I picked up Samuel Wells’ Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics for a spell this evening. He has great things to say about worship transforming the worshiper.
Worship is the time when the conventional rules of the fallen world are suspended, when God is at last addressed as Lord, when time and heart and voice and posture are directed toward knowing God and making him known, toward experiencing the glorious liberty of being his child, when need and expectation are focused on their true source, when all desires are known and no secrets are hid, when attention moves from what is to what might yet be. (82)
The next several pages walk through various aspects of worship. I found his section on listening to scripture to be particularly compelling:
When Christians listen for God’s word in Scripture, they learn to listen for God’s word in every conversation. They develop the skill of storytelling, of finding their place and role in the story, of recognizing beginnings and endings, of seeing the author at work; and also the sill of listening, of realizing how much there is to discover, of fitting their small story into the larger story of God. (82)
“Fitting their small story into the larger story of God.” Exactly.
As I was reading and copying this in, I couldn’t help but hear the difference between Wells’ “listen for God’s word in Scripture” and what many from my world would prefer: “listen to God’s word in scripture”. I wonder how that posture of listening for God to speak afresh, rather than a more past-focused listening to how God has spoken once for all, might itself conduce toward the posture of listening for the truth and finding one’s place in the story that he goes on to articulate. Can you have the latter without the former? If so, will they be more independent of each other?
Great post, Daniel! I have really enjoyed Sam Wells’s stuff. I can’t help but think your probing questions in the end relate to the difference between Barth’s doctrine of the threefold Word of God and more conservative evangelical views of scripture as a stable (=static?) divine deposit we are called somehow to “master”. It’s no wonder, in my mind, that Barth is often considered the father of postliberal/narrative theology.
Great quote. I especially love “the glorious liberty of being his child”. I’ll have to check out this book.
Thanks for this, Daniel. It’s beautiful. I was thinking for a moment about how he puts it: “the skill of . . . fitting their small story into the larger story of God.”
This is indeed a skill! It takes purposeful counter-cultural shaping to un-learn the idolatry of fitting the small story of God into the larger story of my life. We’re discipled by our Disney-fied culture to do this and worship’s subversive effect is to train is otherwise.
YES. I think I liked it, mostly, because I’ve said the same thing in a talk or two. That obviously makes it both correct and profound. *ahem*
No, seriously, I think we too often give into a narrative that makes the gospel story too small. We think of ourselves going out into “the real world” as small fish swimming in the massive, unbending stream of Culture or The Secular Workplace. The idea that not only our personal stories but these seemingly larger cultural stories are smaller than God’s story (and need to be fitted into it) takes some sort of aggressive transformation of our imagination.