Frederick Buechner: life lived humanly and looked at honestly

Trying to figure out why Buechner is so moving and persuasive in his account of human longing as it meets divine promise, need as it encounters grace, and this in the event of preaching, I think it's because he finds words to bring into the light of day thoughts I now see and recognise but didn't know till he showed me that they are also mine. But only now he has told me.

Switching on the lectern light and clearing his throat, the preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them of the truth and because Jesus speaks them both, blessed behe. The preacher tells the truth by speaking of the visible absence of God because if he doesn't see and own up to the absence of God in the world, then he is the only one there who doesn't see it,and who then is going to take him seriously when he tries to make real what he claims to be able to see as the invisible presence of God in the world? Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between tham and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens. Let the preacher preach the Gospel of their preposterous meeting as the high unbidden hilarious thing it is. (page 71)

As much as it is our hope, it is also our hopelessness that brings us to church of a Sunday, and any preacher who, whatever else he speaks, does not speak to that hopelessness might as well save his breath. (page 55)

Hope and hopelessness, community and loneliness, voice and silence, presence and absence, gain and loss, laughing and crying, beauty and ugliness - a list of contrasts that has no end as long as life is lived humanly and looked at honestly. And Buechner's idea that where such contrasts collide in our experience, there the Gospel happens, is one explanation of why the Gospel is the good news of God, and why grace is experienced as the enlivening miracle it is.

Comments

[chris]

Keep this coming, please - I have another sermon at the end of the month!