"Great Preachers"--Barbara Brown Taylor

3:37 I'm from, but one tucked into the Kashgar Mountains east of the Black Sea between modern-day Turkey and Russia, where wild geraniums to this day carpet alpine meadows and the sound of waterfalls houses everywhere. A thousand years ago it was Camelot, rich in everything that mattered including the love of God. Under the patronage of benevolent kings and queens, artists were brought to that kingdom from far away Constantinople to build huge cathedrals out of the local rock. Many of them must have come with the Hagia Sophia in mind because their creations were not modest in any way. Their Byzantine churches were monuments full of exquisite arches and stonework and frescoes, many of which survive even to this day but only as as ruins or in museums because the age of Christianity is over in Turkey.

4:46 If you go there today, you can still find the wrecks of those great churches, what's left of their high walls poking up through the canopy of trees in the countryside like the stranded masts of tall wrecked ships. All the good carvings have been carried away by now along with the best building stones which local people have quarried for their own homes. The churches are multipurpose buildings now. They serve as soccer fields and sheet pens and sometimes garbage dumps. All that is left are those walls and a few of the beautiful arches, and here and there, amazingly, often in an apse, the remains of a fresco that has somehow or another survived the years, half a face with one wide eye looking right at you, or one raised arm with its fingers in that distinct constellation.

5:49 It is Christ the Lord still blessing his ruined church. You can imagine a four-tiered fountain, if you will, in which God's glory spills over into Christ, and Christ's glory spills over into the church, and the church's glory drenches the whole cosmos. That's what Paul can see as clear as day, the perfection of all creation through the agency of the church. Now, I've been using the future tense. Paul doesn't. He uses the past and the present tense all along. Listen to him. And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things in the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all. Paul can see it. Although as best anyone can tell, he wrote this letter from a prison cell near the end of his life, the only light coming from perhaps a small window over his head.

6:57 His life was coming to a violent end, which he perhaps could also see, but none of that diminished Paul's sense of God's providence or of his confidence in the church. Paul's own experience, it didn't count, at least not the beatings and the hecklings and the arrests. all that counted for Paul was the power that he felt billowing through his body whenever he spoke of Christ, the things he said that were beyond even him, the things that happened in those who listened to him and who believed. In the grip of that power, which turned Paul into God's own lightning bolt. Paul had no doubt that God would succeed. God had already succeeded. The world was simply slow to catch on. I'll say. Like most of you, I belong to a church that falls somewhat short of Paul's vision.

8:00 Maybe you've heard. In the past two years, one of our bishops has killed himself before he could be questioned about an extramarital affair. Our national treasurer has been sent to jail for embezzling $2.2 million. Ten of our bishops have brought charges of heresy against another of our bishops, and One of our priests has just ended up in Penthouse Magazine where he's been exposed in every sense of the word. Your own list may be less spectacular. But I'll still bet you have one, right? If not at the national level, then at the local one, where churches are split right down the middle over the use of outreach funds or the color of the new carpet, where congregations elect to sell their property and move to the suburbs rather than open their doors to a changing neighborhood.

8:54 In a recent interview, the novelist Reynolds Price was asked why he who calls himself a devout Christian doesn't go to church, and he said that part of it dates from the late 60s, the civil rights era, when, he says, the white southern church behaved about as badly as possible. But that's not all. He says, the few times I've gone to church lately, I'm right away asked if I'll coach the Little League team or talk at a Wednesday night supper or join the men's bell ringing class on Sunday afternoon. the church has become a full entertainment service facility. It's supposed to be where God lives.

9:38 And yet, according to Paul, it still is. The roof may be gone, and there may be sheep grazing in the nave, but Christ is still there, half a face with one wide eye looking right at you, that familiar hand raised in endless benediction. it is still Christ the Lord giving his blessing to a ruined church. He cannot or he will not be separated from his body. So how do we live with this paradox, with this painful discontinuity between Paul's vision of our divine nobility and the tawdry truth that we know about ourselves? I suppose that one way would be to decide that Paul was dreaming, a glorious dream, but still just a dream.

10:34 Or we could decide that he's right, that the church really is Christ's broker on earth, and that the better we take control of the world, the better. Only I don't think we can afford either of those options, not without betraying our head who is stuck with the same paradox, the ruler of the universe, born in a barn,

10:58 the great high priest despised by the priesthood of his own day, the cosmic Christ hung out on a cross to dry. On what grounds do we as his body expect any more clarity than was given him? Now the difference, of course, is we brought most of our own problems on ourselves. while he suffered through no fault of his own. But one thing we share with him, part of that fullness in which we take part, is the strenuous mystery of our own mixed parentage. We're children of God through our blood kinship with Christ. We're also sons and daughters of Adam and Eve with a hereditary craving for forbidden fruit salad. Frisk us and you'll find two passports on our bodies. One says we're citizens of heaven.

11:54 The other insists that we're taxpayers on earth. And it's no excuse for all the trouble we get in, but still it does help somewhat to explain the, how shall I say, spotted record. What Paul asks us to believe is that our two-ness has already been healed in our oneness in Christ. Not that it will be healed, but that it has been healed. That we are already made whole in Him, even if we can't feel it yet. Even if there's no startling evidence that it's so, we still are clumping around with a heavy plaster cast on our legs, still knocking things over and stepping on the cat. But when the cast comes off, we will see for ourselves what has been true all along, that we have been made whole in him, that we are being made whole in him, that we shall be made whole in him, whose name is above all names, not only in this age, but in the age to come.

12:56 Meanwhile, Paul says, he prays that the eyes of our hearts may be enlightened so that we can see the power of God that is already at work all around us. Now, based on my own experience, this is not the kind of stuff that makes headlines, not the way suicides and heresy trials and dirty pictures do. It's just your basic, oh, you know, your basic raising the dead kind of stuff. Stuff that happens in the church all the time. Like the brain-damaged young man who shows up in church one day and announces that he wants to be a member. And while he tries to hide it, it is painfully clear that he is out of everything. He's out of money, out of food, out of family to take him in. And nobody makes a big fuss, just very quietly. Someone takes him to the grocery store while someone else finds him a room.

13:49 Somebody else gets on the phone to find out what happened to his disability check. and somebody else makes an appointment at the dentist so he can get his teeth fixed. And you know what? Years later, he's still there in his pew in the front row on the right, surrounded by his family, the church. Or like the woman with ovarian cancer who's told she has six months to live, and the church surrounds her, comes to her home to lay hands on her and bake her casseroles and dust her furniture. Someone even comes up with the idea of massaging her feet and painting her toenails red, which does her spirit a world more good than any visit from the pastor. She gives all her jewelry away. She lets her driver's license expire. She picks the hymns for her funeral. She starts writing poetry again.

14:42 She prepares to die. But instead, against all the odds, she gets better. On Christmas Eve, she's back in church again for the first time in months, wearing an oxygen tank slung over her shoulder and an invisible plastic pipe going right under her nose. After the first hymn, she makes her way to the lectern where she reads the lesson from Isaiah. Someone's bought her a kitchen stool to sit on since she can't stand. Her tank hisses every five seconds. Every candle in the place glitters in her eyes. She opens the book and begins to read. Strengthen the weak hands, she says, bending her body over the words, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, be strong, do not fear.

15:40 Here is your God. And when she sits down, everybody in the place knows they have not just heard the word of the Lord. They've seen it in action. I could keep you here all afternoon, but you get the idea. No matter how hard we try in the church, we're always going to mess some things up. And no matter how badly we mess some things up in the church, some things are always going to keep turning out right because we are not, thank God, in charge.

16:13 With the eyes of your heart enlightened, you can usually find the one who is. you just search for any scrap any ruin of the church that is still standing any place where God is still worshipped any bunch of faces that are still turned toward the light and you can usually find him there bending over them his hand up raised in that endless benediction it is he who fills all in all whose fullness has spilled over into us it is Christ the Lord Amen. When we come back, Barbara Brown Taylor talks about using words which can produce emotions in a congregation. Thank you. Thank you.

17:59 Thank you. Thank you. Great Preachers continues with the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor.

19:05 Rev. Taylor, your message, you took us from that hymn of praise that Paul gives to Jesus about really what we should be in Christ and what the world and creation should be, and then also told us about the reality of where we're not. You brought that tension to us, and how did you resolve that? Barbara Brown Taylor I don't believe I resolved it. I think I left at a paradox in which both things are true, that we fail and we also are about the business of raising the dead and that both are true through our co-inherence with Christ. So it's a mystery we live into. And good preaching should bring us into those paradoxes and make us wrestle with them? The preaching that I do does. The preaching that I do, if I reflect true life I have a hard time living out of the mystery. It seems to me a great deal of God's work with us is beyond our understanding. Good writing. What does good writing have to do with good preaching? I believe that good preaching is about the use of powerful language, evocative language with power to affect the heart and the body as well as the mind. And I've learned a lot about that from good writing in which the choice of words and the stringing together of them in sentences bring about palpable changes in my body. So I have understudied that and tried to find ways to make that happen from the pulpit as well.

20:24 You mean the use of words in a phrase can affect you at such an emotional and physical level? Sure, you too. When you're reading James Michener's Hawaii and everybody's sailing around Cape Horn and everybody on deck is seasick and the boat's rocking back and forth. Through the power of words he can produce nausea in someone sitting in an armchair in a living room. So, words are powerful. You certainly produce some emotions in me and yet you didn't speak in an emotional manner. No, that's for me one rule of thumb. The more emotion projected by the preacher, the less produced in the listener. It's almost like there's a compensation that goes on. So I try to preach with restraint so that the listener is free to experience whatever he or she experiences. You used a phrase, the strenuous mystery of our... Mixed parentage. Sounds pretty, doesn't it? I liked it. And it struck me. Strenuous. Mysteries aren't strenuous.

21:19 Well, I chose that because for me it is a strenuous mystery to be part gods and part human and to live in the push-pull between that. But I also picked it because the words are beautiful and I think when words are beautiful people will listen and be captured by them in a way they won't if they're clumsy or too technical. Now, you preach from a manuscript. I do, but I treat it like a play script. In other words, I hope you are coming to something in which you know I have thought carefully about what I'll say, but I'm not glued to the page. But you're very clear about these word images in your mind and where you want to go with them. You may diverge at some point from that manuscript, but usually you're clear, I want to get to this image. I may diverge, but I have a wild imagination, and when I let that go in the pulpit, I'm usually sorry. So my manuscript is partly to keep me on track. I have material I've carefully developed with a beginning and a middle and an end, and images I've sifted a hundred times to make sure they work.

22:17 And sometimes I'll make a mistake, but I generally stick with what I've prepared. Barbara, the sense I have is that preaching for you has, you've almost come to it in a reluctant manner. What about that? Oh, who wants to stand up in front of a bunch of people and talk about the most important things in your and their life and risk making a fool out of yourself, telling too much, telling too little? I mean, it's a risky proposition. and I think most preachers have a little bit of spiritual exhibitionism that we're willing to do it all but I've just never seen myself as leader, teacher and yet it's what I do. Your own faith, you talk about an experience of coming to faith where you weren't even sure precisely what was happening. Oh, I was playing a joke I thought in some ways. My experience of faith was a college crusade kind of conversion experience where two girls came to my room and sat me on my bed and pulled out their standard questions and I answered them as quickly as I could just to get them to leave my room. But along the way I accepted Jesus as my Savior in the way that they asked me to, again mostly to get rid of them, and then my life changed in ways I can't explain completely except that the world looked different to me after that and I began to behave differently. And while I didn't continue with that group on campus, I went to seminary and look where I ended up.

23:42 There was also a sense of reticence that was going on here. Sure. I'm a shy person, as Garrison Keillor says, and it's a lot easier to sit in a study with a piece of paper than it is to be out speaking to people face to face. What helped you overcome that reticence? God. I don't know any other way to put it, truly. And the love of what happens, the love of what can happen in a room where people want to hear and someone is willing to speak, the Holy Spirit is there and it's a real powerful thing to be part of. You talk about the fact that I don't preach big sermons, long sermons, I preach little sermons out of life's experiences. What do you mean by that? I do what I do because I believe in the life of the community. It's a God-given life and it's a life in which I have discovered a lot of redemption. That means that most of my sermons are living room sized sermons. They're family sized sermons. That's literally true where I preach now. Place seats 85 full. But it's also true in terms of I want to preach into people's families, into their workplaces, into their time off, into their dreams. I want to preach to individuals and small communities. I don't see myself preaching to the world.

24:57 Does there have to be a main point to each of your messages or to a message? You're very conscious of that. It goes at the top of page one and it's written out in capital letters and everything in the sermon better speak to it or be saved for another sermon. How would you capitalize the main point of today's message? Oh, you would say that. Today's message. I would say that the theme is that we are not in charge of the church. I guess I summed up the message in the last paragraph that as hard as we try, we'll mess some things up and as much as we mess things up, other things will succeed.