Book: Telling the truth - the Gospel as tragedy, comedy and fairytale

Telling the Truth is for the preacher who must pull the little cord that turns on the lectern light, must look out over the people and the silence, must begin to speak of a truth beyond telling. It is for the woman who wants to understand how people believe what they cheerfully acknowledge is a tragic, comic fairy tale. It is for anyone who believes that faith, like art, can hold a special mirror to human experience.
To understand what the gospels are all about, writes Frederick Buechner, you have to understand their unblinking reflection of everyday reality. There is no place here for either saccharine, happy endings, or soft-boiled hope. Rather, the gospels record the tragedy of human failure, the comedy of being loved overwhelmingly by God despite that failure, and the fairy tale of transformation through that love. If we understand this, we begin to understand much more. We realise that Pilate is an old man who drives to work in a limousine but smokes three packs a day. We see that the parables are divine jokes about the outlandishness of God who does impossible things with impossible people. We perceive the "once upon a time" of the gospel as a continual now, renewing itself over and over and over again. With grace and beauty, Buechner introduces us to this vision that, once found, cannot be forgotten.
Buechner says it best: "Let the preacher tell the truth. Let him preach this overcoming of tragedy by comedy, of darkness by light, of the ordinary by the extraordinary, as the tale that is too good not to be true because to dismiss it as untrue is to dismiss along with it that 'catch of the breath, that beat and lifting of the heart near to or even accompanied by tears,' which I believe is the deepest intuition of truth that we have."