Today's guest post is from a friend I met many a year ago at Aberdeen University when he was doing post-graduate study on P T Forsyth. We share an admiration for Forsyth, and we both continue to delve into historical and systematic theology. Rev Dr Leslie McCurdy now lives in Halifax Nova Scotia, and he kindly agreed to review a thickly textured thin book. Thank you Leslie, and stay safe and well over there.
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Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale (1977)
Through the years, I’ve been helped by a wide variety of books on preaching, many of them with chapter titles like “Beginnings, Connections, and Endings” and “Sermons for Special Occasions.” Their help has been always welcome. But what happens when the inexorable return of Sunday seems like a doom? Who will breathe new life into the preacher then?
In such times, my sermon-writing life has been propelled and inspired and given new life by two very different books. These are books that not so much teach one how to preach, but preach the gospel to the preacher—and in doing so, yes! prompt the preacher to preach. Both books, interestingly enough, originated as part of the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale University. One of them, from 111 years ago, is P. T. Forsyth’s Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, which started life as a two-inch thick tome, but the inspiration bursts from almost every page.
The other great encourager comes in at just 98 pages, plus two pages of notes, a “Thickly Textured Thin Book” to be sure. No acknowledgements or introduction, and no index: just one small book of heaven-sent incentive to tell the gospel truth, again and yet again. Frederick Buechner gave these Beecher lectures in 1977, and they were published the same year as Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale. In four closely-scripted presentations, he exegeted the title.
First, preaching is telling the truth. “Life is truth, the life of the world, your own life, and the life inside the world you are. The task of the preacher is to hold up life to us [so] we can somehow see into the wordless truth of our lives. Before the Gospel is good news, it is simply the news that that's the way it is….” Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” rings through these opening pages.
Second, the gospel is tragedy; “stripping us naked is part of what preaching is all about, the tragic part.” Buechner invites his hearers to attend to Jesus’s invitation, “Come unto me, all ye who labour and are heavy laden.” The lecturer also insists that we not rush on to the remainder of that invitation until the full weight of our lives is felt.
Third, the gospel is comedy; witness Sarah’s incredulous laughter “at the idea of a baby’s being born in the geriatric ward and Medicare’s picking up the tab.” And so “the gospel is a wild and marvellous joke”: “the comedy of grace.” The contrast between bad news and good news is stark: “The tragic is the inevitable. The comic is the unforeseeable.” And then this as almost an afterthought: perhaps, from God’s angle, it is “the comic that is bound to happen.”
Finally, the gospel is fairy tale, says Buechner, “and one thinks of the angel in the book of Revelation who gives to each a white stone with a new name written on it which is the true and hidden name that he was named with even from the foundation of the world.” The truth, perceived with a childlike faith, is that “the battle goes ultimately to the good, who live happily ever after.”
Such a breezy outline, of course, leaves so much unsaid. Buechner’s writing reproduces his spoken lectures—spare prose, mostly, with long but simple sentences that lilt with a preacher-poet’s delivery. Extended illustrations abound, and then return again and again—Henry Ward Beecher, the first of the Yale lecturers, cutting himself with his razor as he gets ready for the first lecture back in 1872; Sarah laughing; the various characters in Shakespeare’s King Lear; Pilate and Jesus; Jesus and Lazarus; and the Wizard of Oz. And always, the one with a sermon in hand:
The preacher pulls the little cord that turns on the lectern light and deals out his note cards like a riverboat gambler. The stakes have never been higher. Two minutes from now he may have lost his listeners completely to their own thoughts, but at this minute he has them in the palm of his hand. The silence in the shabby church is deafening because everybody is listening to it. Everybody is listening including even himself. Everybody knows the kind of things he has told them before and not told them, but who knows what this time, out of the silence, he will tell them?
Let him tell them the truth.
(Rev Dr Leslie McCurdy)
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