Always a guest: speaking of faith far from home

Abstract

If you are used to books of sermons, talks, and addresses this is such a book, 31 in number. But it is quite unlike what we may be used to, if we consider some such content informative but rather worthy. The quality of Barbara Brown Taylor’s thinking is remarkable, and these talks are riveting and transformative. The title reflects her ability to recognise herself as a guest wherever she goes (often indeed ‘far from home’), and from this perspective to speak engagingly and hospitably. The hospitality of her style in truth seeking and truth sharing is impressive in its inclusivity and sustained participative insights. We will all have much to learn from her wisdom and skill in preaching and teaching. While speaking predominantly though not exclusively to a USA context, the content of the book in its many insights is not confined to it. It does indeed speak to the reader of faith far from home. Each address or talk comes with a highlighted repeated sentence somewhere in the middle that focuses a key point. It is not possible to range across the whole book, but briefly to take some examples – ‘The sacramental sky’ is a study of Genesis 15: 1–6 and God’s promise to Abraham about his descendants. The story unfolds to the point where Abram in becoming Abraham awakes from his dream to find the pieces of meat divided as a sacrifice with his own expectation to walk between them. But instead he finds it is a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch (as the author says, ‘God’s favourite calling cards’) that pass between them. So it is God who assumes the whole risk of the covenant... ‘Abraham did not cross his heart that starry night. God crossed God’s heart...God decided to believe, and Abraham decided on gambling on a God who was willing to gamble on him’ (p. 33). Or the innovative study of Isaiah 58: 6–9 entitled ‘Sabbath rest’, which is arranged as a fivecourse meal (pp. 71-77) to be enjoyed and digested. Or the study of ‘The widow’s mite’, with all the riveting, poignant and memorable detail that is drawn out from the seemingly simple description ‘this poor widow’. It has nothing, the author rightly persuades us, to do with a lesson in stewardship, and everything about Jesus’ own realisation of the costliness of his own approaching sacrifice. The front cover of the book depicts a tree in full leaf and laden with fruit. If ever one wondered in faith’s journey what the Tree of Life and the Tree of Wisdom are like, this book will furnish the reader with the answer.