Scripture Reference (NIV): Genesis 1.1-5

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.  God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

As we all know, the story continues as God creates the sky, land, fish, animals, humans, etc. It’s almost as if God’s creative nature fuels itself in an endless process of literal self-actualization, God becoming the material universe in its infinite array of glory and wonder.

The oldest story in the Bible—and one of humankind’s most ancient myths in general—is about the natural, creative nature of being.

Our earliest concepts of gods were as entities who could create being out of nothingness. Creation stories throughout the Ancient Near East often pit two (or three) great, ancient monsters against one another, their battles forming seas and mountains, stars and planets, and human beings, always created as slaves. Eventually, we imagined a single, all-powerful God as king of all the other gods. From the “king of many gods” foundation, Judaism contributed both pure monotheism and the radical idea that humans aren’t created as slaves to ancient celestial entities, but rather as co-creators in covenant relationship with the Supreme Lord of all Creation.

In the postmodern era, we try to imagine God not as an entity, but as entirety. God is the conscious, creative nature of being. Made in the image of God, we mimic the universe’s creative ability when we, too, create, especially when we dream things into being that have never before existed.

When we spin new tales about the beginnings of the universe, when we sing original songs, when we design and construct new buildings, develop new civics, create the mechanisms for global, peaceful cooperation, and send explorers to the stars, we are channeling the most ancient power in the universe. We are born from Creativity to be creative.

Creativity requires improvisation and faith because to be fully creative means we need to learn how to improvise. To improvise, we have to trust in God—we have to understand God as the universes original, infinitely abundant wellspring of ideas and inspiration. In the Genesis creation myth, God is the ultimate improviser. God creates light and dark and likes it. In response to those first two notes, God scats a few more: The sky, the land, the sea, ooh-ooh, ooh-blie-ooh. The stars, the fish, be fruitful and multiply, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s God and Ginsburg, poetically beating their way through reality.

When we think about improvisation, most of us probably imagine comedy clubs and Jazz bars in smoke-filled, late-night Manhattan basements that smell of bourbon and taste like remorse. And honestly, my first introduction to improv was watching scenes like that in the jazz movies of the 1930s and 40s.

I was born loving Art Deco and Count Basie. Growing up, my musical icons were Duke Ellington, Bunny Berigan, Ziggy Elman, and Lionel Hampton. There was some improvising in the Big Bands, but when they broke into smaller groups, like Tommy Dorsey’s Clambake Seven, the musicians had room to stretch their improv chops. What ensued were musical conversations whose foundations reach to the beginning of time.

Improv is what happens when a musician (or any artist) stops thinking about the music on the page and starts playing with heart. It’s when, if you’re a spiritual person, you let go of your ego and open your mind and soul to the endless creativity of God, whose story is told through us all.

When we tune in and turn on to God, allowing that primal creativity to course through us, it’s a supremely worshipful and transcendent experience. And it’s available to all of us, whether or not we think we’re creative.

I’ve met so many people who think they’re not creative. “I wish I could play the piano,” they say, or, “I can’t draw a straight line.” So what? I can’t draw a straight line either, but now and then I sit and doodle. I just let the universe doodle whatever comes to mind, and I don’t judge whether or not my doodle is good enough to hang in the Guggenheim. I’m just doodling around with God, and it’s awesome.

I doodle on the piano all the time, usually with better results because I’ve been playing the piano for 40 years. I also understand music theory (to an extent), so when someone says, “Let’s jam in A minor,” I can do that. But literally anyone can learn to jam in A minor. It’s not about skill as much as it is about letting go of the concept that to be creative requires some special gene or years of training. Practice and lessons make us proficient with our tools, but God inspires us to use them to create new beauty.

We are all naturally creative because our life source is creativity itself.

So just sit down at the piano and play. Strum the guitar. Paint, draw, sew, bake, cook, tell jokes, clean, organize, create beauty in any and every way imaginable. Co-create with God. Improvise your way through your day and make something new.

Don’t worry about what it sounds like or tastes like or looks like. Just create. It’s good for your soul, it’s good for humanity, and it’s absolutely imperative for the practice of postmodern religion.

What does improvising have to do with religion?

Well, while our parents and grandparents may have grown up “Catholic” or “Protestant” or Hindu, Muslim, or Jew, many of us recognize we now live in a much more pluralistic world. Identifying with any single religion as “true” is difficult—perhaps even somewhat repugnant for many of us who have Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Baha’i and Buddhist friends—or even spouses and extended family. As our families become more multicultural, so too must our image of God.

When we explore the world’s great religions and integrate their teachings into our personal religiously improvised compositions, religious traditionalists often call us infidels and antichrists. When this happens, keep the faith. Throughout history those using religion for personal gain also slung arrows and insults at Jesus and Luther and any innovator who dared to take power away from the religious institution and return it instead, rightfully, to the people God loves.

So I encourage religious improv. Take a riff from Jesus, add a line or two from Buddha, throw down some beats from Mohammed and temper it all with science and reason. Ultimately, filter everything through the command to love our neighbors as ourselves. Write, draw, dance, sing, and bake your story with God. Share it with the world and marvel at how, though we’ve each improvised our religions, we’ve ended up in the same place: feeling so unconditionally loved and accepted by God that we can return the favor for one another.

Amen.

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