Christ is Present

"When I was hungry, you gave me food, when I was naked you clothed me," Jesus said. "When I was a stranger, you welcomed me" (Matt. 25:35-36). And "When I was a tree," he might have said, "you blessed me and asked my blessing." To believe that Christ is risen and alive in the world is to believe that there is no place or person or thing in the world through which we ourselves may not be made more alive by his life, and whenever we are made more alive, whenever we are made more brave and strong and beautiful, we may be sure that Christ is present with us even though more often than not our eyes, like the two disciples' eyes, are kept from recognizing him.

-Originally published in Secrets in the Dark

Maya Angelou's story about laughter

Click here to see the video where Buechner discusses a Maya Angelou story.

The Mystery

When it comes to the mystery of death, like the mystery of life, how can any of us know anything? If there is a realm of being beyond where we now are that has to do somehow with who Jesus is, and is for us, and is for all the world, then how can we know the way that will take us there?

"I am the way, and the truth, and the life," is how he answers. He does not say the church is the way. He does not say his teachings are the way, or what people for centuries have taught about him. He does not say religion is the way, not even the religion that bears his name. He says he himself is the way. And he says that the truth is not words, neither his words nor anyone else's words. It is the truth of being truly human as he was truly human and thus at the same time truly God's. And the life we are dazzled by in him, haunted by in him, nourished by in him is a life so full of aliveness and light that not even the darkness of death could prevail against it.

How do we go where he is? How do we who have a hard enough time just finding our way home in the night find the way that is his way, the way that is he? Who of us can say, and yet who of us doesn't search for the answer in our deepest places?

-Originally published in Secrets in the Dark

Get Up! All of You!

Little girl. Old girl. Old boy. Old boys and girls with high blood pressure and arthritis, and young boys and girls with tattoos and body piercing. You who believe, and you who sometimes believe and sometimes don't believe much of anything, and you who would give almost anything to believe if only you could. You happy ones and you who can hardly remember what it was like once to be happy. You who know where you're going and how to get there and you who much of the time aren't sure you're getting anywhere. "Get up," he says, all of you - all of you! - and the power that is in him is the power to give life not just to the dead like the child, but to those who are only partly alive, which is to say to people like you and me who much of the time live with our lives closed to the wild beauty and miracle of things, including the wild beauty and miracle of every day we live and even of ourselves.

-Originally published in Secrets in the Dark

Wherever People Love Each Other

I wish the church could be as open-hearted and open-minded and free as it was on that little patch of front lawn as the sun came out from behind the clouds. I wish that we could affirm as truly as we did there that wherever people love each other and are true to each other and take risks for each other, God is with them and for them and they are doing God's will.

-Originally published in Secrets in the Dark

My Homeward Search

Where did my homeward search take me? ' It took me and continues to take me every now and then to people in the thick of one kind of trouble or another who, because they know of my ordination, seek me out for whatever they think I may have in the way of comfort or healing, and I, who in the old days would have shrunk with fear from any such charged encounter, try to find something wise and hopeful to say to them, only little by little coming to understand that the most precious thing I have to give them is not whatever words I find to say, but simply whatever, spoken or unspoken, I have in me of Christ, which is also the most precious thing they have to give me. All too rarely, I regret to say, my search has taken me also to a sacred and profoundly silent place inside myself, where it is less that I pray than that, to paraphrase Saint Paul, the Holy Spirit itself, I believe, prays within me and for me "with sighs too deep for words" (Rom. 8:26).

-from Secrets in the Dark

Brendan and Godric

Click here to see the video of Frederick Buechner reading from his novels, Brendan and Godric.

Nicolet's Sermon Writing for Pentecost

"In our blog post every Monday we select a reading from the Revised Common Lectionary for the upcoming Sunday, and pair it with a Frederick Buechner reading on the same topic.

On May 15, 2016 we will celebrate the Day of Pentecost. Here is this week's reading from Acts:

Acts 2:1-21
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Here is an excerpt from the novel The Final Beast where Pastor Theodore Nicolet is trying to write a sermon for Petecost:

HE LAY behind the barn with his jacket folded under his head. The rim of the sun had just appeared above his father's house, and long diagonals of light came slanting down at him from the peak of the roof. ""The birthday of the church took place in the midst of terrible fire,"" he began, his thin lips barely moving. ""I've got this sermon to do. . ."" Don't ham it up, Nick. That's cheating.'

As the sun cleared the roof, the light became almost intolerably clear. Every detail of texture and color seemed too visible, dazzled him; it was like looking at pebbles through the flashing water of a stream--the flakes of rust on the wheel of the ruined cider press, the beaded brilliance of orange rinds that lay tumbled down the slope of the compost heap. ""You tell me, old Lillian, bare-shanks, how do I preach the power from on high?""

Just look around you, Nicolet. Her eyes swelled the chipmunk smile.

""I see a tiny red bug crawling up a tree trunk. I see where my tragic old dad dumps the slops.""

Call on his name now.

""The bug's?""

The Lord's.

""Oh Lord..."" he began, stopped then. ""My prayers move creepy-crawly like the bug. Help me.""

His real name.

""Jesus?"" He whispered it. ""Makes me think of corn belt parsons with china teeth and ghastly old Jesus hymns. Beulah Land. Melodeons.""

It's his name. Call upon it.

""Later."" There were other saints. He leaned over on one elbow and took the pencil in his hand. ""Power,"" he wrote, ""from on high,"" with a little feathered arrow pointing up. The professor of homiletics had told them always to put into one sentence the central point and never to preach for less than twenty minutes--'Sermonettes make Christianettes,"" he had said. ""It comes down,"" Nicolet added. Did it? He crossed out what he had written and in block letters wrote, ""IS IT TRUE?"" Was that, secretly, what they came to find out Sunday after Sunday, just that, yes or no? He thought of them settling down to silence, old jaws clamped in a look of imbecile concentration, as he took his place at the lectern and unfastened the paper clip from his notes, glancing down at where they sat--the queer old lady hats set square like little mansard roofs, hearing-aids in the front pews, here and there a palm leaf fan flickering and the muted complaint of a cough. Rooney would sit in the back with her hair tucked into a bun getting ready to add up the hymn numbers but not yet. For those few moments before he began to speak, he could believe that they had come for something, were dreaming that maybe this time he would tell them: IS IT TRUE? ""It's the awful question you avoid like death,"" Rooney had once said in a fury. Like life, some saint said to him now. They waited. You waited. Sometimes you felt as though you had swallowed an anchor, waiting there. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in Thy sight. . . ."

Mother's Day

For Mother's Day here is an article originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words.

Jesus was by no means sentimental on the subject of mothers. He said that people who loved their mothers more than they loved him were not worthy of him (Matthew 10:37), indicating that duty comes first. And when they told him his mother was outside waiting while he spoke to some group or other, he said that his mother was anybody who did God's will (Matthew 12:50), indicating that his fellow believers came a close second.

To his own mother he could be very abrupt. When she came to him at the wedding in Cana to tell him the wine had given out, he said, "O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come" (John 2:4), meaning perhaps that she was to let him alone, that at that early point in his ministry he wasn't ready to be known as a miracle worker. He was speaking his heart to her if not exactly reprimanding her, and it was just "woman" he called her, not "mother."

Some of the last words he ever spoke were in her behalf, however. She was standing at the foot of his cross when he told her in effect that from then on his disciple John would look after her. "Behold your son," he said, indicating him to her (John 19:26). Again it was just "woman" he called her, but her welfare and safekeeping were among the last thoughts he ever had.

Our mothers, like our fathers, are to be honored, the Good Book says. But if Jesus is to be our guide, honoring them doesn't mean either idealizing or idolizing them. It means seeing them both for who they are and for who they are not. It means speaking the truth to them. It means the best way of repaying them for their love is to love God and our neighbor as faithfully and selflessly as at their best our parents have tried to love us. It means seeing they are taken care of to the end of their days.

Truth Simply Is

Truth itself cannot be stated. Truth simply is, and is what is, the good with the bad, the joy with the despair, the presence and absence of God, the swollen eye, the bird pecking the cobbles for crumbs. Before it is a word, the Gospel that is truth is silence, a pregnant silence in its ninth month, and in answer to Pilate's question, Jesus keeps silent, even with his hands tied behind him manages somehow to hold silence out like a terrible gift.

-Originally published in Telling the Truth