Improv - 2 Samuel 7:1-14a

Over the years I lived in Chicago, during college and just after, one of the favorite outings for my friends and I was to the Northside theater of the Neofuturists. They are a troop of actors, improvisational and absurdist, best known for their performance of a show called “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind.” It was an interactive experience, at turns comic and provocative, that promised to provide one hundred plays in sixty minutes. The plays rotated and were constantly changing, and so, though scripted, the actors relied on strong improvisational skills. What’s more, many of the plays invited audience input, and so the unexpected was expected. It was a dynamic experience, and though true of all theater, there was a strong sense that both audience and actors were creating a unique event together.

The first rule of improv, according to the San Francisco teacher David Alger, is to always say “yes and.” The idea is that if one of the actors introduces something to the story, the response must always be to accept it, to say yes. But acceptance doesn’t mean that the actor’s options are then closed. The response always includes an “and”, a new element that moves the story in a different direction. One actor might say, “I’ve got a gun.” And the other actor might respond, “Please don’t squirt me with it.” One possibility has been closed and a whole new direction for the story has been opened. Or, one actor might say, “We want a king.” And the other might say, “Here’s a shepherd.” The first might say, “I’m going to build you a temple.” And the second might respond, “I’m going to build you an everlasting kingdom.”

Okay, you probably won’t find those last scenarios at The Second City or the Neofuturist. But they are improvisations, a series of “yes ands” in the free play of a story. Ours is an improvisational God, working from a loose script, and since God invites our response, our freedom, the work of God’s mission is open and adaptive. There is a narrative God has in mind, one that involves the healing of the world, but God is ready to incorporate new offers, to accept our acts of freedom and work them into the whole.

When Israel wanted a King, though God warned against the perils of a monarch, God still said yes. Now, in our passage from Second Samuel today, we find David making another offer—he wants to build God a temple. It’s an offer that comes from David’s limited imagination. He is still thinking along the patterns set by neighboring kingdoms, where temples were a form of imperial centralization and control, status and renown. Israel’s God is a God of tents and burning bushes, more at home in the wild places born of his own creation rather than the limited spaces of human artifice. And yet, God agrees to the building of a temple, God says “yes”, but also “and”. David’s dream of a physical temple was to be accomplished by his son Solomon. But more importantly, God’s “and” is that he will work within David’s line to create an everlasting kingdom. This kingdom will be built by a person and then a people who will be a living temple for God. That’s the temple that matters, that’s the temple that will be David’s greatest legacy—not a story he made but a story he was gifted to be part of.

This story took twists and turns that David couldn’t have imagined. How could David have predicted that the everlasting king would be born in a stable in his home town of Bethlehem; or that this king’s coronation would be on a cross? How could he have imagined that his heir would claim the title of Israel’s shepherd when wandering around the countryside with a band of peasants, not an army but a kind of comic inversion of one, a troupe told not to carry a sword or staff or even money on their mission. And yet that is God’s creative play with the possibilities, accepting the offers and taking them in directions no one would have expected, all the while keeping the plot lines moving toward the climax: the healing of the world. This is the story we find in our scriptures. It is the song we hear in God’s response to David, the surprising music that moves from David’s limited imagination, to the promise of a Messiah who will be God’s temple—a person rather than a place.

Its here we should note that the art of improvisation is not limited to theater, but is equally at home in music. When I lived in Chicago I knew an improvisational saxophonist. He played in the clubs around town, but his deepest joy was avant-garde jazz that improvised from chaotic beats. He would sometimes perform, for example, by laying a box fan on its side, and then improvising from the sound of a coke can bouncing across it. Here too is the acceptance of an offer—a random rhythm became the opportunity for making something beautiful.

Tolkien, the great author of The Lord of the Rings series, saw God creating a similar improvisation from the chaos and clatter of the world. In his book The Silmarillion he offers a creation myth in which God sets out the themes for a music that is joined by the choirs of all creation. But there is a dark figure who prefers his own sound to the chorus. He begins a rebellion against the harmonies of God, trying to make his own music apart from the divine themes, sowing discord so that the song of God is hard to hear. But God, the great improvisor is always able to fold the chaos back into the chorus. God’s song works through the dissonance, playing off it, quietly humming beneath the chaos and then springing back, so that in the end all is brought into an even greater harmony.

God the great improvisor is still at work, taking our freedom, our offers, and accepting them as opportunities to keep the story going with surprising twists and turns, yet still moving forward to the final culmination where all are healed and the world joins fully into the chorus of God’s song. Each of our stories are part of that grand story, each of our lives is a song line from which God is improvising.

The question for us is whether we will join in the story, play our part in the music. Will we say yes to what God offers, knowing that God is ready to work with whatever we add? Can we rest in the reality that even when our lives seem chaotic, and the dissonance is loud, that beneath it all there is a story working toward a resolution, a music that we have to quiet ourselves to hear? God invites our entrance into the story, God’s wants our offers, and has all the imagination necessary to accept our clumsy gifts, our discordant notes, and bring them into the beauty of God’s grand symphony.

To live into the free play of improvisation is the work of our lives, for true freedom whether it is in the playing of an instrument or prayer or relationship, is something that takes practice and intention. When we make gardens or raise kids or live out the short time we have on this earth, we are invited to join God in all of it to create something of beauty, to make something that would not be the same without our “yes” as well as our “and”. God has a story and a song and God is ready to bring your offerings into it, to work from whatever you give from your freedom. But be ready for the response for God is wilder and freer than any of us, and far better at improv. So give all you have and wait for the answer, the “yes” as well as the “and”. Amen.