Agricultural Wisdom

Time again to give some column inches to wisdom found over at Farmstrong. JD has been opining for a while about the need for worship to centre on story, not text - that is, to bind us into the whole story of God, not into a preacher's 'theme for the day' (he has some great song suggestions for awkward themes though, and if you read back a couple of posts, I think you may laugh out loud). Creation, fall, redemption, resurrection, and the return of the King are ideas that JD wants to see repeated throughout our weekly worship so that we get the big ideas in our regular corporate dealings with God.

This is good stuff.

In a recent post, I posted a comment because I felt the initial post had a sentence (part of a quotation) that was apt to be mis-read, and you know how pedantic I can be. In part of his reply JD wrote:

My big contention is that we become narrated into the Story via worship that truly remembers the biblical narrative in a living (think anamnesis) Hebraic way of remembering. Jesus is our way in. Consider the implications of Baptism (the drowning of our plot and the resurrection into his plot) and the Eucharist, the continual nourishment on his Body and Blood in the power of the Spirit.

I guess you may have to read a lot of his stuff to get this, but then come back and re-read this summary. It is brilliant. I mean, brilliant. Fantastic theology. So good I want to claim it as mine - well, it is, I mean, I teach this stuff too, but perhaps not as succinctly or in these words (it's a while since St Catherine's had anamnesis mentioned in that precise word on a Sunday, though we get the concept every darned week).

I just had to post it in this form for now. When I have time I will post again, with a whole work-up of what this is about. But I LOVE it as a practical theology of how we design the service of worship for the corporate body as we encounter the living God in order to be more fully his people, filled with his Spirit and equipped for the service of the world.