A light please! No, no that’s much too bright, much too bright. In the old days, of course, I could work under any kind of light, just as long as it wasn’t too bright and didn’t annoy the audience….
These are the opening lines of a one act play, The Death of an Actor, I memorized for UIL contest way back when I was in high school. I still remember them because they are written so deep in my psyche. It might surprise you to hear I was quite the thespian in those days, not just because I was a bit of a ham, but because I thought it would be good training for a preacher. In fact, in those days I naively thought of the faith as a kind of drama. Like Soren Kierkegaard once said, life is a play, we are all actors on the stage, and God is the audience. Of course, as a good Baptist I figured God intended the scripture as a script. The trick, I thought, is to memorize your lines and act them out in the world.
It’s as simple as that! Just follow the script. That’s what it means to be a Christian. But it didn’t take me long to figure out it’s rather difficult to stick with the script when nobody else is following it, and when real life situations that don’t even fit it at all. Something would happen, I’d look in the script, I couldn’t find that anywhere. Before I had even memorized all my lines, I found myself having to improvise.
A lot of Christians still think of life as a simple drama and the Bible as a script we memorize and follow. But the Bible itself bears witness it just ain’t so. God made a covenant with Israel: “I will be your God and you will be my people” (Ex 6:7; 19:4-6). With the covenant came a code, the commandments, rules and obligations God gave to order the people’s relationship with God and each other. The problem was, the people never could quite live up to God’s laws. Never. The prophets all pointed to the people’s failure to live up to their obligations in even a minimal fashion. Jeremiah especially struggled with this problem and eventually decided the people simply weren’t capable of living by God’s script. He said Israel was like a clay pot which had gone wrong in the potter’s hand right from the start. “The heart is devious above all else;” he said, “it is perverse-- who can understand it?” (Jer 17:9). Later, the Apostle Paul agreed: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Rom 7:15). We struggle to live up to our highest standards, our best ideals. But Jeremiah decided God wouldn’t be unfaithful to the people even if the people were habitually unfaithful to God. He believed God wouldn’t give up on us, but would find some new way to make it work.
The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt-- a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people….
The goal of the new covenant is the same – “I will be their God, and they shall be my people” - but the method is different. Instead of memorizing a set script and following it by rote, Jeremiah says we will know God from the heart and act out of that knowledge which is written so deep in our psyche. In the new covenant, we know the Author so well, we can improvise the lines guided by God’s presence within so that our lives become a drama God and we collaborate in writing as we go.
Life is not a complex math equation to be solved. It is not a list of simple sums and subtractions, more like one of those word problems that gave us all fits in elementary school. You can’t write a detailed list of rules that will cover every situation in life. Real life is too messy to fit that model. Sure, we have our ideals and our standards, life’s basic rules as well as our hopes and our dreams, our mental picture of the way everything is supposed to go. But what do you do when some guy rear ends you in traffic and you jump out of the car to ask what gives, but you see his wife is bleeding profusely from a gash on her head? You dig out your Bible, look up “traffic accidents, head wound” in the index, turn to Obadiah 15, and read your lines? Of course not! You improvise! What do you do when your teenage son gets arrested for possession of marijuana? You improvise! What do you do when the doctor says you need an operation you can’t afford and you may be out of work for six months? You improvise! What do you do when your boss tells the company’s cutting back and she has to let you go? You improvise! What do you do when you fail the CPA exam for the eighth time and all you ever wanted to be was to be a tax accountant? You improvise! What do you do when your way is blocked, your hopes are dashed, and your life takes a turn you never expected and did not want? You improvise. You improvise!
Every day we are presented with a thousand situations beyond the script where we have to respond, to decide, to interact. Most of these are baby steps on the road to our destination, small brush strokes in the composition of our life. But some are major turning points, some turn the whole canvas sideways. Not only that, but we, the baptized, have a higher calling we carry onto the stage of life. We are sent to be God’s agents, Christians or “little Christs” as the word suggests, embodying the presence of Jesus in those situations. We are called to sacred improvisation, to bring the holy presence of God and the love of Christ and the influence of the Holy Spirit into all those situations and choices, and interactions. We can’t live in some fictionalized make believe script where everyone behaves and we all live happily ever after. The real world is where we improvise the dominion of God.
Recent reflection in Christian theology has found a useful metaphor in the art of improvisation in theater and music and dance. In his book Improvisation, Sam Wells observes our classical approach to ethics has been to focus on issues. We fight about what the Bible says, take rigid positions, refuse all exceptions, then war with one another from the ramparts of our fortified absolutes. It doesn’t work. It never has, but it has produced a significant number of casualties along the way. Instead, an increasing number of Christian thinkers insist the focus of Christian ethics should not be issues or one-size-fits-all absolutes but the formation of ethical character and training for Christian response in real life situations. In other words, real life is not a play with a set script everyone must follow – that just doesn’t work – but improvisation, where the drama continues but is still being shaped as we go. This approach is much more dynamic and realistic.
Sacred improvisation takes imagination and inspiration and creativity. It also takes discipline and training and practice. You can’t just walk out of the baptistery and into real life situations and expect to operate like a saint any more than you can walk into Strait Music, buy a saxophone, and go down to Antone’s to play a set with the Blues Brothers. But where do we get this training? How do we develop this discipline? When do we practice for the real life situations we must face? According to Wells, the church exists to shape this Christian character and train us in the art of sacred improvisation. The Bible gives us the basic tools and guidelines, the big picture and some basic specific rules along with numerous examples and models. In worship we rehearse the stories and we learn the basic disciplines. In church we practice together and hone our skills over time. We learn how to adapt and interact, how to respond in kindness, how to speak the truth in love, how to forgive and reconcile and restore, how to overcome evil with good. We grow in our knowledge of God in our deepest being so that when we leave here to go into real life situations, we are ready to act immediately and instinctively and habitually as Christians in the world. The covenant gets written on our hearts as we worship and work and play together in the beloved community of Christ.
Let me offer a few examples of how this works. Improvisational actors are trained in certain skills, such as “accepting all offers.” When the other actor takes a direction, you have to go with that and then add your part to it. You can’t always choose or control what you’re given to work with. But you find a way to incorporate it and turn it another way. Wells offers the example of Lawrence, a deacon in Rome in the third century. The Roman prefect demanded that Lawrence gather all the treasure of the church and give it to him. Lawrence had no choice, but he asked for three days. He gathered all the poor and sick people supported by the church. On the third day, he brought them to the prefect and said, “Here. This is the treasure of the church.” The prefect had Lawrence killed, but the church was renewed and bore witness to the love of Christ.
I think of Soulforce and Mel White with their approach of “constructive engagement” based on the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. When a church in Kansas announces it will picket churches who welcome gays and lesbians as equals at God’s table and carry signs that say “God hates,” Soulforce doesn’t counter-attack. They take pledges to support those churches for every minute they are picketed, turning the evil to good and finding ways to bear witness to the love of God in their hearts. This is the way Christians improvise. Paul is thrown in jail, and what does he do? He writes letters that comfort and guide his churches. He converts his jailer. Mind you, these are not stories of sneaky ways we get the upper hand on our enemies. They are stories of how Christians turn evil towards the good in ways that offer God’s grace to all people. The best example of all, of course, is the cross of Christ and what God has done with that.
Again, improvisational musicians practice incorporating mistakes. I was at a workshop with some jazz musicians a few weeks ago and one of them was talking about hearing John Coltrane playing with someone who was not so skilled with his instrument. This guy made a gaff, played several wrong notes in a different key. Coltrane went with it, repeated it, added to it, embroidered it, made it a sub-theme. The other musicians picked up on it and made the guy who made the mistake look like a genius. Most of the audience never even knew what had happened.
This is the way Christians improvise. Someone makes a mistake. We don’t attack, we don’t shame. We don’t humiliate. That’s the way of the world. But we forgive. We restore. We reincorporate. I was in a service once where the church secretary had made a typographical error in the order of worship. It happens sometimes. The liturgy said “God have mercy on us.” Only she had typed the word “God” with a lower case “g.” This was a big church and an important service with lots of outsiders in attendance that day. The pastor didn’t belittle her or even call it out, though everybody noticed it, of course. Instead, he incorporated it into his sermon. He called our attention to it, said he had heard us pronounce God with a lower case “g.” He said our biggest problem was how most of us serve a lower case God. We don’t believe God is big enough to forgive our sins. We don’t believe God is great enough to cast out our demons. We don’t believe God is powerful enough to heal our wounds. Well, we’re right, he said. All the lower case gods we’ve been serving can’t do those things. But the capital “G” God who meets us in Christ can! After the service I had to go ask him. “Did you have the order of service typed that way on purpose? He smiled and lifted his eyebrows. “Let’s just say Barbara made an inspired mistake,” he said. Well, that’s what Christians do. We improvise by the law of grace that’s written on our hearts.
Beloved, what we do here matters. We need to learn the basics. We need to hear the stories. We need to practice week after week after week what it means to live as Christians in a broken down world. You don’t get good at it, you don’t develop the disciplines, you don’t learn the rhythms, it doesn’t get written deep in your psyche if you skip practice most of the time. What we do here matters. But what we do here is mainly preparation for who we are when we leave here so that we will instinctively, habitually, naturally improvise the dominion of God’s love when we leave here – in our homes, with our friends, at our jobs, and in all the real situations life brings us.
I once heard Grady Nutt say, “The secret to following Jesus Christ is this: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul, and with all your strength. Then you can forget all the rules.”
But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people….
Beloved, we are being trained here in the art of sacred improvisation. See you in practice next week? May we pray?
Shape our souls, great Director. Form our character. Discipline our bodies. Write your ways deeply into our psyche. By our worship and our service here together, train us in righteousness, grace, and forgiveness. Fill us with your love for all people. And then send us into the world to be your agents living and loving and improvising by the habits of our hearts. In the name of the One who showed us how, who accepted the cross and made of it the bridge by which we come to you. Amen.