This was both the fifth week of Easter in the life of the Church calendar, and Mister Rogers Sunday in the life of ubc. Mister Rogers Sunday is a commissioning service of sorts where we celebrate our graduates and commission them to continue to seek to be the presence of Christ to the people they encounter as they move on to new things. Our songs were gathered with both of these themes 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:
Future/Past by John Mark McMillan
Fall Afresh by Jeremy Riddle
There by Jameson McGregor
There's A Wideness in God's Mercy by Jameson McGregor (adapted from F. Faber)
Recordings:
From time to time, we'll post live recordings of the songs from Sunday morning. These recordings aren't what you would call polished--sometimes guitars are out of tune, sometimes the vocals are off--but they are records of moments we've shared together. Here are a couple from this week.
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.
Future/Past: This song contrasts God's power, might, and status as Wholly Other, with the notion that God has chosen to be God-for-us and God-with-us. The Resurrection really seals the deal for both of these ideas, and ultimately intertwines them. And so, as we live out our stories and grapple with our own anxieties in the face of change or struggle, we can lean into the idea that, though God transcends our problems, God is taking them on with us, carrying with God the same Lordship that places God above our problems in the first place.
Fall Afresh: We sang this song as a prayer, voicing together our desire for the Spirit to be with us. In this season, it is fitting to dwell on the fact that the Spirit of the Living God is in fact the catalyst of the Resurrection. The Spirit is the power that makes dead things live again. In the call to worship yesterday, we acknowledged that there are many kinds of death that we experience, not all of which involve our hearts ceasing to beat. Change of all kinds is a kind of death, and change seems to be a fundamental part of life. The Spirit is constantly working to raise us to life--life to the fullest. So, as many of us are on the edge of new seasons of life (either because we are moving to new schools, new jobs, or because we are ready to break out of a rut we've been in), we sang this song to petition the Spirit to raise us up once again.
Be Thou My Vision: We sang this song to close this season of life in our community by seeking guidance in the next season. As a community who seeks to be formed in the way of Christ, to embrace beauty, and to live on mission, we are in constant need of God to be our vision, wisdom, security, and hope, because we are in constant need of transformation.
There: This song is an exercise in perspective, noting that God was present before any of our problems, is present in the midst of them, and will be present long after they all fade away. It is also a personal confession of the unhealthy relationship I've built with anxiety, which is somewhere between addiction and idolatry (if there's even a difference in this case).
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: We sang this song because it is during Easter that we see just how wide God's mercy is. We are well-versed at finding reasons why God's mercy would not apply to us, and we are perhaps even more well-versed at finding reasons why God's mercy would not apply to them. This song shines a light at the lies at the heart of these assumption--God is wilder than we ever dreamed, and God's mercy is no different.
Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.
-JM