Publication details: Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1969

The Hungering Dark was the first of Buechner’s books that I read. Some years back, I picked up a rather yellowed copy of it at a secondhand bookshop for a mere pittance. But the find was phenomenal. Much like Jesus’ pearl buyer, I thought I had found the pearl tucked away in a little corner, and happily discarded the rest of the dusty paperbacks in hand for just this one. I was not wrong; it was a sustaining read. Since then, I have bought and read many more of Buechner’s books, but that early delight remains. The Hungering Dark is still my favourite Buechner book.

It is a collection of thirteen essays, clustered easily into two parts evocatively titled, “The Search”, and “The Sought”. Powerful reflections of biblical themes (each essay is introduced by a fitting passage from Scripture), these essays present Buechner’s preoccupation with the dimness and darkness of, paradoxically, an ever-present grace. Grace is a presence, dark and hidden, but so much there, if one has eyes to look beyond the doubt (“The Face in the Sky”, “Come and See”, “The Hungering Dark”). The Hungering Dark provokes questions about the mystery that is God, and stirs our spiritual and inner hunger for the haunting reality of God in the world … even while we doubt. God, after all, is like a gleam of light, a glancing shadow in our troubled minds that never really goes away. And do we want him to?

Buechner’s contemplations are dark, uneasy things, pointing out the face of the divine that shows up in the most unexpected of ways. “The Face in the Sky” powerfully introduces this: the face of Christ hovers over us in the sky as does the statue of Christ flying across Rome to its home in the Vatican in the Italian film, La Dolce Vita. Buechner describes the cinema audience becoming hushed and still as the face of the statue of Christ dominates the screen in a close-up: “Nobody laughed because there was something about that face … that is much of what the Christian faith is. It is, for a moment, just for a little while, seeing the face and being still; that is all.”

In Buechner’s world, faces trouble and excite and hush and humble. God’s face in Christ forever stills humanity and fills the dark sky with the great hope that “just possibly, possibly, [this is] the hope of the world.” For the truth is that gospel light shatters the darkness like glass (“Come and See”) with the coming of the Christ child, and “dazzle[s] the world with its glory and its terror.” The intrusion of God on screen (“The Face in the Sky”), and in history in the Virgin birth, signifies for us that life can never be lived the same way again. God’s wild pursuit of man means his willingness to go to any lengths and any self-humiliation to arrest us in our darkness and confront us with his reality (“Come and See”).

Buechner’s view of God is apocalyptic. When God sticks his face in the sky to look at us, our faces fill with confusion at the sight of his (“Confusion of Face”).  He does not apologize for the intrusion but insists on it, and comes face with face with our wickedness, our evil, our futility, our many-faced selves. He does not wince at our lack of integrity, but we do, at his lack of delicacy. We are embarrassed by his insensitive and bold passion, his lack of discretion and decorum; he chooses flying statues and “Jesus saves” signboards clumsily painted on the sides of a cliff or abutment of a bridge to declare his love. He prefers to use a dying man on a cross to impress on us his willingness to sacrifice (“The Sign by the Highway”). He comes to us in preposterous ways, Buechner tells us. Must he hang on the cross and make those claims of Paradise, first to the thief, and then to us? If you believe … Preposterous claim; preposterous love.

Buechner’s mad(-dened) lover-God will not leave us to ourselves. He will not allow us our reasonableness, our realism, our small sanities that say “no man in his right mind would do such a thing because no man in his right mind would ever willingly give his life away” (“The Rider”). But life is not ordered on principles of hoard and save. The truth of human life is simply that it is meant to be radically given away. That is how life is (“The Two Loves”). God recognizes in our “confusion of face” the deep darkness that “hungers still for the great light that has gone out” of the world, and “the crazy dream of holiness coming down out of heaven like a bride adorned for us…” (“The Hungering Dark”). God sees in us this great hope and unquenchably deep wish for holiness—and that brings his bold, self-giving, unembarrassed redemption near. If we were any kind of lover at all, we would give in to this divine madness. Buechner, at least, commends “this madness and this fantastic hope that the future belongs to God no less than the past, that in some way we cannot imagine holiness will return to our world …. Maybe the very madness of our hoping will give him the crazy, golden wings he needs to … come again …” (“The Hungering Dark”).

When God the divine lover calls us in such ways, controversial, messy and loud, we do one of two things. In “A Sprig of Hope,” which I really like, old, slew-footed Noah who got called by a voice to build an ark, has to decide: Yes, it is God’s voice; or, No, it is not. Noah listened to the voice, and discovered it was also the “voice of [his] own gladness” (“The Calling of Voices”), confirming the “Go!” and “Build!” that led, through so much churning chaos and water, finally to the sprig of hope the dove brought back to the ark, post-flood. Were it not for good old Noah, were it not for “Yes” to the insanity of maddened, preposterous love on the cross, where would we be?

Buechner’s eye catches the sight of God in unexpected ways, and makes us see that even in the most incongruous moments, God is meeting with us. God’s manifestations of grace are uncomfortable. He is the God who sticks his face into the sky in the form of clouds and statues; he calls us in the niggling doubt of our own voices and bursting water pipes; he sings to us in the lullabies of death and dark and glory and light … It is he who comes dancing into the night sky with both the harp and the cross. Frightening to the human eye, his angel-herald shouts out a gleeful hurrah: “… for to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord!” In the eddying darkness, the incongruity, the doubting despair, the uncertainties that limit us, he strains and stoops from heaven to nudge us into hope. Make no mistake, he croons, you are the sought.

Author: Eugene Peterson

Publication details: Eerdmans 1993

The Contemplative Pastor is the first in Peterson’s pastoral series. The others include Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work, Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity, and Under the Unpredictable Plant: An Exploration in Vocational Holiness. Known to many as a “pastor’s pastor,” Peterson offers wise and refreshing counsel to anyone in ministry caught up in the throes of busyness. He returns the reader’s attention to the basics of spirituality, and exposes the routine and relentless activity of “running the church” as part of the root cause of spiritual shallowness and dryness in the vocation. Granted, Peterson speaks first of all to an American audience; nevertheless, the demands of ministry in the Christian vocation anywhere today can testify to a life of unbroken busyness filled with the urgent demands of a thousand little details. Peterson’s alternative is thus refreshing because it gently insists that history and tradition tell us there are other less frenetic ways to be and to do. In place of the “tone and context” of parody and opportunism in which the word “pastor” is uttered, Peterson points to another direction by which that abused noun can be rehabilitated. Redefining the word by resisting the culture’s definition of it, and reformulating life by injecting into it adjectives suggested by Scripture instead, are careful steps one takes towards liberation and renewal of the soul. He offers three adjectival clarifications of the noun, “pastor”, for our consideration: unbusy, subversive, apocalyptic.
 

The essentials of the ministry entail these three invigorating adjectives because they return the minister to a vivid recollection of the real thing: to pastor souls does mean involved ministry and spiritual direction. But to pastor souls well means first of all nurturing the essentials of spirituality for oneself, marking out calendar time for “prayer, for reading, for leisure, for the silence and solitude out of which creative work—prayer, preaching, and listening—can issue.” To re-turn wandering sheep to God’s fold by a tap of the shepherd’s rod requires the subversive pastor to first understand how deeply the creative word of God goes against the grain of normative society. To proclaim the iconoclastic word of God in huge apocalyptic terms of repentance and remorse requires the apocalyptic pastor to grapple first with how blindingly bright God’s terrible word is to a society that does not understand sight. One can only be subversively creative and apocalyptically convincing in soulwork if one is also firstly unbusy enough to see the textured shadows of spirituality and liveliness lying hidden beyond the obvious outlines of a ministry appointment book. Living and ministering according to rhythms other than the incessant call of the urgent (and successful) means having eyes to see the gospel story for the power that it is. It means coming again to light on the most necessary thing in pastoring work, over all else: curing souls out of a centre that is vital and concentrated, unhindered and undistracted by the urgencies of a million unnecessary details. Curing souls is, indeed, an art that needs to be revived. The vocational reformation necessary in every pastor needs to take place at this point of the recovery of the primacy of the pastoral work of curing and caring for souls.
 

Attending to God’s initiatory acts in the subterranean lives of individuals takes time. It means having the kind of eyes and focus that can flush out the thin traces of grace at work amid the large tracts of lived experience (often sinful and fallen). Attending to divine action demands attentiveness. It means sharpened ears and senses tuned to the tiny foetal movements of love and hope that everybody else may miss. The cure of souls thus takes time and attentiveness within the context of conversation and prayer—what is offered to the soul-with-care is not diagnosis and prescription, but rather spontaneous words that the pastoral heart speaks. It is using a language that respects the mystery and sanctity of the individual soul.  It means recognizing that we are stepping into complex situations where God has already been, and where the best work done is to simply look for marks of his presence and “discover what he is doing…” Peterson describes such language that brings cure-of-soul: “It is a language that is unhurried, unforced, unexcited—the leisurely language of friends and lovers, which is also the language of prayer.” Within the leisureliness of such a language framing friendship, openness and trust, there is only a mutual sharing and respect.  The pastor is not engaged in solving problems, but in listening to the history of love between the careworn individual and God. He is not the answer to bruised egos and clashing temperaments, but the silent sharer of an unfolding work of God’s masterly hand.

Using the spontaneous and relational converting language of prayer to articulate the pastor’s primary preaching task is to rewrite the script and reframe it into conversations with God. Spirituality and creativity thus go hand in hand. Peterson cites St. Anselm, who attempted his Monologion, setting forth proofs of God’s existence. Anselm in the process realized his mistake, and rewrote his great work in a Proslogion, which was an entire work of theology reframed into a personal address and prayer to God. Anselm figured out finally that God needed not to be proven, but to be praised. Peterson reminds ministers and pastors of the same crucial transition that needs to be made in their preaching and teaching, which is to cross over from a use of language that is either merely informational or even motivational to one that is deeply personal, the speech of “love and response and intimacy” that finds its greatest expression in Jesus’ own two words: “Abba, Father.”

As in their language, so too the rest of their lives. To be a physician of the soul, a curé, the pastor must engage in the ministry of small talk, and enter into the ordinary and personal worlds of the soul-weary sinner. Paying attention to the other is the movement one takes from the large, impersonal world of “big issues” to the small, personal one where “I” breathe, and live, and have [my] being. Understanding the other in such ordinary participations as talking, and eating, and laughing, and loving, is crucial to the pastoral art of small talk. Empathy is the necessary virtue in the pastor’s life. The pastor with integrity, the pastor whose creative work issues out of a contained solitude, the pastor who is subversive and apocalyptic in his life-changing, consciousness-altering ways, is the curé who has truly grasped what it means to walk lightly and carefully around the holy parameters of an other’s inner sanctum. Doing real pastoral work is the very opposite of self-expression to Peterson: “The worker in the work is a self-effacing servant.”

Coming to such realizations overturns our contemporary views of what is “expected” of a successful pastor and minister, and redirects us to Peterson’s adjectival redefinitions–unbusy, subversive and apocalyptic. Recovering the vividness and vitality of the noun, “pastor”, demands these deep movements and shifts from the conception of a job dominated by the call of the urgent and successful to an appreciation of a life worked into the rhythms of solitude and action, of silence and speech, of dormancy and creativity. No easy task to be God’s curé, the physician of souls. But how can such a calling be denied?
         

Author: Steven J. Lawson

Publication details: Moody Publishers, Chicago, 2003

“We cannot play at preaching.
We preach for eternity.”
C.H. Spurgeon
 

Famine in the Land strikes a strong note. It is not an unfamiliar one, and has been heard enough times in its passionate (re-)call to the people of God back to the fundamental things that matter. But it is a needed cry in that its repeated declamations often go unheard in our ears. For all the noise that noisome prophets make, we seem unusually, in this age of super-technology, incapable of processing anything that seems remotely unfriendly to our convenient lives and therapeutic spirituality. Famine in the Land is not a feel-good book. It will not make you over. It really is too old-fashioned for that. What it does is to offer a strong voice for what Steven Lawson and others like him consider a neglected work: biblical preaching. Like hammer on anvil, the book hits out on a single note, reminding pastors and preachers alike of the one holy thing God has called them to do above all else: in season and out of season, preach the Word!
 

Steven Lawson takes a hard stand; it is probably not one everyone would agree with, but it is a stand worth thinking hard about. In a day when the evangelical movement seems to be making inroads into broader society and culture (theatre, literature, music, recording and broadcasting, business etc), it appears as if contemporary Christianity is riding on the crest of a very good wave indeed. And yet … And yet it is apparent too that at the same time, there is an uncomfortable realization that evangelical Christianity resembles so much of the culture around that the vigour and depth of an earlier faith is missing. Lawson puts it down to a spiritual famine in the land, occasioned by a terrible neglect of “true preaching, biblical preaching, expository preaching” of God’s Word from the sacred pulpit. Amos 8: 11 is the verse he draws upon, and suggests that it is this spiritual famine of an understanding of God, and a knowledge of the glory of the Lord that has left the contemporary evangelical movement weak and shallow.

In an age where bigger is deemed better, and the Christian message is designed in such a way as to be friendly and relevant to the world, Lawson’s call to return to a proper diet of biblical exposition as the main course of the church’s meal seems outdated—but refreshingly so. It is almost a relief to be reminded that the apostles focused on preaching and teaching, fellowship, worship, prayer, service, and evangelism. It is almost a relief to be further told that these essential components of dynamic spiritual life can take place without media gimmicks, musicals, pageants, skits and sketches, Christmas extravaganzas and other novelties “enhancing” the message of the gospel for the consumption of a world waiting to be entertained. As Lawson informs us, the simple bare facts of the bible message, preached with passion and conviction, stirred and moved in the power of the Spirit of truth, are all that is necessary to bring about repentance, growth and renewal: “Biblical preaching must always occupy the leading place of influence in the life of any church. At the core of any healthy congregation is a vibrant exposition of God’s Word.”

The alternative is pabulum in the pulpit. Congregations focused on anything less than a steady diet of biblical exposition open themselves to spiritual malnutrition that leaves individuals stunted and incapable of appreciating the whole counsel of God. Spiritual motivational pep talks and other junk food take the place of compelling, soul-searching sermons; and congregations starve as they are lulled into a languorous stupor.

If preachers would “focus on filling the pulpit” with the beef and steak of Scripture instead of worrying about filling the building, they would rediscover the spiritual potency of the inspired Word, breathed out by God for the admonishment, encouragement, growth and strengthening of the believers. What would be the consequences of returning bible exposition to the core of Christian gatherings? Lawson contends that the primitive church grew in the truth and in numbers as they devoted themselves to the teachings of the apostles. A Word-fed church is a fellowshipping church, is a worshipping church, is a praying church, is a serving church, is a joyful church, is a witnessing church. That being so, the priority of the pastor-preacher must return to the primacy of the Word and away from marketing, canvassing, fundraising and even administration. Great spiritual change cannot be effected in any other way than through the passionate proclamation of the Word that gives rise to faith in those who hear. Repentant streams and revival fires cannot begin without the heart desiring first of all to be filled with the prophetic proclamation of the will of God.

The preoccupation of biblical preaching is never without its application. For the first church believers, theory without practice would have been quite unthinkable. Exposition and exhortation were always for the purpose of application and practice. Lawson points out that the preacher must firstly frequently and scrupulously examine his personal life as well as his teaching. Paul, for instance, tells Timothy: “Pay close attention to yourself and your teaching; persevere in these things; for as you do this you will insure salvation both for yourself and for those who hear you” (1 Timothy 4: 16).  Timothy’s faithfulness to his teaching would produce the same commitment in his hearers, as Paul well knew. Puritan Thomas Manton put it thus: “The hearer’s life is the preacher’s best commendation.”

Lawson draws upon many such witnesses from the annals of Christian history to speak his case. Scripture itself is replete with such fiery pulpit men as Ezra and Jonah, Amos and Paul. More recent church history further fills its pages of character and experience with the Spurgeons, Wesleys, Mantons, Lloyd Joneses and so on, that marked periods of revival and growth in the church. The point is clear: without faithful exposition and teaching and preaching, there can be no truly healthy, vibrant, growing church. For all our desire to be relevant to the world at difficult and challenging times, what we really need to recover is the simplicity and power of the proclamation of God’s Word. When all else is swept away by time’s awful tide, this skein of worthy gold will remain as the enduring work we offer God.