The Use of Scripture in the Sermons of Barbara Brown Taylor

Symposium: Barbara Brown TaylorIn recent years, Barbara Brown Taylor has justifiably been celebrated as a memoirist, essayist, and thoughtful writer and speaker on the spiritual life. But she first entered the public view as a remarkable preacher. Even though her published writing has tilted lately toward non-sermonic material, she is still recognized as one of Americas most gifted preachers, and her sermons are widely studied by students and pastors alike as literary and homiletical gems.However, as Taylor herself describes her literary development, the preaching track of her life has been something of an unexpected detour. In an interview with the North Georgia ecological journal Flycatcher, she tells the interviewer that she set out early on to be a writer of short stories and poems, only to be greeted, as many young writers are, with a flurry of rejection slips. She goes on to say:To make a very long story short, I took a part time job in a church after seminary, was invited to preach my first sermon at some small service during Holy Week, and afterwards someone came up to me and asked for a copy of that sennon. It wasn't until I was driving home that I realized I had just "sold" my first short story. Someone wanted to read what I had written! Either that, or they couldn't understand a word I had said and wanted to find out if it made any more sense on paper. So that was it. The train left the station and I spent the next twenty years writing in and for the church. I found my audience. I found a way to use language that seemed to work for some people and it is only now-nearer the end of my life than the beginning-that I'm turning back to creative writing again.1This is not to say that her work as a preacher has been an unwelcome interruption in her life as a writer. She has, after all, written a whole book on the joys and challenges of The Preaching Life, one in which she says, "If my own experience can be trusted, then God does not call us once but many times. There are calls to faith and calls to ordination, but in between there are calls to particular communities and calls to particular tasks within them."2In this brief paper, I want to examine one dimension of Taylor s "particular task" of preaching, more specifically the use of scripture in Taylors sermons.3 One could make a long list of the virtues of Taylors sermons-their arresting imagery, their delightful blend of colloquial and poetic language, their subtle humor, and more. But I am persuaded that no small part of the creativity and power of her sermons comes from the way scripture gets interpreted and represented in them. If, as Taylor says with a measure of modest understatement, she found in her sermons "a way to use language that seemed to work for some people," a significant factor in their appeal is the way that biblical texts take on a fresh hearing in her preaching.Taylor graduated from seminary in the mid-1970s, and her sermons, in terms of exegetical support, display in many ways the blend of historical and literary criticism of the Bible that was predominant at that time and that still prevails in many of the standard biblical commentaries. Taylors sermons frequently show concrete evidence that she has done her exegetical homework and brought the fruits of her study to her sermons, albeit expressed in her refreshing and imaginative prose style.Listen, for example, as she brings into play the historical background of an ancient covenant ceremony in a sermon on Genesis 15:His name is still Abram, by the way-it is not until a couple of chapters later in Genesis that God changes his name to Abraham, meaning "father of a multitude." In todays story he is just plain old Abram, an elderly Jew without an heir who believes God's promise of a son and a land, but would prefer proof. "O Lord God," he asks, "how am I to know that I shall possess it?" So proof is what he gets: a covenant with God that takes place in the middle of the night among a whole barnyard of slaughtered animals. …