Yes, And. What an Improv Dropout Learned About Faith.

(Sermon preached at First Presbyterian Church of Memphis, 3/19/23)

In the fall of 2011, I was in a pretty rough spot. I was 31 and newly single after the end of a relationship that was painful. I was working as a hospital chaplain, and although that is incredibly powerful and rewarding ministry, it is also incredibly emotionally taxing work. I was in a 31-year rut - not a totally unusual place for 30-somethings to find themselves. So I did what many 30 somethings do to try to push themselves out of a rut. I signed up for improv classes!  

I enrolled in an 8-week course taught by a local improv group and they met on the second floor of a church in a fellowship hall. The advertisement that led me to sign up read something like:

 “Want to be a more confident public speaker? Be a more creative person? Be more fun at parties? Meet some fun people? These improv comedy courses are designed to take your sense of humor to a new level and help you discover a spontaneous side of yourself!”

So, of course from where I was situated in my 31 year-old rut, I thought, Yes! I want all of those things! -Especially to be more fun at parties because you can imagine how the moment that somebody asked me what I did for a living and I told them I'm a chaplain in the emergency room at the city's largest hospital, you can almost hear the “Debbie Downer” noise – Wow-Waaw. Then they usually said something like, “Wow, I don’t know how you do that,” before changing the subject or backing away slowly.

So throughout the fall of that year, there I was, in the class of 16 people trying to figure out how to be more light and funny and make some new friends. And it took about 3 weeks for me to realize the truth, that I was awful at improv. I got in my head too often. I didn't like being silly, but I desperately wanted to be funny, so I was just incredibly awkward through the entire two hour class. I usually sat in the corner praying I would not be called up to whatever game or exercise was taking place, smiling at everyone through my discomfort. I felt relieved when the class came to an end.

While this particular form of theater ultimately wasn't for me, the rules of improv have stuck with me over the last decade, and I've reflected on them over and over again and how I believe that they actually relate to our Christian faith tradition, and offer a model for us to deepen our spirituality. And that's what I'm going to share here -  my invaluable takeaway from an otherwise awful experience in improv class.

Now, a little background info for those who aren't as familiar with this art form. Improv is short for improvisational theater. It's usually comedy, and it's performed in a way that's unplanned or unscripted, created spontaneously by the performers. In its purest form, the dialogue, action, story and characters are created collaboratively by the players as the improvisation unfolds in present time - no scripts. The players just make it up as they go. If you've ever seen the show Whose Line is it Anyway?, that's improv.

One of the most well known improv comedy enterprises is The Second City based in my hometown of Chicago, and it has long served as a pipeline for actors to go on to Saturday Night Live and major sitcoms. Some of the funniest people I can think of came up through performing improv at Second City - Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, Steve Carell, Eugene Levy, Tim Meadows, Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey and the list goes on and on.

There's one very important rule for improv that everyone must follow, and it's so important that they teach it to you on day one, so that you understand just how important this rule is to being successful. The first and most vital rule of improv is: You always say “Yes, And.” In order for a story to be built, the players have to agree to the situation - agree to the information that's been thrown out by the others involved. In saying “Yes” we accept the reality created by our partners and begin the collaborative process of building a story together. We say “And” because the story can't move forward unless we add new information to continue building. So the most important rule of improv comedy is to always say “Yes, And.”

While I realize that improv comedy is not my gift in life, the experience in this 8-week class was transformative for me as I realized how this rule of always say “Yes, And” is invaluable for discipleship, for being a person of faith, and for seeking to understand God. I've come to understand that God, and especially God as incarnate Jesus, is kind of a master of improv – of taking the situation created by the players in the moment and adding information to move the story forward, often imparting profound wisdom.

Here's a few examples….

Jesus finds himself in an enormous crowd of people and as the disciples start worrying about how there's no food to feed this crowd, Jesus essentially says “YES, we don't have a feast prepared, so gather up the food we have, AND you will see there will be enough for everyone to eat.”

Or the story where Jesus heals the hemorrhaging woman, where a woman who is bleeding touches Jesus’ cloak and is healed. Rather than being angry that she has touched him because a bleeding woman would have been considered ritually unclean in ancient Jewish law, Jesus uses the moment to teach all of those gathered around about the power of faith and self-advocacy in the name of faith. “YES I could feel that you reached out and touched me when all the rules say you shouldn’t have, AND your faith has made you well.”

Or the time when Jesus defends the disciples to the Pharisees for breaking Jewish Law and plucking grain on the Sabbath. “YES, they technically broke the law of not laboring on the Sabbath, AND they are seeking to follow God and in doing so, they got hungry today, and a more important law right now is that God wants the hungry fed.”

Or in the Book of Samuel, where God anoints David as King of Israel. David, the youngest, littlest and ruddiest of the brothers. David, the least obvious choice among his brothers. God says of the oldest, largest son, the obvious choice for who should be anointed as King, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance but the Lord looks on the heart.” In this case, we see God acknowledging that YES, I can see why you think any of these other brothers are the more obvious choice for a king, AND I see things differently. It’s a common a theme we see throughout the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament – a God who does the unexpected. Who acknowledges the world around us, the assumptions, the norms, and then does something new. God continues to build the story in unexpected ways throughout scripture and also throughout our lives all the time.

God is the ultimate master of the “Yes, And.” God knows how the process of knowing, understanding, and being a follower is ongoing for each of us. The work of deepening our faith is likewise an ongoing process of YES, AND.

Let me give an example from my life… I noted earlier that my first five years in professional ministry were spent as a hospital chaplain. One of my dearest friends and mentors was a fellow chaplain, an ordained National Baptist minister, a predominantly African American tradition. Aside from my friend’s rather edgy position that women should be ordained, we often found ourselves sitting quite a ways apart in our theologies, as he came from a far more conservative tradition than I do. Well, hospital chaplains spend a fair amount of time sitting around in between encounters debating theodicy, or huge questions of how a loving and just God exists alongside evil and tragedy. We pondered - Why do bad things happen to good people if God is in control? In that line of work, where we were encountering unspeakable tragedies on a near daily basis, we would often go to each other and say, “OK, where's God in this awful mess?”

My Baptist friend sat very strongly in the theological camp that believes that God has already predetermined everything that will ever transpire. He believes God knows the lifespan of every person and how they will die, so he wasn't really interested in sitting around with me and spending a lot of time looking for God in moments of tragedy, because God already knows it - the beginning, the middle, of the end - and is present and loving through all of it. It's not an uncommon theological position - that God is omnipresent and all-knowing through all of time. I'm pretty sure I've heard held that position many times in my own journey, and it can be a source of great comfort. But on a few particular occasions, that answer alone wasn't working for me. I was encountering situations that were too tragic, too senseless, too painful to process.

Sometimes out of desperation to make sense of things, I would poke at his immense and immovable theological position, just to make the conversation more interesting. Every time my friend would respond to my questions with a calm assertion that God is in control and knows it all before it happens, I would stare back at him, shake my head, and say something like, “Well, then it must be pretty boring to be God.” He would laugh, and we would go on sparring and hashing things out over the five years that we were colleagues together.

I confess it is hard for me, in my theological imagination, to imagine a God who simply sits back and watches us always knowing what's going to happen. It's hard for me to imagine a God always delighting in watching creation act out God's own pre-written script, where there’s no improv at all. Don't get me wrong, sometimes I will watch a movie or read a book again, even when I already know the ending, but it's not exactly the same experience. My friend’s grand assertion about God may be true, I don't actually pretend to know the whole truth about how God operates, but I like to believe in the possibility that we also worship an improvisational God. A God who doesn't necessarily operate off of a script.

When I read the Bible, what I see is some improvisation. I see a God who interacts with beloved creation, playing off of what we do. I see a God who despite being eternal, one day decides to make a heavens and an earth, a day and a night, a land and a sea, and then steps back and notes, “Hey, that's good!” I read about a God who appears to change God’s mind, threatening to destroy a city or a people, and then pivoting as people repent. I see a Jesus appearing to change his mind and healing a Canaanite woman's daughter after she demonstrates faith and wisdom in that infamous comment, “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.”

So what is it? Is God omniscient, all-knowing through all time, or is God journeying alongside us interacting with us and deciding things along the way? I suppose the best answer we have from scripture is YES, AND. YES, God is eternal, constant and unchanging AND God is in the moment with us, responsive to our present. God is not only the great “I Am,” God is the great “YES, AND.” 

This concept of YES, AND also helps to describe us as people of faith - as followers of Jesus. My tradition, the United Church of Christ has for years used a comma in its marketing as its unofficial symbol. When the comma first debuted it was accompanied with the taglines, “God is still speaking” and “Never place a period where God has intended a comma.” All Christians believe in the power of the Holy Spirit to continue to guide us as individuals and guide the church seeking the be a witness to the Gospel in this world. Through that guidance, God is still speaking to us. Scripture continues to speak to us, even as the world around us has changed so much since the books of the Bible were first written. The belief that God is still speaking to us, still operative in our lives, is perhaps another way of saying YES, AND.

Perhaps in response to worshiping a YES, AND God, we are also, as a church, a YES, AND people – a people of faith who say YES, acknowledging the sacred scripture and traditions of the church, AND interpreting the Gospel in our present context, listening for the wisdom of God being revealed to us today. In living a life of discipleship, we are doing improv with our God and with one another. We take the information that is given to us by scripture, church tradition, our lived experiences, and the stories we carry, and we add to it – building our faith through lives of improvisation, without scripts or practice.

Let me show you. Let me hear you all say, “YES.”

Yes we are a people who read a very old yet living word in our Bibles.

Let me hear you say, “AND.”

And we do the work of interpretation and contextualization to determine how God is speaking to the issues of our day.

Say, “YES.”

Yes we are a people who acknowledge and study the past of our church, our country, and our world so that we can understand how things came to be.

 Say, “AND.”

And we are a people who, with those understandings, are working toward building a more just world for all so that we more closely reflect God’s Kingdom or Kin-dom.

One more time, say, “YES.”

Yes we are a people who worship a constant and unchanging God who knows all and whose love and mercies endure through all time.

Last time, say, “AND.”

And we worship a God who delights in creation and actively participates in our lives, moves all around us, responds to us, and meets us daily on our journeys.

As you go forward from worship this morning, pay attention closely. Look for the ways this primary rule of improv - YES, AND - shows up in your lives. Look for how new information is being added all the time as we build our faith together, as we do church together, and as we love God and each other together.

YES,

AND. Amen.