Yesterday was the fifth Sunday of Epiphany, and the songs were gathered with that 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:
Amazing Grace by Citizens and Saints
Wayward Ones by The Gladsome Light
Pulse by Jameson McGregor
Just the Same by Jameson McGregor
Hope 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: This song offers us language to express the transformative grace of God revealed in the Person of Jesus.
Wayward Ones: We sing this song every time we take communion to remind ourselves of a couple of things. First, we are a broken people--though we are seeking to become more like Jesus, we often fail at this. Second, Christ has given Himself for us despite our brokenness. We take communion to remember the sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf, even though we did not, and do not, deserve it.
Pulse: This song expresses the interconnectivity of God's creatures that is revealed through the life and ministry of Jesus.
Just the Same: Epiphany offers us the chance to encounter Jesus again and to re-calibrate the lens through which we view him. This ends up being an opportunity to intentionally seek to revise our models of faith, which will launch us into this more intentionally during Lent. In revising our faith models, we are faced with the reality that, over time, the things we believe to be true about God change. This song is about the complexity of the hope and grief of coming to terms with that change.
Hope: We sang this song to look over our shoulder at last week's songs. This is what we said about Hope then: Among the things we come to find revealed in Jesus is how far God is willing to go to set things right with us. In the incarnation, long before we reach the love revealed in the Passion, we find an act of radical love and empathy: the self-emptying of God into humanity. This song gives voice to a hope rooted in God having demonstrated God's decision to set things right in 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