Category: Andrew Yang’s songs (Page 1 of 2)

One of my favorite experiences of the church has been writing songs for our Sunday meetings, and I’ve been honored to see how they’ve circulated in our community. Translating the poetry of Scripture and the church mothers and fathers into music is a meditative act for me, and I hope that you can get a sense of that this week. — Andrew Yang

Today’s Bible reading

This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one that testifies, for the Spirit is the truth.

1 John 5:6

More Thoughts for Meditation

Born through the water and blood

You who will reap all death that we’ve sown

Break now the jaws of the flood

Rise in the life we can claim as our own

https://music.circleofhope.net/songs/detail/1303

https://www.facebook.com/roberthornakphoto/videos/866401967320687

The author of the Gospel of John famously begins his Gospel with “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and a description of the world being made. But then he zooms in from a cosmic bird’s eye view to a comparatively intimate, human one; a specific person in a specific point in history. He writes, “There was a man sent from God whose name was John.”

For the author of John, the story of Jesus’ divine person starts before the making of the universe, but his human story begins with John the Baptizer. The author of the Gospel of John doesn’t actually describe Jesus’ baptism, so drew on Luke 3 for the imagery I use in the song.

Baptism has been considered a ritual death going all the way back to the Apostle Paul, who writes in Romans 6 that we who are baptized are joined to the death of Jesus. Similarly St. Ambrose of Milan writes that “the [baptismal] font is a kind of grave.” In this way, Jesus’ baptism, his entering into the darkness of the water, prefigures his entry into the darkness of the tomb. As his emergence from the water prefigures his resurrection, so our emergence from the water prefigures ours.

Suggestions for action

I’ve done a lot of growing since I was baptized at around 12 years old, so I can’t say that the moment of my baptism carries a lot of emotional significance for me. Even so, I love watching people get baptized in our community. I love watching people brave the cold water of the Delaware or the Wissahickon, and the joy on their faces as they stumble soaked back onto the riverbank to all of our applause.

It’s important to remember these rituals that connect us to resurrection. As a kid, my grandfather taught me to pray before going to bed, “Heavenly God, forgive me for the wrong that I’ve done as the sun sets, and make me new as the sun rises.” He said this all in Taiwanese Hokkien, and honestly as a teenager I felt like this prayer felt a bit pagan, like I was predicating my salvation on the rising and setting of the sun or something instead of my personal faith (I was a brat). 

As an adult I love it. I need these rituals and the truths they remind me of. And I don’t think God hesitates to use every opportunity to convey more grace to us, as often as we’ll allow God to do so, so I’ll take all I can get. As John says, “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.”

One of my favorite experiences of the church has been writing songs for our Sunday meetings, and I’ve been honored to see how they’ve circulated in our community. Translating the poetry of Scripture and the church mothers and fathers into music is a meditative act for me, and I hope that you can get a sense of that this week. — Andrew Yang

Today’s Bible reading

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love.

1 Corinthians 13:11-13

More Thoughts for Meditation

https://music.circleofhope.net/songs/detail/1169

“When I Was a Child” was a song I wrote after I learned that a friend of mine was getting divorced. I hadn’t really thought about the possibility of divorce before that and I definitely wasn’t prepared for the grief that I felt. It felt like someone had died.

1 Corinthians 13 contains the famous passage about how “love never fails.” Paul is describing virtues that will continue into the next age, saying that faith, hope, and love will endure even as God transforms the rest of the world. There’s an irony in the fact that the passage is so often used at weddings, when marriage is an institution that, at least according to Jesus, will explicitly not continue in the age to come.

Most of my adult life has been re-evaluating my relationship to the things and people that I thought would be around forever. I hold tightly to things, so these have been hard lessons to learn:

“All things must end, help me know that your love will be, endlessly. At last I’ll see you clearly.”

Suggestions for action

A friend of mine told me that it’s easy to mistake the channel the water moves through for the water itself. We think that the channel itself is life-giving and we orient our lives around it, without realizing that it’s the water that gives us life. 

Sometimes I’ll give my rabbits an automatic feeder, and they’ll end up sitting around it, waiting for it to feed them even after it’s long empty, even ignoring me to stare at the feeder when I’m trying to get their attention with a cup of food.

We’re like rabbits, or children, as Paul says. We know things incompletely, so it’s helpful to remind ourselves of what lasts: faith, hope, especially love.

One of my favorite experiences of the church has been writing songs for our Sunday meetings, and I’ve been honored to see how they’ve circulated in our community. Translating the poetry of Scripture and the church mothers and fathers into music is a meditative act for me, and I hope that you can get a sense of that this week. — Andrew Yang

Today’s Bible reading

When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.

Acts 2:1-4

More Thoughts for Meditation

Circling, Circled, Lover, Loved

You make all things new

You, within, around, above

Remake us in You

https://music.circleofhope.net/songs/detail/1269

St. Hildegard of Bingen was a 12th century abbess who led such an extraordinary life in that there’s really no way to begin a sentence “St. Hildegard of Bingen was…” without ending the sentence with an understatement. She was a scholastic philosopher, a genius composer and poet, healer, religious leader of her convent, and pen pal to multiple popes and emperors. One of her poems is a hymn called “O Virtus Sapientae” meaning “Holy Wisdom” in latin:

O Wisdom’s energy!

Whirling, you encircle

and everything embrace

in the single way of life.

Three wings you have:

one soars above into the heights,

one from the earth exudes,

and all about now flies the third.

Praise be to you, as is your due, O Wisdom. 

There’s a theological tradition about the figure of “Wisdom” in Scripture and Apocrypha where no one is quite sure what Divine Person, if any, Wisdom refers to. By which I mean that when Bible writers personify wisdom and call her the proper name “Wisdom” or describe how Wisdom says this or Wisdom does that, are they perhaps referring to Godself saying or doing something? If so, is Wisdom another name for the Holy Spirit, or maybe Jesus, or all the Divine Persons, or maybe it’s just poetry and we should stop reading into it? 

Like any writing on the Trinity it’s confusing, but I love that ambiguity, which Hildegard preserves in her “Holy Wisdom.” And I tried to capture that sense of ambiguity in mine. These different ways of referring to God: Maker, Mother, Root of Life, Holy Wisdom, Soaring Power, Mountain Fire, Fiery Pillar, Liberator, etc., are in some sense referring to the same being (or Being), one that, despite all of these powerful names and metaphors, has the quiet grace to “rest upon our heads.”

As a minor aside, this makes me think of all of the Totoro, big and small, who are sometimes scary and sometimes cute, sitting together and playing ocarinas with Mei and Satsuki in My Neighbor Totoro. 

Suggestions for action

The author of Acts describes the coming of the Holy Spirit as being accompanied by violent wind, which fills the room. This sense of God filling space is echoed by St. Hildegard when she describes these wings that soar above and below and “all about.” It’s helpful for me to remember this imagery of God as one who is both far and close, grand and tiny, fierce enough to appear as a fiery pillar but mild enough to appear as a tongue of flame.

One of my favorite experiences of the church has been writing songs for our Sunday meetings, and I’ve been honored to see how they’ve circulated in our community. Translating the poetry of Scripture and the church mothers and fathers into music is a meditative act for me, and I hope that you can get a sense of that this week. — Andrew Yang

Today’s Bible reading

But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. 

1 Corinthians 15:20-22

More Thoughts for Meditation

You, know what it is to die, and then again to rise, to die and then to rise

Oh, you went ahead to die, ahead of us to rise, the first of us to rise

So, we follow you to die, we follow you to rise, Lord teach us how to die

So, our sinful selves have died, with you were crucified, and then in you we rise

https://music.circleofhope.net/songs/detail/1142

My pastor dad when I was growing up loved Hebrews 12:2, which describes Jesus as the “pioneer and perfector of faith,” so much that he named his church after it: “Pioneer Christian Fellowship.” I was never all that impressed by that description of Jesus, as it just made me think of Jesus looking like one of those pioneers from Oregon Trail.

I have a better appreciation of the idea as an adult. Paul describes Jesus’s resurrection as the “firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep,” in the same way that the author of Hebrews describes Jesus as the “pioneer” of our faith — Jesus was the first of us to rise, and because of that, we know that we too will rise. The emphasis here is that Jesus is one of us.

Suggestions for action

What strikes me about this is that the promise of our resurrection depends on Jesus’ humanity, again, as one of us. In myths and stories, gods do things that we can never do all the time, including rising from the dead. But the writers of the New Testament want us to realize that Jesus was fully human when he resurrected, and that this resurrection comes out of his humanity and obedience to God, and not his divinity. And because it is a human being that was resurrected in glory, so eventually will all human beings that follow after him.

I don’t know if anyone puts it better than Charles Wesley and George Whitefield in “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,”

Come, Desire of nations, come!

  Fix in us Thy humble home:

Rise, the woman’s conqu’ring seed,

  Bruise in us the serpent’s head;

Adam’s likeness now efface,

  Stamp Thine image in its place:

Second Adam from above,

  Reinstate us in Thy love.

Jesus in John 14 promises that “the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these,” which is an astounding promise, but one that’s worth remembering whenever it seems that we’re facing something impossible in our liberatory work. There is nothing that Jesus could do that we can’t also do, and more. Jesus was the pioneer, the firstfruits, but we follow after him.