Week 4 – The Summarizing of the Story

For: The Institute Of Contemporary And Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen’s University, Essentials Blue Online Worship Theology Course with Dan Wilt

Rather than rehash an answer to this weeks question, I’d like to discuss a point that I think is almost as equally valid as an answer and incredibly relevant to the content of this course.

I deeply struggle with this question.  The problem isn’t necessarily the question itself as it is how I would normally approach to answer it.  In this course we’ve looked at the idea of learning how to tell the grand story in a number of different ways.  I believe the point of doing so is to provide effective communication of that story so that people can hear and chose to participate in the greatest story of all.

When answering questions like, who is God, who are humans, why are we here, what happened to us, what was God’s response, what is the Kingdom, how will everything end – the natural and easy thing to do is to provide an answer of a series of abstract statements.  It would be easy to rattle off a number of adequate abstract terms to describe God – eternal, omnipresent, etc, etc.  Within each abstraction is a number of great ideas about the subject.  However, is that really adequate to describe and already abstract idea (God) with another abstraction?  (Don’t get me wrong, I wholly believe that God is a person, and not just an abstraction.  But the ‘idea’ of God and our explanations of Him are generally very abstract.)

I tend to think in abstract terms a lot, but as I journey out life I realize more and more that abstractions have limited usefulness.  I don’t live in abstractions, a world of thoughts and constructs of ideas, but rather in a concrete world of dirt, air, water, flesh, bone, fire.  This concrete world can be partially expressed with abstractions.  But there are parts of this concrete world that we live in that cannot adequately be expressed with abstract ideas.

I think we do a grave injustice to the subject matter if we only express it in abstractions.  There are some things that only make sense when we express their likeness through concrete terms.  One can express a glass of wine in abstract terms of it being a ‘food beverage item composed of fermented grapes…’  But the reality of what the wine is does not take real shape in the mind until we begin to express concrete ideas like its dark red color, transparent, yet lightly laden with small particulates of sediment – the fruity aromas of black cherries, the floral aromas of blooming flowers and the earthy aromas of tobacco – the quick opening of the bouquet on the pallet with a wide burst of fruity and earthy tannic flavors with a thickness of texture and a long pleasant finish that softens into fruity and floral flavors leaving the pallet pleasantly soothed rather than irritated by a quick drop off into tannic bitterness.

As we approach the story of God, humanity and our interactions throughout our history together, I embrace the value presented in this course to tell the story in a thousand different ways.  I believe that many (but not all) of those ways need to take the story and preset concrete ideas.  I can’t help but to think that this is part of what Jesus modeled to us as he spoke to farmers about the Kingdom in relation to sowing seed or about the Kingdom to fishermen in relation to casting nets.

We can speak of God as eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, but we can also speak of God in terms of a man who put mud in blind eyes to produce sight, one who took fish and bread to relieve hunger and one who took nails through his flesh and rose again in his body so that we to may experience this newness of eternal life.