So Fill Our Imaginations: The Work and Play of a Year of Preaching

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.

Mark Lloyd Taylor is Professor Emeritus at Seattle University, having taught theology, worship, and preaching there for twenty-five years. He serves St. Paul's Episcopal Church (Seattle, Washingon) in many roles, including Associate for Liturgy and Godly Play teacher, and is a licensed lay preacher in the Diocese of Olympia. Taylor's scholarship addresses the love of God; body, gender, and Jesus Christ; feminist, womanist, and process theologies; Melville and Kierkegaard; emergent worship; and child theology.