Benjamin’s Reviews > Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale > Status Update

“Is it possible, I wonder, to say that it is only when you hear the Gospel as a wild and marvelous joke that you really hear it at all? Heard as anything else, the Gospel is the church’s thing, the preacher’s thing, the lecturer’s thing. Heard as a joke—high and unbidden and ringing with laughter—it can only be God’s thing.”

“The language of images and metaphor... is finally the only language you can use if you want not to just elucidate the hidden thing but to make it come alive.”

“The miracle they are waiting for is that [the preacher] will not just say God is present... but that he will somehow make it real to them. They wait for him to make God real to them through the sacrament of words as God is supposed to become real in the sacrament of bread and wine...”

“The pressure on the preacher is to promote the Gospel, to sell Christ as an answer that outshines all the other answers by talking up the shining side...”

“The Gospel... is tragedy before it is comedy because it strips us bare in order ultimately to clothe us.”

“Stripping us naked is part of what preaching is all about...”

"...let [the preacher] use words, but, in addition to using them to explain, expound, exhort, let him use them to evoke, to set us dreaming as well as thinking, to use words as at their most prophetic and truthful... to stir in us memories and longings and intuitions that we starve for without knowing that we starve."

“Two minutes from now [the preacher] may have lost his listeners completely to their own thoughts, but at this minute he has them in the palm of his hand.”

“Any religious person who does not heave [words of truth] at the injustice and unrighteousness of his own time and of himself, runs the risk of being irrelevant, sentimental, a bag of wind.”