Sometimes Buechner can be heart-breakingly accurate in his diagnosis of the preacher's weakness, and heart-liftingly optimistic about how that weakness is the preacher's primary strength
To preach the Gospel is not just to tell the truth but to tell the truth in love, and to tell the truth in love means to tell it with concern not only for the truth that is being told but with concern also for the people it is being told to. Who are they? What is going on inside them? What is happening behind their faces...to make them strain to hear the truth as it is told? The preacher must always feel what it is like to live inside the skins of the people he is preaching to, to hear the truth as they hear it. That is not as hard as it sounds because, of course, he is himself a hearer of truth as well as a teller of truth, and he listens out of the same emptiness as they do for a truth to fill him and make him true. (page 8 - forgive the gender exclusive discourse Buechner uses - the book was written 32 years ago)
Describing the great Prophets of the Old Testament as first and foremost poets, he was by no means diminishing their authority, or their capacity to see and speak truth.
They put words to things untill their teeth rattled, but beneath the words they put, or deep within their words, something rings out which is new because it is timeless, the silence rings out, the truth that is unutterable, that is a mystery, that is the way things are, and the reason it rings out seems to be that the language the prophets use is essentially the language of poetry, which more than polemics or philosophy, logic or theology, is the language of truth. (page 19)
What makes Buechner's lectures on preaching so telling, is that, God help me (the phrase is a prayer not an expletive), they make me want to preach, and for what can begin to feel like the right reasons and in the right frame of heart.
The painting is The Sower With Setting Sun, images of human frailty, nature's toil and promise, the lonely work of hopeful scattering, and the possibilities embedded in grains of wheat that fall into the ground and die...and so do not abide alone.
Jim. Reading your blog is not good for my book budget :-)
Posted by: Jason Goroncy | August 11, 2009 at 06:32 AM
LOL, nor mine. Couldn't get this from Amazon (out of stock) but did through Ebay (!!!) if anyone else is interested. A seller called Charlies Chapters has 'more than 10 copies' in stock...
Posted by: Catriona | August 11, 2009 at 08:06 PM