jayber crow

(or more thoughts on telling it slant)

There are a handful of books that I try to revisit every year or two, because they have been so important in shaping my sense of who I am as a Christian (i.e. as a human) and what I am called to as a preacher and pastor. One of those books is Frederick Buechner’s Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. More than anyone else, Buechner reminds me that “telling the truth” is about something more than simply “explaining the Bible” or passing on information about God accurately.

This morning our house was unusually quiet, with wife and baby asleep, and the boys amusing themselves happily, so I sat in a sunny kitchen with a pot of coffee and listened again to Buechner. Here are the passages that caught my breath this morning:

So if preachers or lecturers are to say anything that really matters to anyone including themselves, they must say it not just to the public part of us that considers interesting thoughts about the Gospel and how to preach it, but to the private, inner part too, to the part of us where all of our dreams come from, both our good dreams and our bad dreams, the inner part where thoughts mean less than images , elucidation less than evocation, where our concern is less with how the Gospel is to be preached than with what the Gospel is and what it is to us. They must address themselves to the fullness of who we are and to the emptiness too, the emptiness where grace and peace belong but mostly are not, because terrible as well as wonderful things have happened to us all…

The preacher is not brave enough to be literally silent for long, and since it is his calling to speak the truth with love, even if he were brave enough, he would not be silent for long because we are none of us very good at silence. It says too much. So let him use words, but, in addition to using them to explain, expound, exhort, let him use them to evoke, to set us dreaming as well as thinking, to use words as at their most prophetic and truthful, the prophets used them to stir in us memories and longings and intuitions that we starve for without knowing that we starve. Let him use words which do not only try to give answers to the questions that we ask or ought to ask but which help us to hear the questions that we do not have words for asking and to hear the silence that those questions rise out of and the silence that is the answer to those questions. Drawing on nothing fancier than the poetry of his own life, let him use words and images that help make the surface of our lives transparent to the truth that lies deep within them, which is the wordless truth of who we are and who God is and the Gospel of our meeting.