Resurrection Letter No.5

Dear Good Shepherd and friends,

Music is a great thing. I don't know anyone who does not like music. Some people might not like certain kinds of music, but hardly anyone does not like or appreciate music. 

Part of the beauty of music is the nearly infinite possibilities. Hearing music can meet the hearts of different people, and it can express the hearts of many different people. Music moves us in different ways. Sometimes it's the music itself, sometimes it's the lyrics to a tune, sometimes, often, it's the combination of the two. 

I am and always have been a huge music person. I love old songs, and hearing new songs. Somehow I've grown an appreciation for all kinds of music: jazz, rock, heavy metal, loud and aggressive music, soft classical music, hip-hop, acoustic and folk, whatever. I often find music is an expression of our humanity, and even more often a signal of our longing for something beyond us, for God. 

In my letter today, I want to just share with you all a song that has hit me lately. It's a song by a guy named Andrew Peterson, and the song is called "The Sower's Song." I think because I've been working in the garden at the church  building lately that this song resonates with me. Sometimes songs hit you in certain times differently than at others. 

Well, this song is about planting and growing. And it's about how our planting and growing is reflective of things beyond us, of God's activity in our lives. It's a great song. It's a parable, a story about sowing and planting and growing, and the song connects these metaphors with our own longings in life for beauty, for goodness to grow, for justice to rule in our lives and in this world. And it's a song of hope in the God who is more like a farmer than anything else, a God who plants and waters and waits, but also a God who promises that there will be life at the end of the cycle.

So, I want to share it with you and let it do what songs do.

Oh God, I am furrowed like the field;

Torn open like the dirt

And I know that to be healed

I must be broken first

I am aching for the yield 

That you will harvest from this hurt

Abide in me, let these branches bear you fruit

Abide in me Lord, as I abide in you

So I kneel at the bright edge of the garden

At the golden edge of the dawn

At the  glowing edge of the spring, when the winter's edge is gone

And I can see the color green, I can hear the sower's song

Abide in me, let these branches bear you fruit

Abide in me Lord, let your word take root

Remove in me the branch that bears no fruit

And move in me, Lord, as I abide in you

As the rain and the snow fall down from the sky

They don't return, but they water the earth and they bring forth life

Giving seed to the sower, bread for the hunger

So shall the word of the Lord be with a sound like thunder

And it will not return, it will not return void

We shall be led in peace and go out in joy

And the hills before us will raise their voices

And the trees of the field will clap their hands as the land rejoices

And instead of the thorn now, the cypress towers

And instead of the brier the myrtle blooms with a thousand flowers

And it will make a name, make a name for our God

A sign everlasting that will never be cut off

As the earth brings forth sprouts from the seed

What is sown in the garden grows into a mighty tree

So the Lord plants justice, justice and praise

To rise before the nations till the end of days

As the rain and the snow fall down from the sky

They don't return, but they water the earth and they bring forth life

Giving seed to the sower, bread for the hunger

So shall the word of the Lord be with a sound like thunder

And it will not return, it will not return void

We shall be led in peace and go out in joy

And the sower leads us.....

I close with the words of Isaiah 43:

This is what the Lord says, who made a way through the sea, a path through the mighty waters;

"Forget the former things, do not dwell on the past; see, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up, do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness, and streams in the wasteland..."

In defiant hope,

Pastor Kyle

PS: here's a link to Peterson playing the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKrm3Q72LZM