“Yes, and…?”

Proper 17A: Matthew 16.21-28

“Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.” When we hear these words, they usually strike us as a challenge, a threat, an obstacle to our happiness, to getting what we want. But the truth is, these words are one of the most encouraging, most hopeful, most liberating commands Jesus gave the Church. I realize that sounds crazy, unbelievable, but it’s true.

To explain how this is so, we need to start with something that seems far removed from Jesus’s world, namely theatric improvisation. If you are familiar with jazz, you know about improvisation, how jazz musicians often in the course of playing leave the printed music and improvise, extemporize, play spontaneously from a certain musical theme. Well, there’s something like that for acting, too. In some schools of acting, actors are taught not to follow a script but to improvise, to respond creatively to various contrived scenarios and interactions. If you’ve ever watched the TV shows Whose Line Is It Anyway? or Middleditch and Schwartz, you’ve seen improv in action. The thing about improvisational acting is that, like improvising in jazz, it takes a lot of practice, in order to learn what to do and more importantly what not to do, so as to let the story play out. And this begins, theater coaches say, with understanding three key technical terms: offer, accept, and block.

An" offer” is anything an actor does or says, whether it is a speech, a facial expression, a gesture or action, even an attempt to remain silent or still. They are considered “offers” because they are treated as invitations for others to respond: “Here, let’s see what you do with this!” Now, offers are not good or bad in themselves. What matters is what you do with them, whether you “accept” them or “block” them.

An actor “accepts” an “offer” by any response that maintains the premise of the action that constituted that offer. Imagine a child in the playground puts two fingers together and points them towards another child and says “Bang! You're dead.” This is an offer. The second child then has an opportunity to respond to that offer. If the child accepts the offer, he will conventionally do so by yelping a strangled cry and falling to the ground, for this maintains the premise of the first child's offer, that he’s been shot. Now, to do this, the second child has to be willing and able to let go of any thought of controlling the outcome of the story and resist the inclination to not play along.

The refusal to play along is considered a “block.” Imagine once again that the first child takes a shot and says, “Bang! you're dead.” But the second children respond, “I'm not playing anymore.” That’d be the simplest form of a block. But it would also be a block if the second child didn’t fall down, but instead remained standing and declared, “Bang! You're dead, not me.” 

The thing about blocking, why it’s a problem, is that it prevents action from developing. It may be amusing to watch, but it kills the story. When an offer is blocked, all sorts of possibilities are then ruled out. Imagine once again that the first child shoots and says, “Bang! You're dead,” but this time the second child accepts the offer. Now the “dead child” may begin to explore the afterlife and perhaps reappear to the first child as a ghost or angel. This only becomes possible if their death, the first offer, is accepted. Then the story can really develop, as the first child may be introduced to other angels, maybe fall in love with one of them and have to choose whether to die in order to be united with their beloved, and so on.

The challenge of improvisation is that most people are inclined to block, to say No to the offers given. The reason people prefer to say No is because they see saying Yes to be improper, impossible or just too scary. Fear is in fact the largest obstacle to an actor accepting an offer. They fear they don't have what it takes to keep the action going, that they're not creative enough, witty enough, and they’re likely to flub their response and bring the whole enterprise to a standstill. Or maybe they fear that they will actually succeed but they’re not comfortable with what that will mean for them—no longer being in control, going somewhere emotionally or relationally they weren't prepared to go, perhaps even changing how they see themselves and the world. So they block offers given them.

Now, why am I telling you all this about improvisation? It’s because we Christians have a lot in common with improv students. We are often tempted to say No, no to things we don't like, things we don't agree with, things we feel are contrary to God’s truth, to God’s justice, to the way Jesus gave us. As understandable as that response may be, as with improv, the question is not so much whether the world’s offers are good or bad but rather what we do with them. And the times when the Church has been most tempted to block are times when accepting seems the most frightening, the most risky, when the future seems most uncertain and fraught. But the fact is, these are also the times when we have been called to deny ourselves, our fears, take up our cross and follow Jesus.

When the church is tempted to shut itself off, to refuse to engage in the complex realities of discipleship and accept the tension of living faithfully in a broken world, we are challenged to not block the world’s offers, but instead ask ourselves two questions. First, What's the worst thing that could happen? And then, if after some deliberation we are able to answer that, we need to ask a second question, And what will happen then?

The point of this first question is to free us from the paralysis that tends to surround all thought about the “worst thing.” How bad really is what we fear will happen? The purpose of the second question is to remind us that whatever happens, it isn’t the last word. The story we are in does not belong to us …or to those who wish us harm. It belongs to God. In this way, asking these questions, we start to be able to think beyond the “worst thing.” It becomes possible to imagine accepting the “worst thing,” when we realize the “worst thing” may not actually be so bad.

The key to this is learning to say the phrase, “Yes, and…?” That’s how improv actors describe their posture, the way they respond to what they are offered: “Yes, and…?” It’s a helpful tactic for acting and it is also a profound statement of faith. For, “Yes, and…?” is an unfinished sentence. It indicates that the story is not yet over. There is more to come. Even when evil has done its worst, it is not the end. “Yes, and…?” gives us a way to place an offer we want to block into a larger context where it might be accepted.

For us Christians, you see, that context is a story of salvation, the story that began with the calling of Abraham and the formation of Israel, that is centered on Jesus, Israel's messiah, who died and rose for us, and that will come to its conclusion, its fulfillment, with Jesus’ return and the redemption of all creation. In the context of that larger story, we are free to accept, to say “Yes, and…?” to whatever life throws at us, whatever offers we are given, however scary, however threatening they may be, because we know the larger story. We are a part of it and we know how the story will end. And so it’s not up to us to make the story turn out the way we think it should or even to make our story turn out the way we think it should. It is rather to learn the story and practice it together, so that we were able to play our parts faithfully, creatively.

Let me be clear, though. I’m not advocating quietism, passive acceptance of whatever happens, however unjust. Rather, because we know how the story goes, we can accept offers without accepting the premise they are given in. Indeed, this is key to improvisation in acting—not accepting offers at face value, but rather accepting them while at the same time changing them, reframing them, a process in acting known as “overaccepting.”

To see what I mean, consider how Princess Diana responded when she was asked in a television interview in 1995 whether she thought she would ever be queen, now that she was divorced. She replied, “I will be queen of people's hearts.” With this, she did not block the awkwardness of her change of status, but overaccepted the loss of her throne and placed herself in what she saw as a more significant story. Likewise at her funeral, her brother in his address claimed that “She needed no royal title” to be recognized for her inherent dignity and grace and the contribution she made to national life. In this way, he too did not block her change of status after her divorce, but suggested a larger, more significant context for her life.

This is, in fact, how the Gospel writers tell the story of Jesus, as one long story of overaccepting. In becoming human, being born as a baby, God overaccepts human life. He does not reject his people, block them, nor does he simply accept them. Instead, he comes among them in order to save them. And throughout his ministry of teaching, healings and exorcisms, Jesus doesn’t just accept but overaccepts the offers made to him by the crowds, his opponents and his disciples: “You have heard it said, but I say…” “I have not come to abolish the Law but to fulfill it.” The perfect example is at the Last Supper, where he takes what is offered, the bread and wine, and overaccepts, transforms it: “This is my body, this is my blood.” Finally, just as the Gospel story begins with God overaccepting life, the story ends with God overaccepting death. Jesus does not avoid the cross, but neither is the cross the end of the story. In the resurrection, God shows that even the worst offer, the execution of the Son of God, can be embraced by overaccepting it.

In the same way, we can bear our crosses—judgments, humiliations, persecution, sufferings, death—by overaccepting them, seeing them in light of God’s larger story, the story of redemption. For with God, nothing need be in the end a tragedy. God can make even the “worst thing” into something glorious.

There's a story about a mother who wanted to encourage her son's progress in playing the piano, so she took him to a piano concert. After they were seated, the mother spotted a friend in the audience and walked down the aisle to meet her. Seeing an opening, the little boy quickly got up and made his way through a door marked “No admittance.” When the house lights dimmed signaling the concert was about to begin, the mother returned to her seat to find her child was not there. Just then the curtains parted and the spotlights focused on the impressive Steinway on stage. In horror the mother saw her little boy seated at the keyboard, innocently plinking out "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star." At that moment, the great piano master made his entrance. He quickly moved to the piano and whispered into the boy's ear, “Don't quit, keep playing.” Then leaning over, the pianist reached down with his left hand and began filling in the base part. Soon, his right hand reached around the other side of the child, and he added a running accompaniment, improvising on the notes the child was playing. Together, the master and the student transformed a frightening situation into a wonderfully creative experience.

In the same way, God is able to take our half-hearted efforts to follow him and transform them, overaccept them, weaving our failures, our defeats, even our denials into the larger story of redemption.

This is the promise of Jesus' words today, how the call to take up our cross and follow him is so hopeful, so freeing. For, to take up our cross is not to seek out suffering, but to accept, or rather overaccept the suffering we inevitably experience. In all of our lives, we will face suffering—loss, disease, betrayal, estrangement, death of loved ones. The question is what we do with it. Most people choose to block—to deny, to fight, to try to run away from suffering—or else they just accept it, surrendering to its inevitability. Jesus gives us a third option: overaccepting. By willingly taking up our cross and following him, we take the worst that the world, evil, life can offer, and transform it, reframe it, see it not as a danger, a threat, but as an opportunity to find God and be found by him.

Fact is, God doesn’t give us a script for life. Rather, Jesus calls us to follow him, to trust him, to learn to say, “Yes, and…?” to all that we encounter. For, therein we find the freedom, the joy, and the goodness of life with God. Amen.