Decided to have a Fred Buechner week. Telling the Truth. The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale is Buechner's Beecher Lectures on preaching. It is full of that kind of wisdom that you instinctively listen to, because it sounds true – not only its content but the voice that speaks it. Genuine wisdom has a tone, a timbre, a listenability that comes from the unmistakable notes and cadences of humanity that inform it, a combination of compassion, humour, joy, sadness and gratitude for the life we live.
Here's Buechner the preacher doing what he does best – preaching the text of his own heart interpreted through the text of the Gospel – or, if you will, preaching the text of the Gospel through his own heart.
"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 of us all where 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 wand what it is to us. They must address themselves to the fulness of who we are and to the mptiness too, the emptiness where grace and peace belong but mostly are not, because terrible as well as wonderful things have happened to us all." (Page 4, Telling the Truth)
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