Inside This Guys Head

In 1977 Frederick Buechner wrote his little book, Telling the Truth: the Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. There are many excerpts I could share, but what connects with me most is his description of the preaching event. It’s honest. It’s accurate. It’s as if Buechner peaked inside the window of my heart and captured in a few words the complex emotions I’ve felt for several months now.

If you are a preacher living under the expectations of people coming to the worship gathering to be fed, inspired, or encouraged, or if you find yourself feeling more like a bartender or distributer of goods and services than a pastor or truth-teller, I hope these words bring you a measure of comfort, or maybe even confidence.

Don’t forget it was written in the style, prose and language of 1977. Here’s Buechner:

“When the preacher climbs up into the pulpit. . . . He has been to a seminary and studied all that one studies in seminary. He has a degree to show for it, beyond the degree he has his ordination. . . . All of this deepens the silence with which they [the congregation] sit there waiting for him to work a miracle, and the miracle they are waiting for is that he will not just say that God is present, because they have heard it said before and it has made no great and lasting different to them, will not just speak the word of joy, hope, comedy, because they have heard it spoken before too and have spoken it among themselves, but that he will somehow make it real to them. They wait for him to make God real to them through the sacrament of bread and wine, and there is no place where the preacher is more aware of his own nakedness and helplessness than here in the pulpit as he listens to the silence of their waiting. . . . What can he say? What word can he speak with power enough to empower them, waiting there?

But let him take heart. He is called not to be an actor, a magician, in the pulpit. He is called to be himself. He is called to tell the truth as he has experienced it. He is called to be human, to be human, and that is calling enough for any man. If he does not make real to them the human experience of what it is to cry in the storm and receive no answer, to be sick at heart and find no healing, then he becomes the only one there who seems not to have had that experience because most surely under their bonnets and shawls and jackets, under their afros and ponytails, all the others there have had it whether they talk of it or not. As much as anything else, it is their experience of the absence of God that has brought them there in search of his presence, and if the preacher does not speak of that and to that, then he becomes like the captain of a ship who is the only one aboard who either does not know that the waves are twenty feet high and the decks awash or will not face up to it so that anything else he tries to say by way of hope and comfort and empowering becomes suspect on the basis of that one crucial ignorance or disingenuousness or cowardice or reluctance to speak in love any truths but the ones that people love to hear.” (pp. 39-41)

You can catch up on Part 1 here.

In his biography of Martin Niemoller, Matthew Hockenos offers substantial evidence of WWI German Emperor Wilhelm II’s relentless commitment to the German monarchy’s faith in “providential glory.” He believed they were chosen by God to be the hope of the world. He tied his understanding of the Christian faith with German patriotism, forming a nationalistic brand of Christianity that possessed a hold that was strong and misleading. Niemoller was held by it (and realized it later). Bonhoeffer was held by it (and realized it later). This belief laid the foundation in creating the antisemitism Germans formed and that in turn, formed them.

For instance, while dedicating a new Lutheran Church in Jerusalem in 1898, Emperor Wilhelm II said this in his dedication speech:

“From Jerusalem came the light in splendor from which the German nation became great and glorious; and what the Germanic peoples have become, they became under the banner of the cross, the emblem of self-sacrificing charity.” (19)

Social and political institutions, national policies, and moral values were all formed with this ideology working in the background. Some sort of ideology is always working in the background. It’s how civic life works.

The Emperor’s speech was met with thunderous applause by the 200 or so German Christians and pastors accompanying the Emperor’s voyage to the Holy Land. Of course if asked if the German Protestant pastorate was tied to party politics they would have responded with a resounding, “Nein!” (no in German).

In attendance at the speech in Jerusalem was Martin’s father. He was enamored with Wilhelm II, so much so he named a son after him. He was a pastor faithful to God and King.

Again, take that in. It’s subtle. Quiet. Formative. Seems innocent. Seems Christian. But in the end, it’s destructive.

Martin’s father raised him to embrace the same nationalistic brand of Christianity. No wonder Martin supported Hitler’s rise in power and antisemitic policies. Until he didn’t.