The Preaching Life Quotes

“For those willing to keep heaving themselves toward the light, things can change. What has been lost gradually becomes less important than what is to be found. Curiosity pokes its green head up through the asphalt of grief, and fear of the unknown takes on an element of wonder as the disillusioned turn away from the God who was supposed to be in order to seek the God who is. Every letdown becomes a lesson and a lure. Did God fail to come when I called? Then perhaps God is not a minion. So who is God? Did God fail to punish my adversary? Then perhaps God is not a policeman. So who is God? Did God fail to make everything turn out all right? Then perhaps God is not a fixer. So who is God? Over and over, my disappointments draw me deeper into the mystery of God’s being and doing. Every time God declines to meet my expectations, another of my idols is exposed.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“That is why the rich young ruler went away sorrowful, if you ask me; he understood all at once that he was not free. His wealth was supposed to make him free, but kneeling in front of Jesus he understood that it was not so. Invited to follow, he went away sorrowful instead, for he had great possessions that he lugged behind him like a ball and chain. He is the only person in the whole gospel of Mark who walks away from an invitation to follow; he is the only wounded one who declines to be healed.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“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, and it is a hard, hard lesson to learn—so hard that most of us have to go back to the blackboard again and again, because we keep thinking that there must be some way to work it out, some way to master the human condition so that there are no leaks in it, no scares, no black holes.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“Our God could be an ethereal God, after all, a disembodied deity whose holy word was a collection of abstract philosophical premises. Instead, we have a God who is pleased to dwell among us, setting the holy story within the human story so that none of us has to leave flesh and blood behind to hear it. We do not have to park our bodies outside before entering God’s presence. God is willing to meet us where we are, coming among us as a burning bush, a mighty wind, a pillar of cloud, a still small voice, a descending dove, a newborn babe.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“Whatever the crime, very few of us would deny the possibility of forgiveness, but most of us would insist on penance, on the sinner’s heartfelt confession and willingness to pay for the wrong that has been done. Then along comes this story of instant forgiveness with no strings attached, and we cannot miss the point: that the extravagant love of God both fulfills and violates our sense of what is right.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“Where are the nine?” Jesus asks, but I know where they are. “Where is the tenth leper?” That is what I want to know. Where is the one who followed his heart instead of his instructions, who accepted his life as a gift and gave it back again, whose thanksgiving rose up from somewhere so deep inside him that it turned him around, changed his direction, led him to Jesus, made him well? Where are the nine? Where is the tenth? Where is the disorderly one who failed to go along with the crowd, the impulsive one who fell on his face in the dirt, the fanatical one who loved God so much that obedience was beside the point? Where did that one go?”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“We cannot nail him down. We tried once, but he got loose, and ever since then he has been the walking, talking presence of God in our midst, the living presence of God in our lives. If we cannot say who he is in twenty-five words or less, it is because he is our window on the undefinable, unfathomable I AM, and we cannot sum him up any easier than we can sum up the one who sent him. “Who are you?” That is the only question worth asking. “I am.” That is the only answer we need.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“Something happens between the preacher’s lips and the congregation’s ears that is beyond prediction or explanation. The same sermon sounds entirely different at 9:00 and 11:15 on a Sunday morning. Sermons that make me weep leave my listeners baffled, and sermons that seem cold to me find warm responses. Later in the week, someone quotes part of my sermon back to me, something she has found extremely meaningful—only I never said it.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“If the preacher leans too far one way, he will side with the text against the congregation and deliver a finger-pointing sermon from on high. If the preacher leans too far the other way, she will side with the congregation against the text and deliver a sermon that stops short of encountering God.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“While celebrants have been known to omit it from time to time and their congregations have been known to appreciate the gesture, the prayer book gives no indication that the sermon is optional. The reason for that, I think, is that the word of God calls for a response with some human daring in it. Certainly there are ways in which the rest of the service constitutes our response to the gospel, but the words of the liturgy are theologically correct words that stay the same from week to week. A sermon, on the other hand, is an act of creation with real risk in it, as one foolhardy human being presumes to address both God and humankind, speaking to each on the other’s behalf and praying to get out of the pulpit alive.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“Sacraments are our road maps home. God may not need them, but we do, and while they cannot make something happen, at least they make sure that we are in the right place if it should.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“Biblical faith gives believers a particular pattern by which to judge the truth of their own experience. We see that service may be the way to greatness, poverty may be the key to freedom, weakness may be the path to strength, death may be the gate to life. The Bible confirms all these suspicions, and while it may not make them any easier for us to act upon, at least it gives us courage to go on when everything seems stacked against us. 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.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“The Bible is not an object for me; it is a partner, whose presence blesses me, challenges me, and affects everything I do.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“Over and over, the Bible offers me an alternative vision, not only of myself but also of other people and ultimately of the whole world. Sometimes it seems far-fetched, but other times it seems truer than what is supposed to be true.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“The Bible also teaches us how to imagine ourselves. In a world where we are offered so many unsolicited definitions of ourselves, it is easy to forget who we are.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“By keeping us rooted in our historical tradition, the Bible helps us to know the difference between imagination and delusion; by tethering our own imaginations to that of the whole people of God, the Bible teaches us to imagine the God who was and is and who shall be.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“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. We may not imagine that God speaks only through cats, for instance, or that turning three circles before walking out the front door will protect us from harm each day.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“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 offer them.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“Over and over again, the human imagination turns out to be the place where vision is formed and reformed, where human beings encounter an inner reality with power to transform the other realities of their lives.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“Walking down the street, I see a wild-looking character sitting on the steps of the library. His gray hair is matted. His dense beard covers the slogan on his grimy T-shirt. His small darting eyes are as volatile as a hawk’s. I look once and think “drifter.” I look twice and think “John the Baptist,” and in that imaginative act my relationship to the man is changed.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“The ministry of the ordained is no substitute for the ministry of the baptized; it is a prototype, copied from Christ’s own, that offers the whole people of God a pattern for seeking and responding to the Lord’s presence in our midst.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“Pursuing that vocation, priests are likely to wear a hundred different hats—social worker, chauffeur, cook, financial advisor, community organizer, babysitter, philanthropist, marriage counselor, cheerleader, friend—but whatever hat they happen to be wearing at the time, priests remember that they wear it as God’s person, for God’s sake, in God’s name.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“Traditionally, it is the clergy who have filled that role, keeping the church neat by gathering up all the power the laity have dropped there. Part of it is their genuine if misguided desire to be helpful, but the rest of it is megalomania—their perverse notion that they are the only ones who can be trusted with the ministry of the church.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“In many ways, those who pursue ordination take the easy way out. They choose a prescribed role that seems to meet all the requirements, and take up full-time residence in the church. They forgo the hard work of straddling two different worlds, while those they serve have no such luxury. Those in the pulpit may know where they belong, but the people in the pews hold dual citizenship.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“Do anything that pleases you,” the voice in my head said again, “and belong to me.” That simplified things considerably I could pump gas in Idaho or dig latrines in Pago Pago, as far as God was concerned, as long as I remembered whose I was. With no further distress, I decided that it would please me to become a priest, and to spend the rest of my life with a community willing to help me figure out what that meant.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“Maybe God tricked people the same way, luring them with pretty pictures and then setting them on fire, to teach them a lesson about what was important and what was not. It was part of the same hard knowledge I had gained earlier in Ohio, the uneasy sense that God might be dangerous, a dazzling light that warmed but could also burn, reducing the whole world to ash.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“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.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“Every letdown becomes a lesson and a lure. Did God fail to come when I called? Then perhaps God is not a minion. So who is God? Did God fail to punish my adversary? Then perhaps God is not a policeman. So who is God? Did God fail to make everything turn out all right? Then perhaps God is not a fixer. So who is God?”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“But down in the darkness below those dreams—in the place where all our notions about God have come to naught—there is still reason to hope, because disillusionment is not so bad. Disillusionment is the loss of illusion—about ourselves, about the world, about God—and while it is almost always painful, it is not a bad thing to lose the lies we have mistaken for the truth.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

“One man I know, mourning the death of his infant daughter, confessed the depth of his loss. “I don’t know what to believe anymore,” he said. “I don’t know whom to pray to, or what to pray. I tried to be a good person; I did the best I knew how, and it didn’t do a bit of good. If God is going to let something like this happen, then what’s the use of believing at all?”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication