I Met God at the Theater

The two things we’re taught early in life is that it’s not polite, nor safe, to talk about politics and religion with your family at Thanksgiving. I find that very unfortunate, especially in days like these. The problem with having a nice, polite, safe Thanksgiving dinner is that nothing important is discussed and everyone leaves with the same opinions they arrived with—that their beliefs are the right beliefs.

So instead of having a potentially uncomfortable conversation about God at the dinner table, I went to the theater. There I encountered a ninety-minute conversation about the provocative nature of the character of God in the play An Act of God.

Emmy Award winning comedy writer David Javerbaum wrote the play, which was based on his book The Last Testament: A Memoir by God. Javerbaum was the Executive Producer and Head Writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart as well a writer for David Letterman and Stephen Colbert. I found the play ironic, sarcastic, and theologically astute. I could easily imagine that Christopher Moore’s book Lamb and the movie Dogma, has some influence on Javerbaum. Unfortunately though, when the curtain went down only about a quarter of the audience stood in applause. In light of Paige Davis’ (God) marvelous performance, I had to assume the patrons either didn’t get the jokes or didn’t find them funny.

God appearing as a woman brought feminist issues to the forefront, though Javerbaum didn’t really address feminism in the play. I was also disappointed that in the opening monologue, the character of God set aside the topic of Islam for the evening. I had to wonder if the playwright did so because of the Arizona audience?

But then the play moved quickly to take on most of the controversial Judeo-Christian topics. God starts with the stunner that she is not perfect—creator and omniscient, yes, without fault, no. God gives the example that she was trying to make the perfect beetle and it took her 400,000 attempts. God also tells us she supports the use of the King James Bible because it’s the only version basketball star Lebron James has approved. Then she tells us that the bible was meant to be interpreted metaphorically and not literally. Of course, the 4,000 year-old earth and six day creation theories are brought to their knees with sarcasm. And regarding human creation and sexuality? God originally created Adam and Steve and that worked out just fine for a while. And what about Jesus? Yes, Jesus was God’s son, but not the only child. There were also Zack and Cathy, Jesus being the middle child. And that explained a lot about Jesus’ need to be the mediator, especially from the point of view of the birth order theory. In the last ten minutes of the play, God tells us that Jesus did not die for our sins, but instead for the God’s atonement.

That idea of the God’s atonement could have been lifted from Carl Jung’s The Answer to Job. In Jung’s book he wrote that at the time of the writing of Job (600 years before Jesus) humanity’s view point of God was that the divine was a parent was who simultaneously violent and loving (irascible). This perspective, Jung said, needed to be redeemed. Jung says that from the time Job until the arrival of Jesus, humanity had been working out its issues of God. They did so by constructing God as a parent who was filled with unconditional love. That was Jesus’ message. And they began to let go of the view that God was filled with the need for violent retribution—in other words, the need for a child sacrifice (that was actually dispensed with in the story of Abraham and Isaac). In the old view, Jesus of course, was the child that had to die a horrible death on the cross for human sin. In another view, Jesus died at the hands of the hands of the Romans because he threatened their status quo. Jesus’ followers subsequently then saw this as an act of God’s love (God being present with Jesus in death) instead of an act that demanded human sacrifice for sin. God was atoned and a new perspective of the divine was born.

Finally, Javerbaum offered a few positive words about the future. Here, he borrowed from what is known as Open Theology. Open and Process Theology rely on a positive and cooperative effort between humanity and the divine in order to create a future for the sake of both. That theology says that if we, as human beings, accept our role as co-participants in re-creating the earth then maybe life on earth will be saved for future generations (and the presence of the divine within humanity). However, if we continue on our present trajectory our course will not be reversed and our days on earth will be numbered. Javerbaum, however, leaves us with a hopeful belief that humanity can and will do its best to protect and re-create the earth on which we live.

I found David Javerbaum’s An Act of God as an excellent place to begin a conversation about how we talk about God without using theological terms. Anytime we can allow ourselves the permission to consider that God has a sense of humor, we are closer to discovering the truth about ourselves—and possibly to realize that we might be taking ourselves, on one hand too serious (as in we hold the absolute truth), while at the same time not taking our responsibility serious enough (as in our days as humans of earth is dependent upon how we take care our island home).

Maybe it’s time for a bible study using Javerbaum’s The Last Testament?