Activist Priest Puts His Faith in ‘Jesus’ Performance-Sermon : Theater: Malcolm Boyd is collaborating with performance artist Tim Miller to explore the spiritual journeys in dealing with AIDS and other social issues.

You’ve heard of the Singing Detective and the Flying Nun. Well, meet the Performing Priest.

Malcolm Boyd, Episcopal priest and author of 23 books, has led a life of activism, art and belief. He was a freedom rider in the civil rights movement, a jailed anti-Vietnam war demonstrator, and the target of book burning and public hostility when he “came out” gay in 1976.

Now the affable Boyd, 66, who’s not beneath lobbing a “Mommy Dearest” joke into an otherwise serious discussion, is rattling the pews again, collaborating with performance artist Tim Miller in a “sermon with performance” called “Are You Running With Me, Jesus?”--titled after Boyd’s 1965 best-seller book of prayers, due in May in a new edition.

The sermon-performance will take place Sunday at Highways in Santa Monica.

Combining autobiographical monologue, vaudeville humor and ritual performance, the work will explore Christianity and current social crises from the perspectives of a priest and a performance artist. Boyd, writer-priest in residence at Santa Monica’s St. Augustine by-the-Sea Episcopal Church, is known for experimenting with new modes to challenge his congregants. “Any good sermon is supposed to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted and I trust that ours will fit into that,” Boyd said. “When we get up on the boards, we don’t have pat answers, but we’re sharing a journey--which is what theater and sermons at their best can do.”

This is the second such outing by Boyd and Miller, both AIDS activists and who created a similar, although much more modest, presentation last year.

The topic, however, is not only AIDS, or the recent attacks on expressive freedoms, but the spiritual journeys the two men have gone through in dealing with such trials and issues.

“Tim is on a spiritual journey, as I am, and they’re different but converging paths,” Boyd said. “It’s about our search for Jesus and what that means to us.”

At the same time, the piece is inspired by the personal, cultural and multicultural exploration that dominates current performance art.

“Once you put value on cultural diversity, it becomes important to deal with your own cultural specifics and religious upbringing, even if it’s part of the dominant culture,” Miller, 31, said. “It doesn’t make sense to be only concerned with Nuatl Indian traditions or something and not be concerned with the things you grew up with.”

Although Miller is well-known as a performer and co-director of Highways, Boyd is no novice when it comes to the stage.

Back in the late ‘50s, when Boyd was a college chaplain at Colorado State University, he put on “espresso nights” that included staged readings and dances based on liturgical themes.

“(The nights) were honest and existential and no big deal really, but they came under attack,” the controversial priest recalled. “It became a major cause celebre, with the New York Times doing daily reports on it, and I was forced to leave.

“The point of the opposition was that these nights weren’t traditional, that they were opening things up and moving into areas people didn’t have control over. The bishop said: ‘You can’t call yourself a beloved child of God if you have matted hair, smell badly or wear black underwear’--that’s a quote.”

Despite this opposition, Boyd continued to mix performance with preaching. In the mid-’60s, he headlined with Dick Gregory at San Francisco’s famous hungry i club, where Boyd read poems and interacted with the audience.

Boyd has long been drawn to such forums in part because the sermon is “a literary form as misunderstood as the harpsichord,” a nearly lost art.

“Some of the greatest sermons I have heard were Brando and Tandy in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ the first ‘Death of a Salesman’ with Karl Malden, and other theater I saw when I was at Union Theological Seminary. These were sermons. I didn’t hear them in church.”

But Boyd believes the church can also have that vitality. “I have been at war against church-ianity, but that doesn’t mean that Christianity isn’t real,” he said. “A lot of people who wouldn’t darken the door of a church equate the two and reject both.”