King Lear and preaching

I started (and darn near finished) a delightful book by - who else - Buechner called Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. My birthday present for myself last week was to purchase the rest of the books of Buechner that I hadn't found yet. It will be months before I can get to them all, but it shall make the next few months delightful.

Anyway, I found this commentary on King Lear - one of my favorite if not my favorite play by Shakespeare - to be insightful as usual.....

Insofar as the word of the play is a tragic word, it rings out in its fullness when Lear comes upon Edgar standing half-naked on the bitter heath and asks for all of us, "Is man no more than this?" and then gives the answer to his own question. "Thou art the thing itself," Lear says. "Unaccomodated man is no more than such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art." Then the old king starts to tear off the few rags he has left as if in the awful lucidity of his madness he knows that IF THERE IS EVER TO BE A TRUE HEALING AND HELPING, A TRUE SHELTERING AND CLOTHING FOR ANY OF US, IT IS WITH OUR NAKEDNESS AND HELPLESSNESS THAT IT HAS TO START. Almost the last thing he says as he is dying is "Pray, you, undo this button," of all incongruous and enchanted words, as if of all the moments of his life the one he relives there at the end is the moment when in his nakedness he was the most kingly, when in his helplessness he was his most invincible, in the madness of his despair the most lucid. Shakespeare strips his characters bare and, great preacher that he is, strips us bare along with them as the high school seniors were stripped bare in their classroom. Beneath our clothes, our reputations, our pretensions, beneath our religion or lack of it, we are vulnerable both to the storm without and to the storm within, and if ever we are to find true shelter, it is with the recognition of our tragic nakedness and need for true shelter that we have to start. Thus, it seems to me that this is also where anyone who preaches the Gospel has to start too -- after the silence that is the truth comes the news that is bad before it is good, the word that is tragedy before it is comedy because it strips us bare in order to ultimately clothe us.