I walked into the large religious bookstore that had pyramid displays of hooks by Tim LaHaye, Ann Kiemel, and Keith Miller.
"What do you have by Fred Buechner?" I asked the clerk.
"Who?" she asked. Perhaps the pronunciation of the name had thrown her off. (The first syllable rhymes with "seek.") But no, neither the clerk nor the manager were familiar with Frederick Buechner, and not a copy of his twenty-plus books was on the shelves. That's too bad. I regard him as the most exciting Christian writer since C. S. Lewis.
Like Lewis, Buechner writes fiction for those who stand outside the church and yet are hungry for the mystery of what the Christian faith is all about. Like Lewis, his nonfiction is becoming must reading at seminaries. His ability to state old theological truths in new, vivid language is a model for all pastors.
Like Lewis, Buechner believes we are to take God seriously, but not ourselves. He's the only author who can make me both laugh and cry-often on the same page. It's appropriate that Wheaton College has just accepted all of Buechner's personal papers and manuscripts to reside in the Wade collection next to those of the author of the Narnia Chronicles, The Screwtape Letters, and Mere Christianity.
On the chance that you've yet to discover the delicious tang of Buechner's words, I've pulled together a sampler of quotes under various headings. A few are taken from a recent interview at his home in Vermont, but most are from books available in your bookstore-if you ask real hard.
Making Scripture come alive
Buechner claims that words-especially religious words-get tired and stale the way people do. "If a person is going to be any kind of a preacher, he/she is going to have to avoid canned, religious, seminary, algebraic language." This takes the type of imagination that is only possible when a person reads. I think reading his Peculiar Treasures is one way to acquire that knack. The book contains 125 sketches of biblical characters. I'd love to begin a sermon with one of these opening zingers:
Amos. "When the prophet Amos walked down the main drag, it was like a shootout in the Old West. Everybody ran for cover. His special target was the Beautiful People."
Eve. "Like Adam, she spent the rest of her days convincing herself that it had all worked out for the best."
Jacob. "The Book of Genesis makes no attempt to conceal the fact that Jacob was, among other things, a crook."
Moses. "Whenever Hollywood cranks out a movie about him, they always give the part to somebody like Charlton Heston with some fake whiskers glued on. The truth of it is he probably looked a lot more like Tevye the milkman after ten rounds with Mohammed Ali."
Rahab. "Rahab ran an unpretentious little establishment in the red-light district of Jericho and was known for, among other things, her warm and generous heart."
He's not just playing it for laughs. Consider the impact of the following description:
"The high priest Caiaphas was essentially a mathematician. When the Jews started worrying that they might all get into hot water with the Romans because of the way Jesus was carrying on, Caiaphas said that in that case they should dump him like a hot potato. His argument ran that it is better for one man to get it in the neck for the sake of many than for many to get it in the neck for the sake of one man. His grim arithmetic proved unassailable.
"The arithmetic of Jesus, on the other hand, was atrocious. He said that Heaven gets a bigger kick out of one sinner who repents than out of ninety-nine saints who don't need to. He said that God pays as much for one hour's work as for one day's. He said that the more you give away, the more you have.
"It is curious that in the matter of deciding his own fate, he reached the same conclusion as Caiaphas and took it in the neck for the sake of many, Caiaphas included. It was not, however, the laws of mathematics that he was following."
The pastoral task
A young minister acquaintance of mine said not long ago, "There are two kinds of Christians in the world. There are gloomy Christians and there are joyful Christians," and there wasn't the shadow of a doubt which kind he preferred with his smile as bright as his clerical collar, full of bounce and zip and the gift of gab. The sheltering word can be spoken only after the word that leaves us without a roof over our heads, the answering word only after the word it answers.
The pressure on the preacher, of course, is to speak just the answer. The answer is what people have come to hear and what he has also come to hear, preaching always as much to himself as to anybody, to keep his spirits up. The pressure on the preacher is to promote the Gospel, to sell Christ as an answer that outshines all the other answers by talking up the shining side, by calling even the day of his death Good Friday, when if it was good, it was good only after it was bad, the worst of all Fridays. The pressure is to be a public relations man.
But let him take heart. He is called not to be an actor, a magician, in the pulpit. He is called to be himself. He is called to tell the truth as he has experienced it. He is called to be human, to be human, and that is calling enough for any man. If he does not make real to them the human experience of what it is to cry into the storm and receive no answer, to be sick at heart and find no healing, then he becomes the only one there who seems not to have had that experience, because most surely under their bonnets and shawls and jackets, under their Afros and ponytails, all the others there have had it whether they talk of it or not. As much as anything else, it is their experience of the absence of God that has brought them there in search of his presence, and if the preacher does not speak of that and to that, then he becomes like the captain of a ship who is the only one aboard who either does not know that the waves are twenty feet high and the decks awash or will not face up to it so that anything else he tries to say by way of hope and comfort and empowering becomes suspect on the basis of that one crucial ignorance or disingenuousness or cowardice or reluctance to speak in love any truths but the ones that people love to hear. (Telling the Truth)
Preaching
Let the preacher preach to us not just as men and women of the world but as children, too, who are often much more simple-hearted than he supposes, and much hungrier for, and ready to believe in, and already in contact with, more magic and mystery than most of the time even we are entirely aware of ourselves. "Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven" (Matt. 18:3), Jesus says, and he is not just being sentimental as he says it. Let the preacher stretch our imagination and strain our credulity and make our jaws drop because the sad joke of it is that if he does not, then of all people he is almost the only one left who does not. The joke of it is that often it is the preacher who as steward of the wildest mystery of them all is the one who hangs back, prudent, cautious, hopelessly mature and wise to the last when no less than Saint Paul tells him to be a fool for Christ's sake, no less than Christ tells him to be a child for his own and the kingdom's sake. (Telling the Truth)
The pulpit task
Buechner suggests that a pastor has about sixty seconds at the beginning of a sermon when the congregation is keenly attentive. They want to see if he will answer the only question that counts-the one they are so desperately afraid to voice for fear of being disappointed. That question is put to a pastor by a woman with grave doubts, yet in a quiet rage that comes only with hope. "There's just one reason, you know, why I come dragging in there every Sunday. I want to find out if the whole thing's true. Just true," she said. "That's all. Either it is or it isn't, and that's the one question you avoid like death." (The Final Beast)
If he doesn't deal with it, the pastor will find his people quickly going back to adding up the numbers of the hymns, or filling in the O's on the church bulletin. How does Buechner answer the question "Is it true?"
"Who can say? Humanly speaking, in fact, who can say for sure about anything? And yet there are some things I would be willing to bet maybe even my life on.
"That life is grace, for instance-the givenness of it, the fathomlessness of it, the endless possibilities of its becoming transparent to something extraordinary beyond itself. . . . That if we really had our eyes open, we would see that all moments are key moments. That he who does not live remains in death. That Jesus is the Word made flesh who dwells among us full of grace and truth. On good days I might add a few more to the list. On bad days it's possible there might be a few less." (Now and Then)
Touch
I went to an Easter service a couple of years ago. The sermon was quite pedestrian, the message being "Have faith in yourself." I thought, If that's all I have to have faith in, why am I here? It happened to be a very dark time in my life, and I was in terrible depression, needing something more than that. As I left the church, the man who had just finished preaching said, "I've been thinking a lot about you lately," and with that he threw his arms around me and gave me a hug. That was my Easter!
Touch is important to all of us. We're so unused to it, apologizing if we actually brush against somebody. That's been one of the good things that's come out of the last two decades-the emphasis on touch. Scary but powerful. Anything that comes close to holiness is dangerous. I think of the ark. You touch it the wrong way and it may zap you. The power is so intense for good, it can also be intense for other things. (Interview)
Loving others
Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it's like to live inside somebody else's skin.
It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too. (Wishful Thinking)
We are to love one another as God has loved us. That is the truth of it. But to love one another more than God has loved us-to love one another at the expense of our own freedom to be something like whole and at peace within ourselves, and at the expense of others' freedom, too-is the dark shadow that the truth casts. (Now and Then)
My trouble as a parent has been to love my children to the point where I am so vulnerable to anything that happens to them that it cripples me. I fret about them so that I lose my power to be myself. That's more than God loves them.
Your children have the power to destroy you. You must not let them, for your sake and certainly for their sake. (Interview)
Friendship
Chief among these friends was my friend Jimmy Merrill. Like me, he was either no good at sports and consequently disliked them, or possibly the other way around. Like me-though through divorce rather than death-he had lost his father. Like me, he was a kind of oddball-plump and not very tall then with braces on his teeth and glasses that kept slipping down the short bridge of his nose and a rather sarcastic, sophisticated way of speaking that tended to put people off-and for that reason, as well as for the reason that he was a good deal brighter than most of us, including me, boys tended to make his life miserable. But it was Jimmy who became my great friend, and it was through coming to know him that I discovered that perhaps I was not, as I had always suspected, alone in the universe and the only one of my kind. He was another who saw the world enough as I saw it to make me believe that maybe it was the way the world actually was. (Sacred Journey)
-Em Griffin
Wheaton College
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