The Preacher's Toolbox: Good News for Castaways

You are a castaway on an island, but a special sort of castaway: You have lost your memory of where you come from or how you got there. All you know is the place you now call “home,” though it is pleasant enough and is populated by fellow castaways (who may or may not recognize themselves as such), is nevertheless not truly Home. You have an inchoate sense, a heart-longing, for what you might say is “a better country.”

This is the imaginative setup for Walker Percy’s classic essay “The Message in the Bottle” (collected in a book of the same name). It is a long essay that covers a lot of ground and wades into the weeds of existential philosophy and linguistic theory (which, if that is your jam, more power to you). At the heart of the essay, though, is the vital question of communication. Specifically, he explores what sort of message it is castaways need to hear, which is to say, people like us and the ones in our pews, because we are all, every one of us, stranded by the cosmic shipwreck we call “The Fall.” This is obviously where Percy is going with the metaphor. We all find ourselves for this little while marooned on planet Earth, wondering who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. We are all castaways.

So, being in such a circumstance, what do we most need to hear? Percy’s answer, in short, is news: “The hearer of news is a man who finds himself in a predicament. News is precisely that communication which has bearing on his predicament.” The most natural division of news is between good and bad news, and of course we want to deliver the former. But in order to clarify what it is that makes good news good, Percy makes another distinction, one I find especially beneficial for preachers.

Island News verses News from Across the Seas

It is natural for castaways to want to make the best of life on the island. Robinson Crusoe built his hut and bred his goats. Tom Hanks started a fire and befriended a volleyball. You do what you have to do to get by.

Part of that getting-by means keeping abreast of the goings-on of the world the castaway finds himself in: “Knowledge of the nature of the world and news of events that are relevant to his life on the island.” Stock prices and sports scores, productivity hacks and political debates, these are what Percy dubs Island News. “Such news,” he says, “is relevant to the everyday life of any islander on any island at any time.” It is often informative, entertaining, or both, and the castaway is glad to have it.

But Island News, helpful and even necessary as it may be, fails to resonate at the deepest level.

But Island News, helpful and even necessary as it may be, fails to resonate at the deepest level. Within his heart of hearts, our castaway feels a kind of spiritual loneliness or what the Germans call Sehnsucht. “He might say that he was homesick except that the island is his home, and he has spent his life making himself at home there,” Percy writes. “He knows only that his sickness cannot be cured by island knowledge or island news.”

The castaway senses he needs something more. And what he needs more, much more, than mere help with acclimating himself to life on the island is a message which transcends the island. What he truly requires is what Percy calls News from Across the Seas.

News From Across the Seas is the “glad news of deliverance” of which David spoke (Psalm 40:9). It is the declaration of salvation for the lost, the proclamation of emancipation for the enslaved. It is what causes that click of relief in the castaway’s soul. Indeed, the essence of what it means to be a castaway, Percy says, “is to search for News From Across the Seas.” Without it, we are lost for good.

Percy’s essay, though it waxes existential a little much for my tastes, is required reading for preachers. It provides a compelling apologetic for why someone should give a hearing to the claims of Christianity, and it is a salutary way to frame the task of preaching.

It is required because we are preaching to castaways. Our hearers have washed up onto this world’s shores, already beset with the sickness unto death. And though modern life on the island provides ample opportunities for distraction, we finally can never forget we are scuffling along East of Eden.

The temptation for the preacher is to major in Island News. It is the most relevant, after all. It probably attracts a bigger crowd. It does not even have to be grossly worldly; there can be a spiritual or doctrinal cast to it. But whether it be a fixation on pure doctrine or a focus on personal improvement, if it is detached from the proclamation that Jesus “gave Himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age,” such talk still amounts merely to Island News.

What your hearers need is News From Across the Seas. It is the message that says: The homesickness you feel is not for nothing, and in Christ Jesus you are coming Home. That is good news for castaways, and sure beats spending the rest of your life talking to a volleyball.

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^[1] See Hebrews 11:13-16