Didn't say in yesterday's post - Buechner is an ordained Presbyterian minister as well as a perceptive humane novelist and essayist. So quite a lot of his published work is sermons. In an age when publishers are no longer interested in the obsolete genre of the printed sermon, Buechner defies the odds. His sermons read like wisdom literature - at times gently sceptical like Ecclesiastes, or spiritual experience is shaped and Psalmed into praise, or reflected experience is distilled in Proverbs about the fear of the Lord and what makes for the good life, or again, human love is celebrated in unabashed enjoyment as in the Song of Songs. But all of them immersed in the Gospel, and opening up to those with enough faith to know they are desperate, the realities of mercy and judgement and love and forgiveness, the promise of new possibility through the call to enter the Kingdom, and a way of life shaped by cross-bearing and party going celebration.
Here's an example - an extract from a Church anniversary sermon, called "The Clown in the Belfry." :
In the year 1831, it seems, this church was repaired and several new additions were made. One of them was a new steeple with a bell in it, and once it was set in place and painted, apparently, an extraordinary event took place. "When the steeple was added," Howard Mudgett writes in his history, "one agile Lyman Woodard stood on his head in the belfry with his feet toward Heaven."
That's the one and only thing I've been able to find out about Lyman Woodard, whoever he was, but it is enough. I love him for doing what he did. It was a crazy thing to do. It was a risky thing to do. It ran counter to all standards of New England practicality and prudence. It stood the whole world on its head just like Lyman himself standing upside down on his. And it was a magical and magnificent and Mozartian thing to do.
If the Lord is indeed our Shepherd, then everything goes topsy turvy. Losing becomes finding and crying becomes laughing. The last becomes first and the weak becomes strong. Instead of life being done in by death in the end, as we always supposed, death is done in finally by life in the end. If the Lord is our host at the great feast, then the sky is the limit.
Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry (San Francisco: Harper, 1992), 115-16.
That's why I read Buechner.
The photo above is of the Congregational Church in Henniker, New Hampshire where my friend Becky (pictured here) is minister. So far as I know she hasn't stood on her head in the belfry yet. Buechner lives in Vermont, just a wee bit up the road!
that is the most beautiful picture postcard church. What's it like inside?
Posted by: Margaret | July 14, 2009 at 10:47 PM