weird title. I know.
not so weird if its the title of a book. especially if its the title of my man freddy b's work. (fredrick buechner, check him out.)
this book is divided into 3 chapters as almost all of buechners books are. he talks about the gospel in three different ways
a fairy tale
a tragedy
and a comedy...
shocked aren't you.
I'm on the tragedy part, and i love it. there is something in me that loves finding out that I have something tragic in my making. you might not agree but let me explain. with tragedy comes hope. maybe its small, maybe we don't say it out loud or even think about it very long because to hope in the midst of tragedy is well...dangerous. Its also powerful and something in the deepest part of who I am loves these huge redemptive words, these exciting yet incredibly scary words. Its the same deep feeling I love when people talk about my version of holy things such as adventure, traveling, conversations that remind you how human we all are, and your general breathing in and out of life, the good and bad.
So I regress, back to the book. Buechner has some pretty great thoughts on the gospel and how somewhere in our understanding of it, the tone of tragedy must be listened to.
Disclaimer: these quotes tie together but are better in their entirety in the book. That being said, i proceed...
The preaching of the gospel is a telling of the truth or the putting of a sort of frame of words around the silence that is truth because truth in the sense of fullness, of the way things are, can at best be only pointed to by the language of poetry- of metaphor, image, symbol- as it is used in the prophets of the Old Testament and elsewhere. Before the gospel is a word, it is silence, a kind of presenting of life itself so that we may see it not for what at times we call it - meaningless or meaningful, absurd, beautiful- but for what is truly is in all its complexity, simplicity, mystery.
To think of nakedness is to think of how we hide it from each other and ourselves, I speak of clothes not just as hypocrisy and disguise, though sometimes its that for all of us, God knows, but of clothes as essential to survival because we cannot endure too much nakedness any more than we can endure too much silence, which strips us naked.When Jesus says " Take up your cross and follow me," I think that he is saying before it means some special mission or sacrifice of responsibility, it simple means take up the burden of your own life because for the time being anyway, maybe that is burden enough. Take it up in the sense of ...touch it and taste it and listen to it, look at yourself and your own life and smell the smell of your morality and nakedness.
When they brought Jesus to the place where his dead friend (Lazarus) lay, Jesus wept. It is very easy to sentimentalize the scene and very tempting because to sentimentalize the scene is to look only at the emotion in it and at the emotion it stirs in us rather than at the reality of it, which we are always tempted not to look at because reality, truth, silence are all what we are not much good at and avoid when we can. To sentimentalize something is to savor rather than to suffer the sadness of it, is to sigh over the prettiness of it rather than to tremble at the beauty of it, which may make fearsome demands of us or pose fearsome threats. Here as he stands beside the body of his dead friend he has no form of comeliness about him that we should desire him, as one from whom men hid their faces we turn fro him. To see a man weep is no comely sight, especially this man whom we want to be stronger and braver than a man, and the impulse is to turn from him as we turn from anyone who weeps because the sight of real tears, painful and disfiguring, forces us to look to their source where we do not choose to look because where his tears come from, our tears come from too.
Jesus has shared with us the darkness of what it is to be without God as well as showing forth the glory of what it is to be with God. He speaks about it, and perhaps that is much of why, although we have not followed him very well these past two thousand years or so , we have never quite been able to stop listening to him. To speak out of the darkness and to weep as Jesus wept, maybe only then can the reality of the other word become real to us, the word which to the darkness upon the face of the deep is "God said let there be light, and there was light." which to all those who labor and are heave laden is "i will give you rest" To preach the word of human tragedy, of a world where men can at best see God only dimly and from afar, because it is truth and because it is a word which must be spoken as prelude if the other word is to become sacramental and real, too, which is the word that God has overcome the dark world....
