--but the truth is that the love of God is much broader than our broadest notions of this love. Aside from thinking of how this love relates to ourselves, this song also reminds us that the same is true for those who are different than us--those who we might not care much for at all. Taken together, this song offers us the opportunity to lean further into loving God and loving our neighbors as ourselves (which also presupposes that we love ourselves well).
Wild One: This song seeks to remind us that who God is and who we expect God to be are not the same thing--that God is in fact greater than our greatest assumptions. This idea poses a challenge to us in Ordinary Time to continue to carry the holy curiosity of Epiphany.
Crown Him With Many Crowns: We sang this song to look over our shoulder at last week's songs. This is what we said about Crown Him With Many Crowns then: We sang this song to give voice to the lordship of Christ, with language of power-in-weakness. In doing so, we call ourselves to imagine how this self-giving savior would have us live and move in the world.
Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.
-JM