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

p. 23

Buechner’s recipe for wording the Sunday sermon: 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. The prophets used them to stir in us memories and longings and intuitions that we starve for without knowing that we starve. Let the preacher use words that do not only try to give answers to the questions that we ask or ought to ask, but which help us to hear the questions that we do not have words for asking and to hear the silence that those questions rise out of and the silence that is the answer to those questions . . . .’