Last Sunday’s Playlist @ Newmarket Baptist 

21st October 2012, Ordinary Time 29B: Colour: Green

Highlights from our Sunday 10am Community Prayer space ‘playlist’… in the hope that it may re-source you to better follow Jesus in your world…

C2W (Call to Worship)

We read this weeks Revised Common Lectionary  from the Hebrew Bible’s Wisdom narrative of  Job 38: 1-7.  I really like the King James Version of God’s response to Job’s lament and questioning of his arduous and archetypal experience of human suffering and existential trauma…

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said,

² Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?

³ Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.

⁴ Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. 

KJV

We considered God’s extended rant to Job over the next three chapters about the mysteries of creation alongside the words and music of U2’s 1991 single ‘Mysterious Ways’ which is written about the alluring power of a woman but which I have equally always thought of in regards to worshiping God.

Perhaps this is in part inspired in my consciousness by the last ever hymn written by William Cowper in 1774.

GOD moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.

Despite his experience of depression and mental illness which led him to at times, like Job, wish himself dead, he wrote some of the greatest and most sung hymns of British evangelicalism and was a pioneer of the great English Romantic poets. Take a quiet moment to sit and listen to this acoustic version below….

Whilst God “moving in mysterious ways” does not appear directly in scripture, one gets a strong sense of this sentiment from Psalms 77:14-19, Isaiah 55:8-9 and John 3:8.

However one deals with the ‘trauma of existence’, the character of Job seems to find some sense of meaningful solace and resolution in the mysteries of God’s love, manifest in the wonders of creation and his place within it.

In this Spirit we made the U2 lyric our prayer:

One day you will look… back
And you’ll see… where
You were held… how
By this love… while
You could stand there
You could move on this moment
Follow this feeling

It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right
She moves in mysterious ways
It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right
Spirit moves in mysterious ways
Love
It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right
lift my days, light up my nights
Love.

Amen.

– Marcus Curnow,  October 2012.

PS. I love this live version with Bono dancing with his daughter Eve at Sloane Castle.