From “Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons” by Frederick Buechner
The earliest sermon in this collection is “The Magnificent Defeat,” which I preached at Phillips Exeter Academy around 1959 or so when, fresh out of seminary, I was starting in as the new school minister. Exeter was for only boys in those days – hence the heavy use of masculine pronouns and references – and most of the ones who came to hear me did so only because it was a school requirement. Left to themselves, they would have stayed in bed. In keeping with the spirit of their time and generation, the majority of them were against almost everything – the Vietnam war, the government, anybody over thirty including their parents, the school, and especially religion because all the people they were against were always telling them it was good for them. They were there against their principles and under protest.
They dismissed all sermons as hogwash even before the preacher started preaching them, they slouched in their pews and stared up at the ceiling, yet every once in a while you could tell they were listening in spite of themselves. And that is what I can still remember their doing as I tried to describe the great scene of Jacob at the river Jabbok in Genesis. I don’t think it was so much my words that held them as it was just the haunting power of the biblical narrative itself – the stranger leaping out of the darkness, the struggle by the river bank, the strangled cry for blessing – and in some deep way I was apparently haunted myself because it turned out to be the germ of a novel about Jacob, The Son of Laughter, which I wrote some thirty years later.
There are a number of other sermons from those early Exeter days here including three Christmas monologues entitled “The Birth.” A church in Beverly Hills, California, presented a dramatic reading of them in 1965 with Raymond Massey doing the Wise Man, Edward G. Robinson the Shepherd, and (best of all) the English actor Frederic Worlock the Innkeeper, and if ever I have occasion to read back over them, it is those three remarkable voices that I hear in my mind.
I had a strong suspicion that once they left Exeter, most of my captive listeners would never be caught dead in church again, and that gave me a strong sense of urgency about what I was doing. It might be the last time anybody would try to persuade them that religious faith was not as boring, banal, irrelevant, and outmoded as they thought it was, so if I didn’t do it right, that would be the end of it. I tried every way I could think of to catch their attention and make them listen. I avoided traditional religious language and imagery as much as possible as well as the kind of fuzziness, bombast, and sentimentality that preachers are apt to resort to when all else fails. In sermons like “A Sprig of Hope,” “Message in the Stars,” “The Sign by the Highway,” and “The Face in the Sky” I tried to be as dramatic and vivid as I could without going over board, to tell a story or set a scene that I hoped would capture their imaginations. I tried not to let them ever see where I was going next, to keep them on their toes, to keep them wondering what on earth I was getting at until suddenly and unexpectedly, if I was lucky, we all of us got there together. I tried to be suggestive, elusive, and unpredictable rather than systematic, dogmatic, and pontifical. I never took it for granted that they believed any of even the most basic affirmations of the Christian faith concerning such matters as God and Jesus, sin and salvation, but always tried to speak to their skepticism and to honor their doubts. I made a point of never urging on them anything I did not believe myself. I was candid about what, like them, I was puzzled by and uncertain of. I tried to be myself. I tried to be honest.