tragedy, comedy and fairytale

I'm reading ‘ telling the truth - the gospel as tragedy, comedy and fairytale’

It's an interesting book. Let me throw two quotes at you:

“One wonders if there is anyting more crucial for the preacher to do than to obey the sadness of our time... by speaking out of our times and into our times not just what we ought to say about the gospel, not just what would appear to be in the interests of the gospel for us to say, but what we have ourselves felt about it.”

“So let us use words, but in addition to using them to explain, expound, exhort, let us use them to evoke, to set us to dreaming as well as to thinking, to use words at their most prophetic and truthful. The prophets used them to stir in us memories and longings and intuitions that we starve for without knowing that we starve. Let us use words which do not only try to give answers to the questions that we ask or ought to ask, but which help us to hear the questions that we do not have words for asking...”

In between those two quotes the author, Frederick Buechner, describes Pontius Pilate’s commute, the pictures on his desk, and how he’s been trying to give up smoking. He contemplates the difference between truths and the truth, and notes that the silence before a preacher speaks is often the most profound part of a sermon.
I haven’t got very far yet, so I’ll have to come back to you on this one, but the point so far is this: that the truth of God, life, the gospel and the way things are is a truth that is too big to be contained in particular truths, in statements and propositions, in the aforementioned explaining, exhorting and expounding.
And when you look at the Bible, this is what you find. Sure, the epistles are full of exhortations and explanations, but because we focus on them so much we forget that most of the Bible isn’t written in that style. It’s in poetry, in prophesy, in story and drama, from the woes of Jeremiah to the dances of David, the warnings of Amos or the great hopes of Isaiah.
When Jesus was asked difficult questions, he asked questions back, changed the subject, or told a story. And when he was asked ‘what is truth?’ in John 18:38, he said nothing.

Can there be more truth in silence than in a smart answer? Is a metaphor more honest than a statement of fact?

Anyway, I’d better finish the book before I say anything else...