buckner fanning and the men of athens

"Men of Athens . . . ."    That's the beginning of one of my favorite sermons.    It's by St Paul the Apostle, delivered at the Areopagus in Athens.    Paul was a Pharisee, and a Christian proselytizer;  by all rights you'd imagine he would be knocking down graven images and shouting about hell in this pagan city.    But nope:  he instead compliments the people of Athens, quoting their own literature and finding the spiritual aspirations in it, and remarking on how religious they are, with altars all over the place, even one inscribed "To An Unknown God" (legend:  built by Socrates!).    He says, today I have come to tell you about that Unknown God.    To this day it chills my spine and brings tears to my eyes.

Every good sermon begins with "Men of Athens . . . ."    Every good sermon speaks to the people it's speaking to, and takes them from where they are to the cross of Christ.

It's no accident that St Paul's words strike me so.    I grew up on them.    I can think of few sermonizers who embodied that ideal more completely than Buckner Fanning, whom I heard roughly every week from when I was in utero to my thirties.    I'm now nearly in my fifties, and it all seems like the other day:  the rich chocolate voice of the man who baptized me, always pouring the Gospel into new wineskins, never changing it by an i-dot, and bringing with it a joyous demeanor that I always think is the true mark of the Spirit in a person.    He had laughter in his soul that you can't fake.    And he spoke to the people of San Antonio, the people of America, the people of the 20th and 21st century —– the people who were who they were, and were where they were, and needed to hear the good news he brought.

He had the Shakespearean gift of speaking in a way that poor and rich, educated and uneducated, churched and unchurched would hear and respond to.    He quoted generously from Shakespeare, and more generously from Browning, whose prosy spiritual grandeur-in-the-everyday most resembled him, I think.    He also quoted from Kierkegaard and Pascal, Kennedy and Eisenhower, Willie Nelson and Michael Jackson, finding everywhere the human heart that yearns for God.

I just this moment learned that Buckner died.    This man, the most effective public communicator I ever saw in person, this media-friendly grandpa with evangelical fire in the belly, had no precedent and no successor.    In his decades of ministry he tried to get people to see that they too were sui generis, irreplaceable, and completely loved by an all-embracing God.

He will be missed greatly on this earth.    I can't help but think that in the hereafter he will be greeted by ancient men of Athens, and by men and women of San Antonio, and their great-great-great-great-grandchildren, whose path to the cross was paved by so many stones laid by him.