I searched for an image of a pulpit, and found this photo of a cliff in Norway called The Pulpit. I like it.

“It’s a writer’s job to tell the truth,” John Updike once said in an interview.

I think one might say the same thing about preaching.  I have been spending a good deal of time and energy recently learning how to preach.  My experiences in the pulpit, as well as in a homiletics class I recently completed at the Aquinas Institute, have encouraged me to see preaching as more than something I do.  Instead, I am learning to see it as part of who I am.  I suppose it’s similar to the distinction between a career and a vocation.  And in the process I’m coming to believe that the most important part of preaching is witness–that is, telling the truth as I have experienced it.

There is an interesting tension in…

It has not been a good month for erstwhile Lutherans named John. First, Richard John Neuhaus. Now, John Updike.

Updike spoke often on topics religious and his own faith, including his contribution to NPR’s “This I Believe.” And the religious impulse in his own writing has been spoken of. By many. Often.

For what it’s worth, I submit to his memory this poem, one of my favorite Easter poems.

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the…