In the name of the Father, the Son, and the cafeteria worker: God is the guest star in the first season of CBS' hit drama Joan of Arcadia--and it takes a troupe of actors to fill the role.

JOAN OF ARCADIA, CBS' SURPRISE HIT SHOW ABOUT THE Almighty chatting with a not-so-religious teenage girl, as a rich genealogy. Longtime TV and film watchers race Joan's lineage to George Burns' apparition to reluctant believer John Denver in Oh God! which then begat Michael Landon in Highway to Heaven, which in turn begat Roma Downey and Della Reese in Touched by an Angel.

But other critics see a hipper bloodline in this show about a surly teen's encounters with the supernatural, linking Joan with the spunky, bratty heroines of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, and this season's Tru Calling. Still, a tale about God appearing to a teenage girl may be older than the networks or cable. Remember Mary of Nazareth, Joan of Arc, Bernadette of Lourdes, and Therese of Lisieux?

Joan Girardi (Amber Tamblyn) is having enough trouble without God dropping into her life each week with a new assignment. Her father (Joe Mantegna) uprooted the family to become Arcadia's police chief, forcing Joan to scurry for some quiet niche among the hormonal storm of jocks, geeks, and cheerleaders flooding the halls of her new high school.

At home, family dynamics have been rocked by a car accident that put older brother and star athlete Kevin (Jason Ritter) in a wheelchair, leaving loan clueless about how to deal with her sibling's grief and rage. She just wants to lay low, plug in her headset, and tune out the world.

But God, of course, will have none of that. As Moses, Hosea, Jonah, and a host of other reluctant recipients of divine messages could tell our modern-day Joan, you can run but you can't hide from the divine. So each week the Omniscient One breaks into loan's routine, nudging and cajoling her with cryptic one-liners that wrinkle her brow and exasperate her already pouty personality. And each encounter leaves her with a new task, invariably one she neither welcomes nor understands.

Joan's God, however, is no burning bush, no bolt of lightning knocking her to the sidewalk, nor even some whispering angel seen through a gauzy haze of light. There are no special effects warning Joan or the audience that we are dealing with more than an ordinary stranger. Instead, the Holy of Holies drops unannounced into Joan's day dressed up as a cute boy, a cafeteria worker in a hairnet, a toddler on the playground. Taking a line from pop singer Joan Osborne's 1995 hit (and the show's title track), God appears to Joan as "one of us ... just a stranger on a bus."

CASTING A TROUPE OF EXTRAS AS GOD MAKES GOOD THEOlogical sense. Genesis tells us that every woman and man is fashioned in the image and likeness of God. Tall or short, fat or thin, young or old, dark, pale, or freckled, we are each the imago dei. A show that has God taking on such ordinary human flesh reminds us that our greatest act of worship will always be the love we show the unremarkable body sitting next to us. For Joan and for us God is always as near as our closest neighbor. As Jesus tells us in Matthew 25, "Whatever you do for the least of my sisters and brothers you do for me."

Having God appear in so many different forms also provides a nice tonic against idolatry. If Joan sees God differently each time, she can't get attached to one image or notion of the divine, she can't forget that God is beyond all our images and notions, a mystery we can point to but never name. Perhaps if Christianity had a millennium or two of pictures of God as a middle-aged woman, or a child, or as African or Asian we could undo our attachment to notions of God as an old white man with a beard.

Joan's conversations with God take place against a backdrop of evil and raise questions about the possibility of belief in a good and all-powerful God. Her father the police chief wrestles with the moral evils of political corruption and criminal violence, and must use cunning and force to constrain the malice of those around him. For him it seems unrealistic to believe in a good God.

Meanwhile, her older brother struggles to make sense of the random evil that has ravaged his body. For him despair and rage seem like more reasonable responses to the world in which he finds himself. How is Joan (or anyone) to make sense of a loving God in the face of these--and much greater--evils?

Unlike the biblical figures and saints God has appeared to down through the ages, Joan Girardi is not a religious person. Her mother (Mary Steenbergen) and father are lapsed Catholics, and there are no signs of religious practice in their household. Even God seems particularly uninterested in religion on this show, telling loan that life is not about religion, but about fulfilling your nature. This sentiment flows from the show's creator, Barbara Hall, who has forbidden that God identify one religion as right.

IT MAKES SENSE THAT A NETWORK show about God take a nondenominational approach to faith. Reaching a large audience requires casting a wide net, and taking sides on religious debates would only work against the show's popularity.

Plus, the nondenominational approach reminds us that God transcends all religions and is present to people of every faith. Offering us a vision of God that is catholic with a small "c" (i.e., universal), Hall's show critiques the sectarian spirit that can make warring tribes of our various faiths and reminds us of the dangers of using religion as a sword when it should be a plowshare.

Still, our cultural bias against religion doesn't always flow from an ecumenical spirit. Sometimes it results from an individualism that exalts our private, personal experience of the sacred. Sometimes our suspicion of organized religion comes from the fact that it challenges our narcissism.

In this show Joan is called to fulfill her nature and she experiences God in personal encounters. But part of our nature is that we are social beings, and we experience God not just as individuals but also as members of communities.

Paul told us that the church was the Body of Christ and that we experience God's love and presence in and through that community. We believe that the communion of saints and sinners we call the church is how we encounter God's Word and sacraments, and we believe that that community is broader and deeper than our own denomination or faith.

JOAN OF ARCADIA'S FAITH, LIKE THAT OF many an adolescent, is a faith focused on her personal experience of God and her dawning recognition that her life is a vocation from God. She is beginning to realize that the world around her is "shot through with the glory and grandeur of God" and that this God is calling her to live up to her nature, to develop her talents and gifts, and to recognize the sacred and holy in her neighbor. She is even beginning to realize that the God who stands so close to her in these encounters is also completely beyond her understanding, that God is immanent and transcendent.

And she is just starting to struggle with the crises of evil and suffering in the world around her. She is trying to make sense of a world in which God addresses her, in which her father must use force to constrain the moral evil of criminals, and in which her brother must live in the wake of a senseless accident that has left him paralyzed.

In time, perhaps, she will also discover that the God who is present in her life and neighbor, is, despite moral and physical evil, also present in the sacred and broken communities of faith that seek to worship and honor God. In time, perhaps, her adolescent faith will move beyond a private, personal relation to the divine to a communal faith in the Body of Christ.

PATRICK MCCORMICK, professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.