Act V

Romans 12:1-8; Matthew 16:13-20
August 21, 2011


I am a fan of Garrison Keillor. For those of you not familiar with him, he’s the host and voice of Prairie Home Companion – a long running show on public radio. Each week on his program, among other things, he shares news from a fictional town named Lake Wobegon, “where the women are strong, the men are good looking, and the children are all above average”…as he says every week. I have enjoyed Prairie Home Companion for years, and love the news segment. I’m impressed with Keillor’s creativity in coming up with different news stories every week.

I am even more impressed after reading an interview with him. He was asked how much of his monologue was improvised and how much was written down. Keillor responded, “I write up a few pages of notes and then put it aside. The monologue you hear is a man trying to remember what he wrote. Sometimes while he’s trying to remember it, he thinks of something better.” As someone who finds it terrifying to say anything that is not written on a piece of paper sitting right in front of me, I find this impressive.

But as I thought about it, it really does make sense. Not only was he the creator of Lake Wobegon, he has, essentially, lived there for 37 years. He knows the people so well. He knows what they have done before, he knows their stories inside and out, he knows their character. He is not just standing up there making up things off the top of his head;.he’s continuing a story he knows deep in his bones – it just flows out.

I got to wondering, what if this was how we thought of scripture? When we face the world today, and try to act faithfully, we know we are supposed to look to the bible to guide us. But what if the bible is a bit like the scripts Keillor writes each week. I know we didn’t write the bible stories, but we do live in them. We read the same stories over and over, we know the plots, the characters, the settings. Maybe as we seek to live our lives faithfully, we can set the bible aside and while remembering what it says, maybe we will think of something better.

I know that might sound slightly blasphemous. The idea of “setting scripture aside” and “making up something better” is not exactly what we think of as textbook Christianity. But I think the idea for doing this comes from our scriptures themselves. I think it is our scriptures that insist we constantly continue and expand on the stories – that we come up with something better for our time and place.

I think that’s what Jesus is insisting his disciples do in this passage today.

Jesus asks them, “who do people say that I am?” “Elijah, John the Baptist,” they answer. These are characters from the bible…real people who lived in the past. People are saying Jesus is just the same old character. Jesus as understudy, if you will.

But then he asks the disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” He wants it in their own words. They know the scriptures – the texts of the Jewish people. They know a lot about who God is and how God acts in the world. And they have been with Jesus for a while now, and they know him and what he has said and done. Now Jesus wants them to move beyond the script. He doesn’t ask the disciples what the scriptures say…he asks them what they know, deep in their hearts.

Brave Peter gives it a try. Though others stick to what they know – characters of the past…Elijah and John the Baptist – he names Jesus as the Messiah. For Jews living at that time, the Messiah was still something in the future – as of yet unknown, unfulfilled. Peter moves forward in the script…into the part that hasn’t been written yet.

An author named Tom Wright explores what it means to understand the bible as authoritative for our lives. He asks us to imagine that there exists a Shakespeare play whose fifth act had been lost. The first four are so good – so compelling – everyone agrees the play should be staged. Nevertheless, it is felt inappropriate to actually write a fifth act once and for all. Instead it’s better to give the key parts to highly trained and experienced Shakespearian actors, who would immerse themselves in the first four acts, and then in the language and culture of Shakespeare and his time, they would work out a fifth act for themselves. It would be true to the play, yet honor the fact that it isn’t, in point of fact, finished.

Now imagine the same is true of the bible. We have the first four acts, but the fifth act is not a part of our bible as it is written down. And we are like the Shakespearian actors constantly performing Act five, and because we have immersed ourselves in them, it will follow the first four acts naturally. Yet it will never be written once and for all.

So, it would probably help to name the first four acts.

In the Christian play, act one is creation – God created everything, including us, and called it good. Act one means every other act that follows must assume the goodness of God’s creation.

Act two is the fracturing of the world. The bible shows us that what was good was broken in many ways. All the acts that follow must assume this brokenness and, because of Act one, we must assume that the movement of creation is toward healing this brokenness.

Act three is Israel – the story of a people that reflect acts one and two. They are fundamentally good – fundamentally God’s people – loved – and ultimately God’s partners in the movement to restore creation. At the same time they reflect the brokenness of the world. They are both victims and causes of this brokenness. Act three gives us characters, plot, and a trajectory for the rest of the drama.

Act four is Jesus. Jesus comes to give us a glimpse of what is possible in this broken world. A glimpse of the way to break out of the pattern of humankind, doing the same things over and over. He shows us the way forward, and invites us to think anew. He invites us to become Act V.

And so, act five is the church. It’s the disciples after Jesus has gone. It’s the Christians throughout history. It’s the church. It’s us. We are the ongoing, never written for good, Act V. Being a disciple means two things when it comes to the bible; We must always immerse ourselves in the bible; we would certainly all admit we could always learn more about our bible. We cannot skip this step. But step two is improvising; coming up with things that are new and better for our time and place.

We face things never imagined by the bible. Jesus did not solve everything once and for all. The world is still broken, and we face problems he never did. So, we have to improvise. The script helps, but it is not finished.

It’s nice to have a script. Many actors surely take comfort in having the words written for them and their work is to merely perform them as best they can. But when this is true, creativity is severely limited. And while different actors perform the script slightly differently, it’s the exact same story told again and again. It can never be new or fresh…it can never be contemporary. Obviously, in the world of plays, this isn’t a problem.

But in the end we are not in a play – the stakes are much higher. We are on a journey through life – and how we choose to act really matters in the world. There are very real consequences. Our scenery changes, constantly. And performing the same script against changing scenery begins to look ridiculous. It can cease to make sense – and the consequences can be devastating.

This does, I admit, have huge implications for what it means to call scripture authoritative for our lives. We tend to think the bible is true because it’s God’s word for all times and all places. We think the bible is sacred because it never changes, it’s always right, and we can go to it with any problem and find the “answer.” But this view ultimately makes us look ridiculous. And I am not alone in thinking this.

Paul, for example, is constantly improvising based on his scriptures. Paul writes to the church in Rome, people facing things the disciples never did, people trying to understand what it means to be faithful knowing Jesus didn’t come back when everyone assumed he would, that Jesus didn’t look exactly like the Messiah was supposed to look, people trying to live as Christians in their broken world.

Paul obviously wants them to look to scripture for guidance – he quotes his scripture all the time…which of course at that time was only what we call the old testament. He also wants them to look to what they know of Jesus’ life through the stories that had been passed down to them. But, he recognizes that this is not enough. They must take all this – the scriptures, the stories others have told them – then set it aside, and figure out what comes next. They must, in Paul’s words, discern God’s will for them. Discern. Not replay the past, or try to make the scriptures fit their current situation. With great humility and sober judgment, they are to figure out their Act five.

The ethical dilemmas we face today are worlds away from those the authors of our bible faced. We see the world differently. MUCH has happened. Some parts of the world that were broken have been healed and restored. Some parts that were whole are now broken.

Think about the challenges we face with the environment. We can assume the ozone was intact when Genesis was written. Yet people insist on addressing the environmental problems we face by sticking to the script that was written 3,000 years ago. But if our part of the play is to join in the movement to restore what is broken now, in this day and age – we need to know God’s new word for us.

Science has completely changed the scenery, modern technology has moved us to an entirely different stage, politics introduces new characters and dynamics. With Acts one, two, three and four in mind, we need to set them aside and improvise; then we will see what new things emerge.

Our actions, if we’re being faithful, will likely be radically different from what the early Hebrew people did in their journey to be faithful to God. They conquered lands to be free from oppression; we must give up our tendency to use creation for our own ends. They built kingdoms meant to mirror God’s realm; we now know we must dismantle the institutions of power and oppression. When we try to use the old script in the new setting, we begin to look ridiculous…and the consequences are devastating.
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Some want to argue that the play is complete. Some want to argue that the answer to our broken world is to say over and over again the words of scripture. To do exactly as the characters in these books did things. Some believe we have a script and we must follow it to the letter. Jesus, the disciples and Paul tell us there’s more to the story – God is living, and we must discern God’s will for our time and place. If we don’t, our lives don’t make sense, we can’t be relevant to our world, we end up acting in ways that are antithetical to God’s will for us.

Let’s keep this amazing play going. Let’s perform our Act V; let’s improvise and see what new and creative things emerge. Amen.