I'd like to introduce a new music project that Adrian Wilson (from the Guelph Vineyard) and myself have contributed to.  It's called "Merry Christmas. Good Night. 2".  It's a follow up to an EP last year, and it's available for free from noisetrade here.

While it's clearly a Christmas record, it's far too easy to think of Christmas music and either listen to it to get in the "Christmas spirit", or disregard it if you've been Christmas-ed out.

This is different.  These are songs that celebrate the incarnation of God.  Each of the original tracks here spring from this theological mystery and explore the majesty and simplicity and implication and impossibility and certainty that God came to us, physically incarnated himself, and then lived among us in the person of Christ.

In the Church's emphasis on the cross, the death and the resurrection of Jesus, which is a good and right emphasis, I sometimes hear a kind of disregard for this crucial element of God's story.  It's as if the death of God trumps His birth as a necessary component of the Gospel.

That God physically incarnated to be among us, as one of us, is central to the Christian narrative.  That he did so the way he did says so much about the nature of his personality, and much about what our own lives should reflect.  The incarnation is precisely what makes the rest of the story make sense.  The resurrection of Christ only matters if he was indeed a human person, with all the frailty and inherent mortality that our bodies have.  Of course God could resurrect, that's hardly even newsworthy.  But that a man did, that He resurrected to an eternal state of physical embodiment... wow, now THAT means something.

This record seeks to put language to the incarnation.  The contributing artists, all very good friends and deep souls, struggle to capture the divinity and humanity that get knit together in Jesus.  May this offering enrich your celebration of Immanuel, God with us, this Christmas-tide.

Here are the lyrics to my song for this project, entitled "Joy Joy Joy"