Frederick Buechner more than any other Christian novelist writer today fulfills G. K. Chesterton's call for wonder-full artistic and spiritual digging. Treasure Hunt is probably the closing volume in a series of books (Lion Country, Open Heart, Love Feat) centered around the zany pratfalling and abundantly loveable religious quest of Leo Bebb — ex-Bible salesman, ex-con, evangelist, and God's holy buffoon. In his last will and testament recorded on cassette tape, Leo gives his daughter Sharon and her husband Antonio and old house in Poinsett, South Carolina. They are admonished "to do something nice with that old place. And I want you to do it for Jesus." So it happens that these relatives and some of their friends converge on Bebb's old homestead where unbeknownst to them, Leo Bebb's twin brother Babe and his wife Bertha are living!

The get together proves to be a Bebbsian bash with faith and unfaith wrestling with imminent tragedy, and much philosophizing about how the end time leads to hopeful beginnings. Antonio, the narrator, as usual is carried along by events ("You must reconcile yourself to spending the rest of your middle age making the best of things because you can no longer make the most of them"). Brownie, Leo's old disciple, has lost his faith ("Scripture says where your treasure is, here shall your heart be also. The trouble is my treasure's turned out to be a bad check. Spiritually speaking, I don't have a nickel to my name"). Gertrude Conover, a close friend of Leo's, is convinced that he's an "always-returner"; she believes he is reincarnated in a blind baby who looks like W. C. Fields. Her optimism is indomitable ("Thank your stars there is always and yet. This side of Paradise, perhaps it is the best you can hope for . . . My dear everything that happens is absolutely seething with miracle . . . ").

Beside the catalytic effect the deceased Leo has upon these pilgrims, there is the impact of his red-haired twin brother. Babe runs an outer space project called Uforium, gives life-ray treatments, and has his teeth wired for messages from outer space. As Antonio puts it, he's "a trickster, ventriloquist, hypnotist, and impersonator." Babe hypothesizes that Jesus is a space man who one day will "climb out of a saucer. Sunshine in his hair. Gather his own up just like it says."

Treasure Hunt is an outlandish novel zigzagging from improbably incidents to totally refreshing seriousness. I always come away from a Buechner novel with fresh imagery for my preaching and teaching. Here are a few nuggets. An image of a believer as a weightlifter — Antonio describing Leo "hoisting his faith off the ground grunt by grunt like an overweight weightlifter, the eyes bulging, the sweat rolling down." An image of Jesus as "Don Giovanni, the great lover himself, with a little gold earring in one ear and an Errol Flynn smile as he runs Satan through with a sword and puts Death to rout." Or the memorable response Antonio gives to Babe's question: "Father, Son, and Holy Smoke, you ever laid eyes on the crowd?+< — The only answer I have is that I know what I've looked at but not what I've seen." What I see in Treasure Hunt is a sturdy, expansive, daring, and very appealing vision of the faith — one that is thumpingly alive with wonder.