Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "On January 31, 1872, Henry Ward Beecher traveled to Yale to deliver the first of the Beecher Lectures on preaching, which had been established in..." (more)
Key Phrases: poor naked wretches, pitiless storm, King Lear, Henry Ward Beecher, Greg Dixon (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A sermon arises out of silence, preacher and writer Frederick Buechner reminds us, and that silence is both an opportunity and a warning. An audience sits in the pews waiting, and each of those who sit there bring with them a long and complicated history. How will you reach them? How will you awaken them? "Tell them the truth," Buechner says in this brief and powerful book. The Gospel begins here, out of this silence: "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." Out of this silence, he writes, the "real news comes, which is sad news before it is glad news and that is fairy tale last of all."

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

Review

"A beguiling book .... Buechner handles difficult subjects (eternity immortality prayer) with a casual aplomb and easy analogy" -- -- Time

"Journey on, Frederick Buechner. We need your stories to help us make sense of our own." -- New Oxford Review

"One of our most original storytellers." -- USA Today

"Original, pungent and joyful." -- -- The Christian Century

"Thoughtful, spirited, entertaininga dictionary for doubtersand restless believers." -- -- Chicago Tribune

"With profound intelligence, Buechner's [work] does what the finest, most appealing literature does: It displays and illumines the seemingly unrelated mysteries of human character and ultimate ideas." -- Annie Dillard, Boston Globe

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 112 pages
• Publisher: HarperOne; 1 edition (October 26, 1977)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060611561
• ISBN-13: 978-0060611569
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #27,580 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

61 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE LITTLE OLD MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN, May 8, 2003

By	NotATameLion (Michigan) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

When I took a class in "Christian Mythopoeic authors" I had to give a presentation on an author not discussed in the class. I presented on Frederick Buechner. My focus was on his novel, On the Road with the Archangel. While preparing for this, I found myself reading seven of his other books. Once I picked him up, it was hard to put him down. One of the books that I read was Telling the Truth. I have recently had the pleasure of re-reading it.

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.

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must Read ... and Re-Read, November 18, 2001

By	Nathan G. Brown "ngb27" (Warburton, Vic Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Frederick Buechner's 'Telling the Truth' is one of those little books, so packed with great things, it needs repeated reading. Not that it is difficult to read, it is just full of huge ideas and grand truth.
Buechner revisits various aspects of the gospel. But his first challenge to the reader is to confront the silence of truth. Using as an example the silence of Jesus in response to Pilate's question "What is truth?", Buechner suggests truth may not be far from the ordinariness of our everyday lives - if only we would pause to realise.
'Telling the Truth' uses the recurring picture of a preacher getting up to preach. Buechner describes in detail the scene in the church, the congregation who have come to the church for so many different reasons and the inadequacies the preacher feels but, as the preacher lays out his notes "like a riverboat gambler, the stakes have never been higher."
'Telling the Truth' considers the gospel as "tragedy, comedy and fairy tale" in turn and ultimately Buechner finds the gospel "a tale that is too good not to be true."
If you only read one book each year, make it 'Telling the Truth' this year - and next year.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Compelling Read, July 11, 2001

By	Sarah S. Weber (North Wales, PA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have read this book 3 times in as many months, and I will be reading it again. The first time I read it, I was swept away emotionally and ended it feeling totally wrung out, yet still uplifted. The second time I began to understand the meaning. The third time I was able to integrate emotion and thought, and I finally grasp what he means by (1) the truth being found in silence, (2) tragedy as an inevitable part of life, when God seems absent and the world is dark and empty, (3) comedy as the unexpected event, God making himself present in unlikely and unanticipated ways, (4) the fairy tale, too good to be true, where good overcomes evil, light overtakes darkness, and people are transformed; but in the gospel it really is true--and here is joy, but a joy accompanied by tears.

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.