This past Sunday was the twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, 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. If you want to talk about any of these, feel free to email me at jamie@ubcwaco.org.
Songs:
Wideness by ubcmusic
House of God Forever by Jon Foreman
Wandering by Jameson McGregor
Breathe For Me by Jameson McGregor
Where God Has Always Been by Jameson McGregor
This was the fifteenth 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 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
Your Love is Strong by Jon Foreman
Breathe for Me by Jameson McGregor
There's A Wideness In God's Mercy by Jameson McGregor (adapted from F. Faber)
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.
Come Thou Fount: When this song is in the set, we almost always sing it first. This is because it offers us language to orient our attention toward inviting God to shape us around who God has been for the people of God in the past. By some measure, one of our main concerns in our liturgy is to remember the work of God in the world. This implication is made most plain in the second stanza that talks about raising an Ebenezer, which, if you don't know, is a monument to signify God's showing up in a time of need. It is a monument of remembrance. The song also has some significant themes of God's faithfulness to us, and a petition for God to transform us through God's Story. During Ordinary time, this is doubly significant, because it mirrors the part of the story that we now find ourselves in--Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again (but hasn't yet). These words serve to reorient us toward God in a time where we are left to work with the Spirit to look for and lean into the inbreaking of the Kingdom in our particular time and place.
Amazing Grace: We sang this song to remind ourselves of the grace of God both in our particular stories and the larger Story in which we find ourselves. In the context of this week's sermon text, this song served to remind us of the forgiveness extended to us through the grace of God that we are called to extend to those who wrong us.
Your Love Is Strong: This song gives us words to acknowledge the work of God in our lives in both mundane and significant ways, and rises into an offering of the Lord's Prayer, where we essentially ask God to keep showing up and to transform us into people who relate to one another in a way that is transformed by the grace we have received.
Breathe For Me: This song is a prayer for re-creation. It gives voice to the sort of wearing thin that comes about when we live in a broken world, and asks the Spirit of God to form us anew and breathe life into us.
There's A Wideness In God's Mercy: We sang this song to look over our shoulder at last week's songs. This is what we said about There's A Wideness In God's Mercy then: This song is a reminder to us that God's mercy is greater than we deem reasonable, and that our thinking is much more bound by rules than God's. We sang it to proclaim the good news, and to challenge ourselves together to imagine the breadth of God's mercy.
Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.
-JM
This was the second 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 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:
Wandering by Jameson McGregor
Rise Up by Bifrost Arts
Breathe for Me 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.
Come Thou Fount: We began with this song to confess that we gathered to worship with the hope that the Spirit would form our community more fully into the way of Christ, and to remind ourselves that looking back on who God has been for us is an excellent indicator of who God will be for us in the future.
Wandering: This song is a confession that we have a tendency to make our ideas about God into an idol that can be harnessed and manipulated for our own purposes, and a proclamation that God is somehow able to work in the midst of that.
Rise Up: This song is both a plea for God to rise to the defense of the trampled people in the world and a challenge to ourselves as the Body of Christ to be active in defending those whom God defends.
Breathe for Me: This song is about transformation in the midst of despair. For any number of reasons, we might find ourselves worn thin by life, and this song offers language for petitioning the Spirit to breathe life into what is dead in us.
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 then: Since it was Trinity Sunday, this seemed like a good song to begin our time together. It's a confession of, and implicit surrender to, God's Otherness--a way of saying that God is beyond our comprehension.
Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.
-JM
This was the twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, and our songs around the theme of healing. 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:
Wandering by Jameson McGregor
Amazing Grace by Citizens & Saints
There's A Wideness in God's Mercy by Jameson McGregor (adapted from F. Faber)
Breathe For Me by Jameson McGregor
Lord, I Need You by Matt Maher
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.
Wandering: We sang this song to celebrate God's faithfulness to us, even though our faithfulness to God is inconsistent, at best. With the theme of healing in mind, we might think of God's relentless choice to be God-for-us as the method of God's healing us. God is actively healing us of our brokenness all the time, though this process is slow. And, because God has chosen to redeem what God has made, we can trust that God will be faithful to do exactly that.
Amazing Grace: This song is an exercise in looking back to look forward. The saving work that God has enacted in our lives is not a one-off event, but instead is indicative of the way God acts toward us in general. So, looking back at the glimmers of hope or healing in our stories, we move forward knowing that there will be more.
There's A Wideness in God's Mercy: This song confronts our tendency to try to talk ourselves out of any confidence in God's faithfulness to be God-for-us--as though we could disqualify ourselves. Instead, it reminds us that the love of God is not limited by our own sense of what kind or degree of mercy we deserve.
Breathe for Me: The healing we experience in our lives of faith tends to cycle--that is, we usually break again in one way or another. This song is a record of re-breaking, and a plea for healing: for God to start over with the dust and ash of what is left, form it clean, and breath into it again.
Lord, I Need You: We sang this song to look over our shoulder at last week's songs. This is what we said about Lord, I Need You Then: This song voices our need for God's help in all aspects of life, but particularly when it comes to doing the things that we should do. Left to our own devices, we have a tendency to disappoint--or, worse, harm--ourselves and those around us. Over time, we might find ourselves more permanently formed by the Spirit, but we never get to the point where we do not in fact need God's presence.
Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.
-JM
This was the thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, and our songs were gathered with God's faithfulness to us despite our brokenness in mind. Or, taken from the vantage point of Josh's sermon, God's making wine out of wild grapes. 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 atjamie@ubcwaco.org.
Songs:
Wandering by Jameson McGregor
Future/Past by John Mark McMillan
Breathe For Me by Jameson McGregor
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.
Wandering: This song takes up the theme by noting our tendency to attempt to manipulate the movement of God for our own purposes. Time and again, we go through life as though God is a tool that we can use. We don't always do this on purpose, but it's a posture we slip into rather easily. This posture presents itself so easily because God has partnered with humanity to tell a story. God could no doubt tell this story by other means, so it's a baffling mystery that time and again God chooses to be faithful to us when we are not faithful to the calling of God. Or maybe it's not mysterious at all. Maybe that's just how God is.
Future/Past: This song is a further response to the theme of Wandering. Beyond God's faithfulness, it traces several layers of God's grandeur, and notes the surprising fact that God has called us friends. The divine-human relationship is an unequal partnership. It's the kind that leaves the lesser party (us) wholly caught up in the undeserved grace of God to allow us to enter into a project of which we are not worthy. God stands before us and beyond us, and somehow still stands with us.
Holy, Holy, Holy: We sang this song to step further into the train of thought to meditate upon and proclaim God's holiness. God's faithfulness to us is baffling in light of God's holiness, but this surprising grace itself becomes a central point of what it means for us to say that God is holy.
Breathe For Me: This song was going to be an interpretation of Breathe on Me, Breath of God, but it ended up without a single line from that hymn. So it is its own song. It is in many ways a prayer that acknowledges the parts of the human experience that make us bad partners in God's project, and asks God to step in and do what we cannot--to transform us into vessels of Godself who carry out God's project faithfully. It's an admission that we can't do this on our own--that we can't will ourselves into capable partners in God's redemption project.
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 look over our shoulder at last week's songs. This is what we said about Pulse then: We sang this song to be reminded of the gift of life that God has given to all of creation, and to lament our tendency to ignore the dignity of this gift in people who are different than us.
Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.
-JM