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This series of lectures explores these three ways of seeing the Gospel: first as tragedy, as honest sorrow and suffering--this must be faced before anything else becomes possible. From this comes the comedy of new life: a child born to Abraham and Sarah in old age, Lazarus raised from the dead. This is the folly of the Gospel--what Buechner will ultimately call the fairy tale. Drawing deeply from the well of The Wizard of Oz and other stories, he reminds us in this final chapter that "there is a child in all of us," a child in touch with a truth deeper than the logic of tragedy. --Doug Thorpe
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Buechner is a shameless recycler of themes and material (King Lear references are found almost everywhere in his writings). Most of his books don't even break one hundred pages. Still, I'd rather sort through Buechner's recyclables than the seven course meals of a lot of other writers.
Telling the Truth is the printed form of lectures Buechner gave on what it means to preach the gospel. He argues that the gospel must be presented in terms of tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale.
The gospel is tragedy because life can be exceedingly dark. We spend so much time trying to pretend, and sometimes believing that everything is fine and dandy. Yet sin is real and it causes death. We all live under the horror of a death sentence that will not be commuted. We live in the valley of the shadow of death. To try and deny this is not to preach but to play games. Too many Christ-followers try to skip over this integral part of life.
The picture Buechner paints of Jesus' silence before Pilate is jarring. It makes me uncomfortable. It must have freaked Pilate out too. This silence and the silence before the preacher speaks are the personification of what the tragedy of the Gospel is. We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. The wage of this "missing of the mark" is death.
The Gospel is comedy because God's provision for those who are his enemies is beyond the pale. It is in this hour of death--in the hour of our just execution--that God comes and gives us a life beyond all of our dreams and expectations.
The picture of Sarah's laughter at God's promise is the picture of our reaction when we first truly encounter the Gospel. A woman giving birth as she enters her second century of life looks easy compared to a God that we have slandered, rebelled against, ignored and even crucified loving us and redeeming us.
It is the hyper-reality of this comedy that makes the Gospel a fairy tale. We live in the drudgery of our everyday "real" lives. Yet the Gospel is more real than any of the fleeting, fading images that pass for our reality.
Buechner uses the picture of the Great Oz to convey the fairy-tale aspect of the Gospel. Just as Oz turns out to be a little old man behind a curtain, so the preacher's proclaiming of the wonder of the Kingdom looks insignificant, a lot of the time ridiculous, compared to the truth they bear.
The fairy tale of the Gospel is that all us, though seemingly frail and cowering behind the curtain of our lives, turn out to have power through Christ. The things we say and do while carrying the Gospel do indeed have eternal impact.
The Gospel must not be neutered by the understatement or ignoring of any of its elements. Sin has made our situation dire. God's provision has given us joy. The entire story offers us wonder.
I appreciate Buechner's Telling the Truth because he is creative in the making of his points. He paints vivid pictures. He does not soft-sell any element of his argument. This is a great book.
I give it my full recommendation.
Still there is more to be learned. This book is absolutely a masterpiece of interwoven themes and images, thoughts and emotions, reality and imagination, literature and life.