Preaching Today: You were a writer before you became a preacher. Can you tell us about your transition from putting words on paper to proclaiming God's Word from pulpits?

Frederick Buechner: Yes, I got out of seminary assuming I was going to go to a parish, because I figured that's what ministers did. I grew up outside of the church, and in my innocence I thought that when you went to seminary, you became a minister and got a church. That's what ministers did. But by a kind of a fluke, I ended up starting a Religion Department at Philip Exeter Academy in 1958. I was there until 1967, so I was there during that turbulent period of the '60s. It was a real baptism by fire, because I was preaching to an audience composed of adolescent boys who, like so many of their contemporaries of that period, were anti-everything: anti-school, anti-country, anti-church, anti-religion, anti-parents. And they were required to go to church. I would get up as this green, young preacher Sunday after Sunday and deal with them. It was a wonderful beginning to a preaching ministry, because from the start I could not get away with easy answers or platitudes. I couldn't get away with simply repeating with conviction the old principles of the faith, because they wouldn't understand them and would reject them out of hand. It kept me on my toes. That beginning has kept me in good stead ever since.

You wrote in one of your books that if a person is going to be any kind of a preacher, he or she is going to have to avoid canned, religious, seminary, algebraic language. Can you illuminate that to us?

Buechner: It seems to me that one of the weakest parts of evangelicalism is its preaching. It seems algebraic in the sense that, in algebra, x + y = z tells me nothing. If you give me the value of one of those letters, it tells me something. If you give me the value of two of them, then the thing cracks open. It seems that very often the language of preaching tends to be that way. Look at the maxim "Accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior, and you will be saved from your sins." What does that mean? Personal Savior? Save me from what? Save me how? Save me why? "You will be saved"—what does that mean? What does "sin" mean? The words, without an attempt to spell out what they mean in human, flesh-and-blood terms, are meaningless, as far as I'm concerned. People can buy that message and say, "Yes, I do believe in Jesus Christ, my personal Lord and Savior," but unless they have some idea of what that really involves, what have they bought? It's like buying e = mc2.  It's true, but so what?

Another weakness I see in preaching is what I call "tourist preaching." When an American travels overseas, he always has the feeling that if he simply speaks English loudly enough, forcefully enough, and slowly enough, he will be understood. I think that's often true of the preacher. If he simply brings forth the old formulas of the Christian faith and says them loudly and forcefully and strongly enough, everybody is going to understand them. But that's not true. In either case, the only language that you understand ultimately is your own language. Therefore, it's crucial for the preacher to speak not the language of Zion, but the language his or her audience is familiar with—the language spoken at home and in the office.

How much do you have to use familiar language to keep people from being turned off by the unfamiliar? People are often weary of the unusual. They're comforted by the familiar.

Buechner: My goal is not to comfort people with the familiar. I'd much rather upset them and make them think, What's that poor fool saying? I want people to give thought to what they hear; I don't want simply to rehearse the same old formulas.

After you upset your audience, where do you go from there?

Buechner: I'm not really too upsetting. I'm not upsetting in the way a prophetic preacher is upsetting; I'm not shaking the boat all the time. I'm more interested in making people ask, What do you suppose he's saying? I haven't heard that before. I try to preach very much out of my own experience, which I feel I have in common with everybody. My experience is your experience. I know what it's like to be sad and depressed and happy and have children and have my failures and some successes, and I somehow try to relate the faith to that. Rather than using theological formulas, I attempt to say where I've found God in all of those situations. People tend to be fascinated by that.

I think if anybody speaks candidly out of his or her own experience of God, of Christ, everybody is interested. No matter if you do it eloquently or without eloquence. If you do it honestly, and if you do it concretely, I don't think it's upsetting; I think people listen.

I want to say one thing to amplify what I've said. So far what I've said about preaching suggests something so personal, so much out of your own experience, so emotional, that it doesn't seem to have much to do with the facts, the realities of Scripture. There's a specific story we're committed to. There's a text we're working out from. Dig at that text. What is the truth of it? What does it say? What does it say in Greek? What does it say in English? Look at several translations. That's where you begin. Otherwise, who knows what hobby horse of your own you might be riding?

Your writing shows a passion for words—the right words, colorful words. How does that bid for language translate into your preaching style?

Buechner: I try to find new ways of saying old things. Instead of saying, "Accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior," I try to find some other way of saying it. Part of it is language choice to be sure—just trying to find new words to use.  Tillich, my own teacher, was so marvelous at that. He took the old word sin and said, "What does that really mean?" So from sin he got separation, which immediately offers a whole new angle on the concept. Sin is sort of a formal word—a word we take our hats off to. Separation is more down to earth. So, in part, it's a matter of simply finding new ways of speaking about these truths. Sin is only a word, and there are other words that are just as good. In addition to finding different words to use is simply finding a new language of concrete experience.

When I was at Wheaton College, I remember hearing a very conservative minister saying, "Do you believe in the blood atonement?" The idea was that if you didn't believe in it, you were out; if you did believe it, you were in. I thought, Now, what on earth? and I said, "I can't really tell you what I believe about that. Tell me what it means. What do you mean?" And he never did satisfactorily tell me. I don't to this day know exactly what that means. So when I'm using language, I try to find words that are vivid and fresh—my own words. Preaching should always be writing, in a way, a script for yourself. You know your own voice; you know what you can do; you know how you can say things powerfully. Beyond that, find a new language, by which I mean simply the language of experience rather than simply a theological utterance.

In Telling the Truth, you explain Jesus' style this way: "He suggests rather than spells out. He evokes rather than explains. He catches by surprise. He doesn't let the homiletic scene show. He's sometimes cryptic, sometimes obscure, sometimes irreverent, always provocative." How do you do that in your own preaching?

Buechner: First, I had to decide that's what I wanted to do. I decided that I wasn't going to comfort my audience with the familiar. I wanted to try to give it to them in some new way. How to go about doing it is a matter of imagination—of trying to imagine yourself in the Scripture. That's a great deal of it: reading Scripture imaginatively. What was it like to be Pilate and have this wreck of a human being beaten up and standing in front of you, and when you ask him, "What is truth?" he doesn't say anything at all. He's just stands there. What was that like? Put yourself in that position.

Once you put yourself in that position, you begin to feel what it must have been like. So talk out of that—out of almost your own experience of it. Jesus said, "Come unto me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Supposing that he was saying that to me—that he came into this room and said it—how would I respond? If you're asking yourself these kinds of questions and projecting yourself into these situations, then the job is already underway. You're describing something that has, in a sense, happened to you, I think. And since you're a twentieth century human being, you can put it in twentieth century terms.

How do you keep the beauty of well spoken words from actually getting in the way of what you want to say—of drawing attention to themselves?

Buechner: That's a great danger. One of the things I'm apt to hear at the end of a service is something like the usual clabber that ministers hear and say, "Oh, that's so poetic!" And I think, Oh, my goodness. Is that what it was? Poetic utterance of a lovely language? People remember how we preached a lovely sermon and have no idea what it was all about. That's the danger. I think if you become too involved in style, too involved in words, that's what's going to come through—your cleverness with style or words. So that's the danger on one hand.

The danger on the other hand is boring everybody to death or handing them the same kind of stuff they've heard for a million years. They know it's comforting and they know it's reassuring and they know it's true in some sense, but it doesn't leave them with much that they didn't have before. So the value is not in being poetic or flowery, but in just being honest with your language. Try to describe a concept in ways that are peculiar to you. I've sometimes said to people who want to be writers, "Look at these two sentences: A little, black dog came into the room; and, A black, little dog came into the room." All I've done is reverse the usual sequence of adjectives. The little, black dog you see nothing of. The black, little dog, on the other hand, makes you see a black, little dog. In other words, simply take the language and make it yours by one device or the other, by reversing the usual sequence, by catching people by surprise with the unexpected word. One of C. S. Lewis' greatest contributions was to speak of the Christ figure as a lion, Aslan, in the Narnia books, and he often described Aslan as not a "tame lion." That's just what I mean. Lewis chose an unexpected but absolutely dead-on description. Had he made Jesus a lamb, which is the biblical way of doing it, he would have communicated so much less, because we already know that dimension of Jesus. Yes, Jesus was like a lamb, a sacrificial lamb. But to say that he's a like a lion, and not even a tame lion, that's to say something in a new way. It's not flowery, not poetic, but it's real and unforgettable and Lewis.

When you preach, to whom do you direct your sermons? To the child? The older person? The intellectual?

Buechner: I'm an apologist, I think. If I had to define myself religiously speaking, that's been my job. I'm an apologist when trying to defend the Christian faith to people who wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole. And I remain an apologist even when I'm preaching to congregations who, one would think, were not in need of apologetics. They've already bought the product. But I have a feeling that inside all of us—even the most churched and the most committed—if we're honest in our secret hearts, we still have this question: Is it really all true? I try never to take anything for granted. I always assume that question is being asked. I'm really addressing myself to the Exeter student who is part of everybody—the kind of residual skepticism and questioning that indicates a healthy mind. If that kind of questioning isn't there, then something is asleep; something's not working. I think a great many people who write the whole business of religion off say that they wish they could believe. We're dealing with simply the ambivalence of the human heart. We're always this and that; we're never just this or just that.

Going back to what we talked about earlier, never let your congregation anticipate where you're going to move next. There are so many sermons preached where you know after the first word how it's going to unfold or the three points the preacher's going to make. You know where the sermon will end up. That's what Jesus didn't do.  He had wonderful parables, but nobody in the world could guess that the image he was going to use for God would be the unjust judge or the fellow who wanted to sleep and not let his friend inside, or that the prodigal son would come back and the father wouldn't ask him to do anything to make up for it. Wonderful use of the unexpected.

Where does the sermon begin for you?

Buechner: I'm not sure it's always the same for me. There are times when the text just grabs me. I remember preaching on Palm Sunday—even though I wouldn't have had to—because the text about Jesus approaching Jerusalem, seeing it, and weeping just grabbed me by the throat. "Oh Jerusalem, would that you knew the things that make for peace. It won't be long before you lie in ruins." I thought of how one sees the city as one comes into it having the same thought, Would that you knew the things that make for peace. Which is to say, What's going to remain here in 50 years? In other words, the text preached itself to me in a way that I had to preach it.

Robert Frost, when asked how he wrote a poem, said, "Poems for me begin with a lump in the throat." I think that for me sermons very often begin with a lump in the throat, where I am deeply moved by some experience of the holy, some experience of God, and then really cast about to find that part of Scripture which seems to be talking about the same thing.

I'd like to add one other thing. While outlines and structure for sermons are important, as we're all taught in seminary, as I grow old in preaching, I think of sermons much less as essays and much more as works of art or poetry. I don't think in terms of three points, but I have a feeling about what it is I want to convey—some part of the reality of Christ, of the reality of God. And I'm not altogether sure where I'm going to go with it. I just allow myself to start off with a kind of abandon and see what happens. I'm not sure that's to be recommended, but it's an interesting approach to it, one where you're not having to push a truck up a hill. You're not having to build a wall or a structure. You're simply trying to convey to human beings who speak your language—both in the sense of linguistics and experience—something terribly important that you've discovered. And you do it the way you speak to a friend or write a letter rather than as you would write a dissertation.

I try to think of sermon writing less as a labor than as a delight. It can and should be a joy. If it's going to come through right, it's something that you have enjoyed writing—something that has satisfied your stomach as well as your mind as you wrote it. It sounded right; it felt right; it felt like something that you could really sign your name to. And it made you better when you finished writing it. The process of writing a sermon is an adventure. You yourself aren't sure where you'll be led.

How do you remain creative? How do you keep the creative juices flowing?

Buechner: Exercising creativity is my way of not going insane. We all have to keep ourselves alive and well, in touch with reality. I'm creative because I choose to be and because I work at being. I spend hours a day simply trying to create and using my imagination. Imagination seems to me a key word; everybody has this power to create things almost out of nothing. You and I can sit here until we can imagine the taste of a chocolate malt; or we could image the smell of the sea at low tide. In time we could do it. A lot of what creativity consists of is simply using that muscle that everybody has and trying to imagine yourself in the Scriptures, trying to image what it must be like to be the people you're speaking to as you look out to the congregation—the old people, the young people, the sad people, the happy people. Who are those people? Imagine yourself inside them, which isn't so hard to do, because inside of them they're probably very much as you are.

It's not an unnatural state for people to be in—the creative state. I think it's almost more unnatural not to be imaginative. We're all born with this faculty. We are born with eyes that can see more than just what's in front of us. We have eyes that can see inside of what's in front of us. But we get so unused to using them that way. Life is so full of things to get done, and we cruise along on automatic pilot and don't pay much attention. I don't think that's the way we were made to be. The natural state is to notice what's going on.

It seems like we sometimes lose that strength of imagination as we grow up. We figure it's for children. How do we nurture that in ourselves?

Buechner: People say, "What should I notice? What am I looking for?" If God speaks anywhere—which I believe he does all the time, through what happens to us and around us—one very practical answer to that question is to look for moments when tears come to your eyes. That's a key, always. Tears indicate that something is being said to you of significance. And the interesting thing is, if you're like me, very often tears come to your eyes not at moments you would expect (though they may come then, too), but at moments you don't expect. You go to a basketball game in a high school gymnasium, and they play the school's song, and the cheerleaders come out, and the team comes running out on the court. And all of the sudden there are tears in your eyes. Why? Because something deep inside is saying something about all sorts of holy things. So there's a clue. Watch yourself the next time tears come to your eyes.

What is it that you want to accomplish through a sermon?

Buechner: Saving souls. Including my own.