In her bestselling preaching autobiography Barbara Brown Taylor writes of how sh
e came to be a preacher of the gospel as a priest in the Episcopal Church. In th
is warm and poignant collection, Barbara Brown Taylor s humor and wisdom delve i
nto the meaning of Christian symbols and history both her own, growing up in the
Mid-West and Georgia, and the Church s, from its earliest beginnings in the Nea
r East. Seamlessly, Taylor weaves together reflections on her vocation with the
long-standing struggles of the Church to hear, respond, and remain faithful to i
ts mission of holy love. She moves effortlessly from reflection to homily, concl
uding the volume with thirteen sermons illustrative of the answered call. This r
ich meeting of memoir, theology, and sermon stands at the center of Taylor s wor
k, bringing into one book the origins and the vision of her remarkable preaching
life. But her voice is not sentimental. Instead, Taylor explores Christian mean
ings and histories in order to hear and speak, in the present, for God. God has
given us good news in human form and has given us the grace to proclaim it, she
writes, but part of our terrible freedom is the freedom to lose our voices, to f
orget where we were going and why. While that knowledge does not yet strike me a
s prophetic, it does keep me from taking both my ministry and the ministry of th
e whole church for granted. This book on the calling to preach is itself a call
to reawaken to the activating presence of God. Because I am a preacher, it is th
rough a preacher s eyes that I see. . ., but because I am a baptized Christian t
oo, it is from that perspective I write. Either way, my job remains the same: to
proclaim the good news of God in Christ and to celebrate the sacraments of God
s presence in the world. Those two jobs are described as clearly in the baptisma
l vows as they are in the ordination vows, which give all Christians a common vo
cation. from Chapter One"
