Excerpts from Buechner's collection of sermons throughout the years:
*on Bible: it is possible to say that in spite of all its extraordinary variety, the Bible is held together by having a single plot. It is one that can be simply stated: God created the world, the world gets lost; God seeks to restore the world to the glory for which He created it. That means that the Bible is a book about you and me, whom He also made and lost and continually seeks, so you might say that what holds it together more than anything else is us. You might add to that, of course, that of all the books that humanity has produced, it is the one that more than any other - an din more senses than one - also holds us together.
*Loving God means rejoicing in him. It means trusting him when you can think of hundred reasons not to trust anything. It means praying to him even when you don't feel like it. It means watching for him in the beauty and sadness and gladness and mystery of your own life and of life around you. Loving each other doesn't mean loving each other in some sentimental, unrealistic, greeting card kind of way but the way families love each other even though they may fight tooth and nail and get fed up to the teeth with each other and drive each other crazy, yet all the time know deep down in their hearts that they belong to each other and need each other and can't imagine what life would be without each other - even the ones they often wish had never been born.
*The words that God speaks to us in our own lives are the real miracles. They are not miracles that creat faith as we might think that a message written in the stars would create faith, but they are miracles that it takes faith to see - faith in the sense of openness, faith in the sense of willingness to wait, to watch, to listen, for the incredible presence of God here in the world among us.
*Power, success, happiness, as the world knows them, are his who will fight for them hard enough; but peace, love, joy are only from God. And God is the enemy whom Jacob fought there by the river, of course, and whom in one way or another, we all of us fight - God, the beloved enemy. Our enemy because, before giving us everything, he demands of us everything; before giving us life, he demands our lives - ourselves, our wills, our treasure.
*The world is full of people who seem to have listened to the wrong voice and are now engaged in a life's work in which they find no pleasure or purpose and who run the risk of suddenly realising someday that they have spent the only years that they are ever going to get in this world doing something that could not matter less to themselves or to anyone else. This does not mean, of course, people who are doing work that from outside look unglamorous and humdrum, because obviously such work as that may be crucial form of service and deeply creative. But it means people who are doing work that seems simply irrelevant not only to the great human needs and issues of our time but also to their own need to grow and develop as humans.
*a Prayer:
How can we pray to thee, thou Holy and hidden God, whose ways are not our ways, who reignest in awful mystery beyond the realm of space and time? Yet how can we not pray to thee, Heavenly Father, who knowest what it is to be a man because thou hast walked among us as a man, breaking with us the bread of our affliction and drinking deep of the cup of our despair? How can we not to pray to thee when it is thy very spirit alive within us that moves our lips in prayer?
Hear, O God, the prayers of all they children everywhere: for forgiveness & healing, for courage, for faith; prayers for the needs of others; prayer for the peace among the desperate nations. Whether thou givest or withholdest what we ask, whether thou answerest us in words that burn like fire or in silence that burns like fire, increase in us the knowledge that thou art always more near to us than breathing, that thy will for us is love.
And deep beneath all our asking, so deep beneath that we are all deaf to it ourselves, hear, O God, the secret song of every human heart praising thee for being what thou art, rejoicing with the morning stars that thou art our God and we thy children. Make strong and wild this secret song within until it burst forth at last to they glory and our saving. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.
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