Besides a few of my seminary teachers, Barbara Brown Taylor has challenged my faith in ways I cannot explain. Here is an excerpt from The Preaching Life I used on Sunday at Woodmont Hills. She is a poet who writes as if words still matter a great deal.


God is not through with us yet. At our worst moments, both individually and corporately, we act as if that were so. We act as if creation had all been finished a long, long time ago, and encased in glass, where we may look at it through the grime of centuries but may not touch. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Holy Spirit still moves over the face of the waters, God still breaths life into piles of dust, Jesus still shouts us from our tombs. The deep river of revelation still runs strong from the fresh headwaters of its source to its jewel-encrusted banks in the heavenly city, with power to drench our dry days along the way. (From The Preaching Life)

The Spirit still moves over the face of the waters...blowing wherever it pleases.