Living Wittily

Author: admin

  • Frederick Buechner – telling the truth in parables

    Vangogh56 "When Jesus said love your neighbour, a lawyer who was present asked him to clarify what he meant by neighbour. He wanted a legal definition he could refer to in case the question of loving one ever happened to come up. He presumably wanted something of the order of "A neighbour (hereinafter referred to as the party of the first part) is to be construed as meaning a person of Jewish descent whose legal residence is within a radius of no more than three statute miles from one's  own legal residence unless there is another person of Jewish descent (hereinafter referred to as the party of the second part) living closer to the party of the first part than one is oneself, in which case the party of the second part is to be construed as the neighbour to the party of the first part and one is oneself relieved of all responsibility of any sort of kind whatsoever.

    Instead Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan, the point of which seems to be that your neighbour is to be construed as meaning anybody who needs you."

    (Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking. A Theological ABC (San Francisco: Harper, 1973), pp. 65-66.

    Two pictures face my desk in my study at College. One is the Rublev icon of the Trinity. The other is the above exegesis of the Good Samaritan by Van Gogh. Both were gifts from good friends – and both have nourished my mind, my heart and my imagination for years. And I think Buechner's fun-poking at the reluctant dutifulness or trip-up intentions implied in the lawyer's question capture exactly the subversive and transformative nature of parable – the lawyer who lived by definitions, legal terminology, words of entrapment finely balancing precision and ambiguity, professionally trained in loaded questions, wants his answer. Instead, Jesus told a story, in which, if the lawyer looked closely, he would see himself, and discover not an answer but a judgement, a calling, and a way into the Kingdom.

  • Frederick Buechner: life lived humanly and looked at honestly

    Trying to figure out why Buechner is so moving and persuasive in his account of human longing as it meets divine promise, need as it encounters grace, and this in the event of preaching, I think it's because he finds words to bring into the light of day thoughts I now see and recognise but didn't know till he showed me that they are also mine. But only now he has told me.

    Breadwine Switching on the lectern light and clearing his throat, the preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them of the truth and because Jesus speaks them both, blessed behe. The preacher tells the truth by speaking of the visible absence of God because if he doesn't see and own up to the absence of God in the world, then he is the only one there who doesn't see it,and who then is going to take him seriously when he tries to make real what he claims to be able to see as the invisible presence of God in the world? Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between tham and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens. Let the preacher preach the Gospel of their preposterous meeting as the high unbidden hilarious thing it is. (page 71)


    As much as it is our hope, it is also our hopelessness that brings us to church of a Sunday, and any preacher who, whatever else he speaks, does not speak to that hopelessness might as well save his breath. (page 55)


    Hope and hopelessness, community and loneliness, voice and silence, presence and absence, gain and loss, laughing and crying, beauty and ugliness – a list of contrasts that has no end as long as life is lived humanly and looked at honestly. And Buechner's idea that where such contrasts collide in our experience, there the Gospel happens, is one explanation of why the Gospel is the good news of God, and why grace is experienced as the enlivening miracle it is.

  • Von Balthasar’s birthday & Frederick Buechner: the wordless truth of who we are and who God is…

    Anastasis_resurrection Today is the birthday of Hans Urs Von Balthasar. I know it's Buechner week, but wanted to show the catholicity of my spirit by celebrating two such different voices! And also, you get two posts rolled into one! :))

    Mark McIntosh is one of the most lucid and penetrating interpreters of Von Balthasar. Here is a brief extract from his essay on Von Balthasar's christology, with a quite stunning couple of sentences from Von Balthasar on the Cross:

    Thus the space, the 'room', which God had made for the creature to respond to divine life was either collapsed into idolatrous creaturely self assertion or else distorted into an angry distance or fearful and bitter alienation. And with that distortion, all the other differences within the created order became toxic and antagonistic divisions.

    On such a stage the human being could never pursue the calling which would lead to relationship with God and thus to authentic personhood. But Balthasar's christology re-situates human being within its true acting space, upon a stage whose structures and rhythms have been purified and reconfigured by Christ. In Balthasar's view this is possible because the divine Persons have themselves, on the Cross and in the Resurrection, revisited the alienated distance between humanity and God, emplotting it once more within the 'space' between the Father and the Son:

    "The extreme distance between Father and Son, which is endured as a result of the Son's taking on of sin, changes into the most profound intimacy…The Son's eternal, holy distance from the Father, in the Spirit, forms the basis on which the unholy distance of the world's sin can be trnasposed into it, can be transcended and overcome by it."

    (Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs Von Balthasar, chapter 3, 'Christology', Mark McIntosh, p. 35)

    …………………………………………………..

    Buechner imagines the preacher ready to preach, and the congregation ready to listen, or to be bored. And what is the preacher to say?

    Who knows what this time, out of the silence, he will tell them.

    Let him tell them the truth. before the Gospel is a word, it is silence. It is the silence of their own lives and of his life. It is life with the sound turned off so that for a moment or two you can experience it not in terms of the words you make it bearable by but for the unutterable mystery that it is. Let him say, "Be silent and know that I am God, saith the Lord". (Ps 46.10). Be silent and know that even by my silence and absence I am known. be silent and listen to the stones cry out.

    Shadow_of_Death Out of the silence let the only real news come, which is the sad news before it is glad news, and that is fairy tale last of 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 her 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 thast 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."

    I don't know about you, but I would love to have such a preacher for my pastor. One through whom we are enabled to share the sacrament of words and the sacrament of silence, and one wise enough to know the difference between them, and the right time for each. Preaching is now far too readily dismissed, diminished, downgraded and de-centered in our quick sell-out to the post-modern critique. In these lectures, delivered more than 30 years ago, when post-modernity was still a philosophical and cultural adolescent worldview, Buechner was already pointing to a way of preaching that can never be reduced to informational exchange, disembodied exposition, practical how-to spirituality, intellectual wrestlings with doctrinal fankles. This is an appeal for preaching that is existentially honest, spiritually adventurous, pastorally compassionate, rooted in the lives and losses of an all too human and all too loved community. Preaching that is unafraid of truth because unafraid of questions; preaching that waits for words out of silence, and then only breaks that silence in order to speak those words out of love for the privileged ministry of the cure of souls, beginning with the preacher's own soul.

    The picture is by Holman Hunt, "The Shadow of Death". The weary carpenter strectches in the satisfaction of hard work done, unaware that his shadow is cruciform, and therefore a fore-shadow of Calvary. Mary sees it though. I saw this painting at the Holman Hunt Exhibition in Manchester, and sat and looked at it for a long time.

  • Frederick Buechner: Telling the Truth in Love

    Sometimes Buechner can be heart-breakingly accurate in his diagnosis of the preacher's weakness, and heart-liftingly optimistic about how that weakness is the preacher's primary strength

    13-vg-sower_with_setting_sun To preach the Gospel is not just to tell the truth but to tell the truth in love, and to tell the truth in love means to tell it with concern not only for the truth that is being told but with concern also for the people  it is being told to. Who are they? What is going on inside them? What is happening behind their faces…to make them strain to hear the truth as it is told? The preacher must always feel what it is like to live inside the skins of the people he is preaching to, to hear the truth as they hear it. That is not as hard as it sounds because, of course, he is himself a hearer of truth as well as a teller of truth, and he listens out of the same emptiness as they do for a truth to fill him and make him true.  (page 8 – forgive the gender exclusive discourse Buechner uses – the book was written 32 years ago)

    Describing the great Prophets of the Old Testament as first and foremost poets, he was by no means diminishing their authority, or their capacity to see and speak truth.

    They put words to things untill their teeth rattled, but beneath the words they put, or deep within their words, something rings out which is new because it is timeless, the silence rings out, the truth that is unutterable, that is a mystery, that is the way things are, and the reason it rings out seems to be that the language the prophets use is essentially the language of poetry, which more than polemics or philosophy, logic or theology, is the language of truth. (page 19)

    What makes Buechner's lectures on preaching so telling, is that, God help me (the phrase is a prayer not an expletive), they make me want to preach, and for what can begin to feel like the right reasons and in the right frame of heart.

    The painting is The Sower With Setting Sun, images of human frailty, nature's toil and promise, the lonely work of hopeful scattering, and the possibilities embedded in grains of wheat that fall into the ground and die…and so do not abide alone.

  • Frederick Buechner – Telling the Truth

    Fred 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)

  • Holidays in Scotland – cannae beat them.

    Crail_fife_scotland_3342 Just back from a brilliant holiday in Crail. say what you like about weather, if it's good Scotland's the best place for a holiday. Say what you like about Scotland, but if the weather's good ye cannae beat it.

    And this past week we had sunshine seven days out of eight; and three of them were unbroken glorious effusions of vitamin conferring, spirit lifting, mood enhancing, emotion enriching, holiday enjoying sunshine. And if that wasn't enough what about pear and cinnamon scones, eh? And Anster mature cheese on centimetre thick oatcakes, eh? And a Fisher and Donaldson peach and cream gateau shared with Stuart and Suzanne? Oh, and the home made quiche pies, bought just as they came out the oven and consumed half an hour later, sitting on the rocks looking across to the Isle of May – and a glass bottle of traditional Victorian lemonade with bits in it? Not to mention the Highland burgundy red, ever tried them – naw, it isnae a wine, it's a tattie! Visited Kellie Castle where they grow old varieties of seed potatoes and sell some of them as home produce – and these tatties are red on the outside and red on the inside – and delicious…with butter.

    And just so you don't think I live on my stomach – we also did the Pittenweem art festival where some of the art was just brilliant, and some of it just good – but the folk were welcoming, interesting and interested.  Read a couple of books as well – the new biography of Calvin and re-read Anne Tyler's Patchwork Planet, a deeply satisfying novel, a playfully serious view of providence without blaming every detail on God. As my immersion in Colossians continues, I read it a few times as well – a kind of early morning mind expansion exercise. talking of exercise, we also walked a bit – longest was 8 miles in one day (that was when the quiche was consumed). All in all – a great holiday.

  • Giving the horse a bath!

    The horse is called Summer Bird.
    Getting a bath from his trainer after he won
    the Belmont Stakes.
    (From The Herald    , Friday July 31)

    Horse

  • Conflict, conciliation and the sole authority of the Colossian Christ

    Crucified_and_risen_christ Talking about how Christians make such a mess of living with difference and diversity in their understanding of their faith, a very good friend once remarked, "The way you relate to people demonstrates your conception of God."

    Those who prefer conflict to reconciliation and argument to dialogue; those who see gentleness as weakness; those for whom openness to revision of thought is called compromise, and theological peacemaking is the culpable surrender of perma-fixed dogma; those who think certainty means the same as faith; those who believe that humanly framed theological propositions can be relied on to adequately express the mystery of sovereign self-emptying love as revealed in Jesus Christ; those whose standpoint is on that kind of terrain will have one kind of God.

    But it will be hard to square that God with the God revealed and made known in Jesus Christ; the One in whom God was and is reconciling the world to himself; in whom the fulness of God was pleased to dwell in bodily form, in whom the Father who blesses all peace-makers as God's children is finally and definitively revealed; this God whose defining nature is love, and whose love is defined by the Cross.

    I find this argument utterly compelling, and biblical in the most profound and searching sense of that often abused adjective – biblical. Amongst my theological and biblical ambitions (can you have such things?), for the next six months is to immerse myself in Colossians, that unparalleled exploration of what it is Christians claim when they confess, "Jesus is Lord!" – and in doing so bow in adoration before the One who is "the image of the invisible God..in whom all the fullness of God dwelt bodily", and the One through whom "God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things in heaven and on earth, making peace through the blood of his cross."

    The remarkable sculpture which illustrates this post is by Lyn Constable Maxwell. It was commisioned in 1994 and is titled ‘The
    Crucified and Risen Christ’. It adorns All Saints Pastoral Centre,
    London Colney.

  • C S Lewis, “No dreamer, but thy dream.”

    Prayer

    Master, they say that when I seem
        To be in speech with you,
    Since you make no replies, it's all a dream
        –One talker aping two.

    They are half right, but not as they
        Imagine; rather, I
    Seek in myself the things I meant to say
        And lo! the wells are dry.

    Then, seeing me empty, you forsake
        The Listener's role, and through
    My dead lips breathe and into utterance wake
        The thoughts I never knew.

    And thus you neither need reply
        Nor can;thus, while we seem
    Two talking, thou art One forever, and I
        No dreamer, but thy dream


    C.S.Lewis, quoted in James H Trott, A Sacrifice of Praise, (Nashville: Cumberland House, 1999), page 735.

  • Kenosis – gift, discipline or both?

    Helen and Rosemary, thanks for helpful comments pushing the discussion along in these recent posts. Paul's limited use of "kenosis" as a term, but its quite widespread use as a concept in his letters, suggests to me no simple either /or will do, when talking of kenosis as either gift or disciplne. "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God at work in you to will and to act according to his good purpose". (Phil 2.12-13).  Enabled by grace to develop and maintain a disposition increasingly Christlike because 'he who began a good work in us will bring it to completion at the day of Christ'.( Phil 1.6), The first ref. above comes immediately following the great kenosis hymn, the first at the outset of the letter.

    Resurr26 Gorman's argument isn't so much that we are to work at being kenotic, but that those who are in Christ by faith are being conformed to his image which is kenotic, cruciform and raised from death. I've been asked to preach in August on a text that says this and more, and which I have to say has been programmatic in my own understanding of what Christian existence is and must be, when the reality of Christ crucified and risen becomes not only definitive of existence, but radically redefining in terms of self. 'I am crucified with Christ. I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me, and the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me, and gave himself for me'. (Gal. 3.20) I can't read those words without realising that the issue of what is gift and what is discipline dissolves into all through grace, all through love, and a grace and love that is inexhaustibly generous, utterly self-giving and radical in transformative intent and power. (Sometime I'd like to write about the influence of autobiography on exegesis – this verse has been paradigmatic in my own spirituality from the beginning because it was "given to me" by two very special people….).

    51nkFA39GoL._SL500_AA240_ This summer I happen to be re-reading Charles Partee's recent The Theology of John Calvin, while also thinking my way through Gorman's discussion of kenosis and theosis. The union of the believer with Christ has always been seen as important in understanding Calvin's thought ; Partee thinks it is more than that, it is central  to his spirituality.

    In a beautiful epigrammatic statement about Christ as source and origin of Christian existence, Calvin says, "As God he is the destination to which we move; as man the path by which we go. Both are found in Christ alone. (Institutes II.2.1) And here is Partee explaining how in Calvin's thought, faith is both human response and divine gift.

    "Faith and union with Christ being virtually synonymous means faith is not under human control in initiation and achievement.
    According to modern dispositions and assumptions, faith is correlative and interactive. Against Calvin, faith is today understood, at least in part, as my faith. Since theology requires listening and questioning so faith is assumed to include both gift and response. Calvin affirms a human response to the divine gift, but he creditis the response to the work of the Holy Spirit in order to avoid all self-congratulation or self-glorification. Faith is not a human choice made habitual but a divine blessing made continual by union with Christ."
    (Charles Partee, The Theology of John Calvin. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009) Page 202-3.

    That is as elegant an account of Calvin's theology of faith and response, of gift and obedience, as I've read. And one that answers some of the crude caricatures of Calvin's thought, generated by his enemies, and at times more damagingly those generated post-Calvin by his less pastorally astute friends who claim his name for their theology.