Telling the Truth
In his book, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, & Fairy Tale, Fredrick Buechner gives one of my favorite descriptions of the preacher's task. "The preacher is called in his turn to stand up in his pulpit as fabulist extraordinary, to tell the truth of the Gospel in its highest and wildest and holiest sense."
I think the greatest mistake a preacher can make is to dumb down or water down the truth. If it's not unbelievable it's not believable. As Buechner says, the gospel is "too good to be true."
The challenge the preacher faces is sitting down to put together a sermon and "the sound of the bills to be paid, the children to educate, the storm windows to put up, the sounds of his own blunders and triumphs, of his lusts and memories and dreams and doubts, any one of which when you come right down to it is apt to seem more real and immediate and clamarous to him than the sound of truth as high and wild and holy. So homiletics becomes apologetics. The preacher exchanges the fairy-tale truth that is too good to be true for a truth that instead of drowing out all the other truths the world is loud with is in some kind of harmony with them. He secularizes them and makes them rational. he adapts and makes them relevant. He demythologizes and make credible."
Buechner believed, "No matter how forgotten and neglected, there is a child in all of us who is not just willing to believe in the possibility that maybe fairy tales are true after all but who is to some degree in touch with that truth."
I love Buechner's defintion of a preacher. A preacher is "a steward of the wildest mysteries of them all."
I think the greatest mistake a preacher can make is to dumb down or water down the truth. If it's not unbelievable it's not believable. As Buechner says, the gospel is "too good to be true."
The challenge the preacher faces is sitting down to put together a sermon and "the sound of the bills to be paid, the children to educate, the storm windows to put up, the sounds of his own blunders and triumphs, of his lusts and memories and dreams and doubts, any one of which when you come right down to it is apt to seem more real and immediate and clamarous to him than the sound of truth as high and wild and holy. So homiletics becomes apologetics. The preacher exchanges the fairy-tale truth that is too good to be true for a truth that instead of drowing out all the other truths the world is loud with is in some kind of harmony with them. He secularizes them and makes them rational. he adapts and makes them relevant. He demythologizes and make credible."
Buechner believed, "No matter how forgotten and neglected, there is a child in all of us who is not just willing to believe in the possibility that maybe fairy tales are true after all but who is to some degree in touch with that truth."
I love Buechner's defintion of a preacher. A preacher is "a steward of the wildest mysteries of them all."
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