So Fill Our Imaginations

With this memoir doubling as an exercise in theological reflection, Mark Lloyd Taylor invites readers to explore the work and play of a year of preaching. A turbulent and supersaturated year of life in the world, featuring parish departures and resilience, a housing crisis in neighborhood and city, the inauguration of Donald Trump as president with attendant social/political/economic issues. ISIS, Iraq, and Syria. Displaced people at the southern border. Sexual violence against women. Race in America. Feminist, womanist, and process theologies propel Taylor's twelve sermons across the 2016-17 church year (Lectionary Year A). But at its most imaginative, the adult work of preaching becomes child's play. Sermons carried by verbal and visual and tactile images. Walking makes the way. Straying beyond fences of hatred and staying beyond. A broken porcelain bowl mended with gold. A seven-foot-tall assemblage of kimchi pots no longer buried by fear. An icon of the great faith of the Canaanite woman, great enough to convert Jesus. Every single one of us a little baby Sophia, living and moving and having our being in the universal womb of God, our mother. All to fill corners and empty spaces in our imaginations.