If you missed this past Friday’s concert, Kusi Taki – The Music of the Andes, it is available on demand by clicking HERE. The previous concert Edem Soul Music, is also available by clicking HERE.
Be sure to tune in for Spirituals, Psalms, and Songs for Social Change featuring Justin Payne, this Friday, August 21st, at 7pm on our YouTube channel or at www.countrysideuccc.org/concerts.
If you are watching on KMTV and would like to view the prelude, you can do so on our YouTube page by viewing today’s service video. The prelude will take place live on YouTube at 10:50 each Sunday.
The prelude is a separate video this Sunday, and can be found HERE.
Moment Musical no. 5 in D-Flat Major by Sergei Rachmaninoff
Blackbird – Lennon-McCartney
Though “Blackbird” has a number of “origin stories”, all tie into the civil rights movement in one way or another. McCartney said that the song was inspired by the Little Rock Nine and their fight to enroll in an all-white school. For this series on racial justice, we will feature a unique version of Blackbird each week for the prelude.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to be free
Blackbird fly, blackbird fly
Into the light of a dark black night
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy
it speaks of how “the love of God is broader than the measure of our mind,” and it laments how we make God’s love too narrow by false limits of our own conception. There is a half verse that didn’t make it into the hymnal that is worth considering in light of today’s topic:
If our love were but more simple, we should rest upon God’s word;
And our lives would be illuminated by the presence of our Lord.
One commentator has described the text as: “If ‘Love Wins’ were a hymn.”
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, like the wideness of the sea.
There’s a kindness in God’s justice, which is more than liberty.
There is no place where earth’s sorrows are more felt than up in heaven.
There is no place where earth’s failings have such kindly judgment given.
For the love of God is broader than the measures of the mind.
And the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.
If our love were but more faithful, we would gladly trust God’s Word,
and our lives reflect thanksgiving for the goodness of our Lord.
In Christ There is no East or West
This is a radical hymn, in ways that weren’t necessarily evident upon its writing, which happily prevented it from being cast aside and lost. It takes its opening idea from Rudyard Kipling’s famous lines, “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” and is a strong refutation of the triumphalism and hegemonic imperialism of of the era. While it does retain some vestiges of missionary exclusivism, we can reclaim that notion as “in Christ’s teachings, there is no east or west.”
In Christ there is no east or west, in him no south or north,
but one community of love throughout the whole wide earth.
In Christ shall true hearts ev’rywhere their high communion find;
His service is the golden cord, close binding humankind.
Join hands, disciples of the faith, whate’er your race may be;
all children of the living God are surely kin to me.
In Christ now meet both east and west, in him meet south and north:
All loving hearts are one in him throughout the whole wide earth.