Shelby Price, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy

This section of the book discusses the ideas and views that differ throughout everyone. How few are able to face reality and how others hide from pain. Preachers can become more of teachers, educating us on the Bible and saying what should be said at points rather than saying what needs to be said. Our world begins to deny reality and we think that we are high and mighty. For example, when the students are reading Shakespeare they realize that they are not as important and they once believed. Then it discusses how when Jesus was shown Lazarus laying dead, he wept and let his tears speak for him.  We try to cover up problems over and over again without facing them and letting ourselves be human. We are all failures, but deny being vulnerable and able to be harmed. A quote that truly grasps this idea is, "We put frames of words around silence and shells of stone and wood around emptiness, but it is the silence the emptiness themselves, that finally matter and out of which the Gospel comes as word." Near the end it discusses how art students , such as filmmakers, preach the most truth in the essence of how we are unafraid of speaking the truth. We watched a short puppet film about tragedy and how although it is horribly sad, he did not offer solutions but he showed how we are not alone. Everyone experiences death and tragedy, but you are not perpetually the only person dealing with these problems. Sadness is reality. Sadness is being human.