We live in a world that has lost its story. We’ve been trained since the Enlightenment Movement beginning in the 1700s to see the world as merely material without any real participation in a transcendent reality (namely, the Life of the Trinity). God was thrown out, and the world was seen as having no embedded meaning from its Creator.  

In Episode 3 of Season Two of this podcast, I talked in a little more detail about this saying, 

What I’m trying to get across is that the idea that there is no God and the idea that life has no story is a very recent historical phenomenon. The vast majority of humans up until just a few hundred years ago automatically thought of themselves as being a part of a meaningful cosmic storyline. But, guess what: there’s an anti-story story. There is a story that says there is no story. That’s the story our world believes today. Do you understand? Unbelief is itself a belief in a particular story that says there is no story. 

In general, the Enlightenment’s anti-story-story has enslaved our culture’s imagination, draining the world of its God-given significance. Significance has to do with signs that signal a Signature, and a signature is the personal handwriting of a Living Person with a Name. That Signature has effectively been erased for most folks, and so the world has no storyline – no creator from whom it came, and no redeemer to whom it is moving in hope and promise.  

But Christianity has always taught that Jesus himself is the One through and for whom the Cosmos was created. He is the Word, the Logos, the basis of its reality; you could say, the meaning of the world is Jesus, and the ongoing dramatic enactment of the World’s story is the work of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the world’s Creation, Redemption, and Re-making. 

But here’s the thing, we have a place in that Great Story. We’ve been invited into it as God’s collaborators. If we’re talking about how to find our place in the story, how do we learn to play along? If the Lamb’s Book of Life is not a ledger sheet but a Grand Storybook endlessly unfolding, how do we join in its telling with our very lives? Well, how about a few analogies to help us think about it? 

The Play Analogy

I’ll start with one that encouraged me lately, Hans Urs von Balthasar’s play analogy. Balthasar says the Father has laid out a script (which is His Will), sent the Principal Actor onto the stage (Jesus), and presently the Holy Spirit is acting as the plays director, overseeing the action, even inviting the audience up onto the stage to participate in the enactment of the drama. So again, The Father is the Playwright, the Son is the Principle Actor, and the Holy Spirit is the Director. 

Get to know the Script. 

What’s the first thing an actor has to do if she’s going to be in a play? She had better put in the time to memorize the script. The Script is God’s will, the Script is the Scriptures. There’s no clever gimmick here, if you want to get the story of God’s will into your bones, read the Bible everyday. 

Now, as an aside, I grew up feeling very confused about the subject of God’s Will, mainly due to a problematic little phrase put this way, “You want to be in the center of God’s Will.” The implication was that to be in the “Center of God’s Will” was to be standing on one foot, on a certain rock, in a certain field, in a certain town, at precisely the right time of day, and you better be holding your mouth just right with your shirt tucked in. And when you asked where the rock, the field and town were, you were told that it was a mystery and if you didn’t know you probably weren’t praying hard enough. 

This made me feel like God was just messing with me. He had some secret will for my life that I had no way of discerning. Like there was some story, but God had the script in a vault somewhere. 

It was quite a process for me to learn that God’s Will is just the story God is telling, which has been made known through the Creation, The Scriptures, and Jesus Christ. That’s why Paul prays in Colossians 1:9 that his friends might be “filled with the knowledge of his will.” 

Because the Story God is Telling has been made available, we can avail ourselves of this resource. God’s will is not a certain rock in a certain field in a certain town where you must stand on one foot – rather, it is a vast realm of righteousness where God is working out a particular drama in his Cosmos through the One in whom the Cosmos subsists, Jesus. 

That is the narrative arch of all existence. What is the story God is telling? If you can get that story down, you’ll be seeing where the world came from and where it’s all going, and this whole world will be situated in a context that will allow you to understand its meaning so that you can live according to God’s intentions for it. Because you are being invited out of the audience and onto the stage to enact the Father’s Script, getting your cues from the Principal Actor, Jesus, while following the directions of the Holy Spirit. 

Now here’s something I think is fascinating and wonderful. The more and more deeply familiar you become with the Script of the play (Bible reading), the stronger your rapport with the Principal Actor becomes (prayer), and the more attentive you become to the Director’s instructions (prayer and obedience) the freer you become to play within the play – in other words, to improvise. 

Improvisation is a species of wisdom that enables the actor to respond to all kinds of circumstances in a way that stays true to the script. It’s based on character. Righteousness is God’s character and he never breaks character. As we are conformed to Jesus’ likeness, we are dressing up as Christ, we are “putting on” God’s storyline, getting into costume, getting into character. But the irony with this particular play is that when you dress up and make believe you may feel dishonest, but you’re actually becoming more and more true, more real, more yourself. The reason is that sin has worked an anti-story story into this world, and made us all, in traditional greek dramatic terms, mask-wearers, false-selves, hypocrites. However, to follow Jesus is to learn to live truthfully again on the stage of reality.  

The joy and the fun of improvisation is that the Script takes on a life of its own through each actor’s unique gifts and personality. That’s why you can see the wonderful vitality, abundance, and variation of faithful Christianity around the world through improvisations on praise music, dance, instrumentation, architecture, food, and dress. You can see endless iterations of Christ’s actions across the centuries as faithful followers have lived, served, and died in wildly creative ways. 

The play is not scripted in a meticulous, deterministic sense. You’ve got the Script – get it into your bones, keep your eyes on the lead actor, listen for directions, and from there just riff on the themes, improvise. Have fun. 

Which brings me to a last analogy I love as a musician, and that’s musical improvisation. And it works the same way. Any jazz musician’s goal is improvisation, but it takes years of learning scales, absorbing a traditional repertoire of tunes, learning to follow a conductor, and so on. But all that work to familiarize themselves with that tradition means that at any moment the band leader might call them up onto the stage to jam and they can respond instantly. Duke Ellington can randomly point to his trumpeter Cootie Williams and say, “Take a solo” and Cootie steps right into the long stream of Jazz’s storyline and adds to the music. He speaks the language as naturally and freely as the wind blows.  

And it’s like that for us. Maybe we can’t relate to the play analogy or imagine ourselves playing jazz, but surely almost everyone can relate to speaking to someone in a conversation? There was a time when you couldn’t talk, remember? You spent years learning the language, picking up phrases, idioms, reading books, practicing within the tradition of your mother tongue until you could – get this – improvise. Unless you are literally reading off a page, you are improvising speech almost constantly. And the fact that you can have a conversation that is intelligible to another human means that you are improvising in a way that is true to the storyline of that linguistic tradition, which is serving as a kind of script or song that speakers improvise within.

Dear friends, this world is about something. It has a storyline. It has a Storyteller who is calling us up onto the stage to become active in this unfolding drama, to play a trumpet solo on the instrument of our very lives within the song God is singing over us. Or, finally, to join in a conversation among a trinity of friends as we learn to speak their beautiful language of faith, hope, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control to a world that has lost its story, and forgotten the voice of its Storyteller.

Closing Prayer

Our Father, you have revealed your character and will first through the Creation, then through the Scriptures, and finally through your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus you have perfectly enacted your Father’s will, fulfilling and expounding a tale of goodness beyond our wildest imaginations. And now, Lord, you have poured out the Holy Spirit upon us to assure us that you will end this story beautifully as you have promised. Holy Spirit, you ‘lead us into all truth’ as you direct and incorporate each of us into this ongoing drama. Give us wisdom to respond to every moment with creative faithfulness to the Story you are telling, with imaginations brimming with hope in your promise-keeping, and patient compassion toward those for whom life is storyless, without a song, and to whom your words, God, have become garbled gibberish. In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.