He was the hero I never met. Frederick Buechner, who died this past week at the age of 96, was my hero. As a young preacher, he made preaching a human task with divine importance. I learned bold humility and vulnerability from him. His words and his preaching shaped my life across the forty-five years I have been in ministry. He told biblical stories that made the characters human, and he usually added a twist of humor. His book Peculiar Treasures tells the stories of many biblical characters with a humorous twist. For example, when writing about John the Baptist he wrote:
“John the Baptist didn’t fool around. He lived in the wilderness around the Dead Sea. He subsisted on a starvation diet, and so did his disciples. He wore clothes that even the rummage-sale people wouldn’t have handled. When he preached it was fire and brimstone every time.
The Kingdom was coming all right, he said, but if you thought it was going to a pink tea, you’d better think again. If you didn’t shape up, God would give you the ax like an elm with the blight or toss you into the incinerator like chaff. He said being a Jew wouldn’t get you any more points that being Hottentot, and one of his favorite ways of addressing his congregation was as a snake pit. Your only hope, he said, was to clean up your life as if your life depended on it, which it did, and get baptized in a hurry as a sign that you had. Some people thought he was Elijah come back from the grave, and some others thought he was the Messiah, but John would have none of either. ‘I’m the one yelling himself blue in the face in the wilderness,’ he said, quoting Isaiah. ‘I’m the one trying to knock some sense into your heads.” (Matthew 3:3)
Buechner taught me the value of humor in interpreting and preaching the texts, while keeping a balance of the wonder and holiness about it all. His humor never disrespected the text, but rather brought it to life in a completely new way. Throughout my life as a preacher I have incorporated humor. In most congregations I have served, I have had to tell them at some point that if they found something I said funny, it was okay to laugh. Not for nothing church people are called God’s frozen chosen. I tried to thaw them out a bit by telling stories with a humorous twist.
Frederick Buechner was a master story teller, and the story he told best was the story of his own life. He wrote with unflinching honesty about the suicide of his father and the near death of his daughter from anorexia. He showed a quality of vulnerability, humanness and deep faith that could model a way through the darkness for anyone. I know he modeled it for me. It is a rare preacher that can tell their own story without it seeming like a psychological strip tease either on the page or from the pulpit.
Short pithy lines were a specialty of his. There are too many for me to quote here, but there was always some line that stuck in my head and unfolded the wisdom hidden in its words.
As a young preacher, I didn’t have much of a clue what I was doing. I tried on a few identities that lay outside of me, for example being a feminist and tearing down the patriarchy of the institution. But that made me too angry. I am a feminist and I have worked to tear down the patriarchy of the institution, but it was hardly an anchor to ground me in ministry. People said that the “in” thing to do was be a woman in ministry and I was just hopping on the bandwagon. I let that feed my self-doubt for a while and decided that didn’t fit either. I finally figured out that the answer did not lie outside of me, but within me. I had a deep sense that ministry was where I belonged, but I had no idea why. The best I could hope for was that God would help me figure it out along the way. All I knew was that the only place I felt the cogs of my life click together was when I was doing ministry.
Then I read these wondrous words from Frederick Buechner: “Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”
The Irreverent Reverend 