“God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world.”
Indeed, today’s readings are filled with praise and blessing, lute and harp, timbrel and dance, a God “show to anger and rich in kindness.” This spirit echoed into the early Christians calling the inner life of the Trinity perichoeresis, or “dancing around.” This dance pervades the universe, and we’re invited to be partners in it.
In Telling the Truth: the Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, Frederick Buechnerproves clearly how it’s all three genres. We’re probably more familiar with the first, so on this feast of summer and ice cream and long-lit evenings and flowering and fresh strawberries, let’s focus on the latter two.
In the world of the fairy tale, “the marvelous and impossible thing truly happens.” It doesn’t deny sorrow and failure, but in the words of J.R.R. Tolkien, “denies…universal final defeat…, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” The genre has a universal and timeless appeal, perhaps speaking to the child in us who’s still in touch with wonder, wanting the magic to be true, hoping someday to stumble into Narnia, Oz or Middle Earth.
Then in the Gospel, the most unlikely characters become the heroes and the unpromising wimps pull off the extraordinary feats. Peter, briefly, walks on water. The befuddled disciples distribute bread and fish to the crowds on the green grass, and the supply just keeps coming. Women, not even recognized in court as legal witnesses, become the first witnesses to the Resurrection. And One who’d been brutally tortured and killed returns to his friends and asks for something to eat. Buechner calls it “the comedy of God’s saving the most unlikely people when they least expect it…” “Maybe it’s too good not to be true.”
If we’ve attended church services that are solemn-bordering-on-grim, maybe it’s time to hear the Good News as “high and unbidden and ringing with laughter” or to feel the wisp of breeze as the Trinity dances around, surprising us at every turn.
Kathy Coffey 