A Lovely book; a series of meditations on preaching followed by a handful of stunning, perfect little sermons. I read one per Sunday when i was between churches, and they kept me going.
Quotes:
Barbara Brown Taylor is primarily a worshiper. Whether in the study, in a classroom, in a hospital room, on a mountain trail, or in the pulpit, she is in the sanctuary.
As best I can figure, the Christian era ended during my lifetime.
Every time God declines to meet my expectations, another of my idols is exposed.
When all is said and done, faith may be nothing more than the assignment of holy meaning to events that others call random.
We are born seekers, calling strange names into the darkness from our earliest days because we know we are not meant to be alone, and because we know that we await someone whom we cannot always see.
"Do anything that pleases you," the voice in my head said again, "and belong to me.'
the sacrament of the word calls for a light touch.
Finally I got the message. "Bible" was a code word for "God." People were not hungry for information about the Bible; they were hungry for an experience of God, which the Bible seemed to otter them.
Faith may be an imaginative act, as I have suggested, but the Bible reminds us that we are not free to imagine anything we like.
In short, the Bible turned out not to be a fossil under glass but a thousand dillerent things-a mirror, a scythe, a hammock, a lantern, a pair of binoculars, a high diving hoard, a bridge, a goad-all of them offering themselves to me to be touched and handled and used.
For those rooted in Christian memory and fed by Christian hope, nothing in life is simply what it seems. Equipped with the paradoxical images and stories of our historic faith, we see things differently than we would without them.
Sometimes we kneel, assuming a posture that is all but gone from our world-like troubadours, like lovers, like servants, we kneel before the Lord our maker and our hearts follow suit. 'Ihen we stand to sing and sit to listen, dancing the peculiar ballet of the people of God.
the first thing [the sacraments] teach us is that we do not worship God alone.
'Ihe second thing sacraments teach us is that God uses material things to reach out to us.
'I he third thing sacraments teach its is that God is not delicate. 'The sacraments of the church are not weekend performances in sacred settings; they are portable.
the sermon proves to be a communal act, not the creation of one person but the creation of a body of people for whom and to whom one of them speaks. A congregation can make or break a sermon by the quality of their response to it.
When the door opens in a sermon, it is because God has consented to be present. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't.
This means that I never know ahead of time what I will preach. If I did, then my sermons would be little more than lessons, expositions of things I already know that I think my listeners ought to know too. While there are preachers who do this sort of thing well, I am not one of them.
Human beings do not lose control of their lives. What we lose is the illusion that we were ever in control of our lives in the first place,
MOST OF US KNOW THIS STORY AS THE STORY OF the rich young ruler, although Mark is the only one who suggests he is rich, Matthew is the only one who says he is young, and Luke is the only one who calls him a ruler. The fact that he shows up in all three of these gospels is a pretty good indication that his story is true, although most of us wish that he had never shown up at all. Because of hinl, we have one of the hardest sayings in the whole Bible, one that strikes fear in the hearts of would-he Christians everywhere: "Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then conic, follow nme."
Are we really supposed to admire a poor woman who gave her last cent to a morally bankrupt religious institution?
We are not called to be philanthropists or social workers, but brothers and sisters. We are called into relationship, even when that relationship is unlikely, momentary, or sad.
I imagine Jesus down at the plasma bank on Boulevard, standing in line with the hungover men waiting to sell their blood, or maybe down at the city jail shooting the breeze with the bail bondsmen who cruise the place like vultures. I imagine him at the Majestic Diner on Ponce de Leon with a crack dealer, a car thief, a prostitute with AIDS, buying them all cheese omelettes when I come in with the sixth-grade confirmation class and sit down a couple of booths away.
These two parables are full of problems, not least of which is that they do not seem to mean what Jesus says they mean. According to his explanations, they are about heaven's joy over one repentant sinner, but the lost sheep does not repent as far as I can tell and the lost coin certainly doesn't. They are both simply found-not because either of them does anything right, but because someone is determined to find them and does. They are restored thanks to God's action, not their own, so where does repentance come in at all?
If God is where we came from and God is where we are going, then we have no permanent address and all our shelters along the way are temporary ones.
It is not the best feeling in the world, but it is not the worst either. It is not a bad thing to know you belong somewhere, even if you are not there yet.
We cling to the illusion that some of us are blessed and some of us are not, and that it is our job as those who are blessed to rescue those who are not.
Belief is something else altogether, although it is not what some would have us believe. It is not a well-fluffed nest, or a well-defended castle high on a hill. It is more like a rope bridge over a scenic gorge, sturdy but swinging hack and forth, with plenty of light and plenty of air but precious little to hang onto except the stories you have heard: that it is the best and only way across, that it is possible, that it will bear your weight.
The best way the writer of Genesis could think of to describe it was to say that paradise was the kind of place where you could walk around naked, where you could skinny-dip to your heart's content. It was that safe-so safe, in fact, that it might never even occur to you that you were naked, at least as long as you stayed away from the fruit of one particular tree.
Adam and Eve decided to live. The days of peace and plenty were gone for good, but they got by. Using all the scraps at hand, they managed to build first in altar and then a home, to bake bread from the wild wheat of the field and to bear five children. Using the pieces of their broken past, they made a future for themselves and for their descendants in the world outside of Eden, a world we continue to live in today. It is a world full of chips and dents and scars. Even where we have glued it back together you can still see the cracks, but in its own way it is lovely, a mosaic of many colors, a mended work of art, a testament to the God who is willing to work with broken pieces and who calls us to do the same.
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