My friend James recommended Frederick Buechner’s book Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale to me and I was not disappointed. Speaking about communicating and understanding the Gospel, it is insightful on so many levels. It has helped me understand and reflect on preaching in a way that I never really thought of before. It reminded me that the gospel is tragedy that is bad news before it is good news. That the gospel is comedy: “The folly of preaching Christ crucified, preaching the king who looks like a tramp, the prince of peace who looks like the prince of fools, the lamb of God who ends like something hung up at the butcheres.” It also reminded me that the gospel is fairy tale calling people to something that seems to good to be true – otherworldly. Or as Buechner writes: “With his fabulous tale to proclaim, the preacher is called in his turn to stand up in his pulpit as fabulist extraordinary, to tell the truth of the Gospel in its highest and wildest and holiest sense. This is his job, but more often than not he shrinks from it because the truth he is called to proclaim, like the fairy tale, seems in all but some kind of wistful, faraway sense too good to be true, and so the preacher as apologist instead of fabulist tries as best he can to pare it down to a size he thinks the world will swallow.”

This book has made me realize the nature of the gospel story and that it is more than just an apologetic step-by-step process but so much more. It is Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale and I want to be one who communicate the gospel for all that it is and not one that pairs it down to some palatable size, consequently making it “simple” and in the process strip it from it’s fullness and power.