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When God is Silent (Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching)

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Through her sermons, Barbara Brown Taylor has earned the reputation of speaking meaningful volumes using only a few choice words. In "When God is Silent," she lives into this reputation once again. Basing her reflections upon Hebrew Testament images of a famine in God's word, Taylor suggests that the glut of wordiness in the world of Church may really be the result not of an outpouring of God's Word upon the faithful, but of a God who is largely silent to us in this day and time. God is leading us to new and unknown discoveries by deliberately NOT speaking, thereby calling us, even requiring us, to listen intently for a new word. Our propensity to speak all the more reveals an unhealthy desire to fill the quiet void with our wordiness, thereby avoiding the real and unpredictable encounter with the God and Creator of the Universe.

A book useful for any who dares to preach the Word and exciting for all people of faith, "When God is Silent" is provacative, accessible, and... troubling. The Rev. Ms. Taylor argues that we live in a time when words are rapidly losing their power of meaning, so that it becomes increasingly difficult to say anything of substance of the Word. Nevertheless, the preacher is called to speak, and to speak faithfully. Fortunately, the Rev. Ms. Taylor's grasp of the written and spoken word remains balanced, firm and courteous, and she shares with the preacher useful insight for approaching the task.

"When God is Silent" deserves our quiet attention and humble consideration.

Barbara Brown Taylor is the kind of preacher that those of us who are, would like to be. The book is dedicated to her mentor, Fred Craddock, who is also- like her- a poet first, and then a preacher. Taylor helps her listeners to anticipate, then embrace, God's silence, rather than lament it. She helps us all to understand that silence in such a way that we know we are looking over her shoulder, as she seeks to understand it herself.

As long as God has Taylor, God is not silent..

Barbara Brown Taylor is one more uniquely creative lady! When she begins Yale's Lyman Beecher Lectures her first words are, "How shall I break the silence?" After two attention grasping questions she paraphrases words from Genesis One, hints of creative silence: "The empty air is formless void waiting to be addressed...and the earth could be all ocean, a blue waterworld in space." Bringing in the first man Adam with several other metaphors, she has already captured every poet's attention! This is the same way she preaches...from Clarksville, to Atlanta, to Boston or to Washington.

...The last Chapter on Restraint is my favorite. There she quotes or refers to, Pascal, Rumi, Auden, Frost, Max Picard and then later tells a Jerry Garcia Story, of the "Grateful Dead" edited by Ken Kesey. Not only is she a Poet but an incredible story teller and knows the best from Robert Schumann to Samuel Barber. These last musical references are based upon "Jesus came among us as word. I believe God remains among us as music." How can you top that variety for sustaining interest of content?
How can anyone ever top her way of breaking silence?
Retired Chaplain Fred W Hood

In this book of lectures delivered at Yale Divinity School, Taylor states that the task of a preacher is not to give answers or advice but to "usher people into the presence of God who may or may not answer." She states if we have a God who always speaks, who's never absent or silent, perhaps we are worshipping or speaking to an imaginary God. "Only an idol always answers," she writes.

Taylor urges preachers not to cover for God's silence with numerous words but rather to employ a language that uses economy, courtesy, and reverence. "In a word-clogged world," she writes, "the only words that stand a chance of getting people's attention are simple, honest words that come from everyday life."

Taylor is unafraid to plunge into the mystery and dilemma of God's silence. Her reflections offer insight and guidance, not only to preachers but also to anyone who has struggled with unanswered prayer and the absence of a speaking God.

A powerful collection of three sermons directed at current and future pastors, Taylor discusses the role of a pastor in the church and society. She accurately describes the hot oil feeling of interpreting the Word of God for receptive and unreceptive ears. And she details the awkwardness of that relationship when the pastor feels the well of communication has dried. A must read for anyone who preaches or seeks a conversational relationship with God.

Barbara Brown Taylor demonstrates her craft as a preacher so effectively that she has earned the title of one of America's best. In her book When God is Silent, Barbara brings to light the difficulty many that preach face as they approach the Biblical text and message. In forthright honesty she gives expression to areas that both teach and frighten a preacher when they are preparing a homily: famine, silence, and restraint.

Taylor speaks to a culture that has become accustomed to its throwaway lifestyle. Words are disposable. With so many words now being assimilated into the English language, our minds are over satiated. This rich diet of fast food newsprint, magazine gluttony, and a blitzkrieg of entertainment television has numbed the ability of words to move and stir our being. In the midst of abundance, we are in a state of famine--a famine that is silent.

What do we do when we don't hear the voice of God? Taylor paints a picture of a God who has grown silent in order that we may pay attention. The canvas of silence is one we avoid with all our might. Upon the canvas, the colors are vivid primary tones that our culture tries to dull with noise and activity. Her point is well taken...God is not really silent, people have just muted God out. But she warns preachers to be wary of using too much language to fill voids of silence, for silence is the antacid to settle our indigestion caused by over feeding on our vernacular.

What Taylor does best, is allow the reader to reflect on whose word is being proclaimed on Sundays. She uses the old adage of `less is more' to articulate that holding back on word usage allows for the silence to speak, almost like a ray of sunlight peaking through a cloud covered sky. Recognize our loss by over using words and restrain ourselves from saying too much. Let silence speak, for it has more profound things to say than any preacher can. Using vivid imagery, she gives sound advice to all who step into the pulpit to proclaim the good news. Sometimes, what you don't say or leave unsaid speaks louder and lasts longer. After all, its God's good news for us, not our good news for ourselves.

It is not surprising that in Barbara Brown Taylor' When God is Silent, the genuine wordsmith focuses on the life and power of words both when they are used and when they are not. When God is Silent comes from the 1997 Lyman Beecher Lectures delivered at Yale Divinity School.

Taylor shares the idea that we are living in a world, in a culture that not only has an increase in the number of words in our language, but it appears that we have grown away from a point where the words had meaning. In the first section of the book entitled "Famine" she enables the reader to recognize the need and desire that we have for words with substance. She suggests that our words are under attack, stripped by the monsters of consumerism and journalism.

In the second section "Silence," Taylor lifts up the scriptural references to the silence God has shared as well as those in Jesus' life. It is in this silence that true power exists. The example of the silence present in the story of Abraham binding Isaac is amazing. Not only were those in the story silent but I think each of us that reads the story for the first, tenth or one hundredth time is struck by our own silence as the knife is lifted in the air.

The third section takes the God given silence and instructs us in what way we are to deal with it. How do we honor God's silence? How do we respect those we are preaching to in regard to this silence?

Through this brief book, this threefold lecture series, those clergy, seminarians, lay folk and professors present at the lecture as well as those of us who read it, Barbara Brown Taylor is able to convey her outstanding work as a modern-day wordsmith to us.

This book is composed of three lectures Barbara Taylor gave at Yale University under the generous support of the Lyman Beecher Lectures. It's always fun to see who gets to be picked by the committee and each time they roll around with the announcement, it is always a delightful surprise. No more so than in the case of Ms. Taylor, who has been an inspiring speaker for many years with speaking engagements in many places of worship from here to Hattiesburg and back.

In these lectures, which are, after all, aimed toward her fellow practitioners, she asks us, what happens when the words dry up and when God seems to turn His face away from the mess that we humans have made of our world? What does the preacher, a man or woman who depends on His word in the original sense of the word "depends" (i.e., hanging from, like a pearl earring hanging from the girl in Vermeer's painting) what does the preacher do to be able to give something to the folk assembled to hear him -- or her of course? Is there a recourse in silence, or music? In Lecture II all of these elements come together and Ms. Taylor really starts to (to use the lingo of jazz which she loves) "cook." And she doesn't turn off the heat until she's out of the kitchen! Now, sometimes God is silent, or SEEMS to be, but happily, usually He is NOT SILENT.

Anybody who completes a coherent finished piece of writing has accomplished a great deal, and this is true of Barbara Brown Taylor's volume of lectures/sermons. She is a fluent writer and the bones of her argument are interesting: human language has been cheapened through dishonesty and excess to the point where none of us can trust a huge percentage of it so we ought to choose our words judiciously, especially those about the spiritual. Also we ought to shut up and listen more to each other and to God. Okay, I buy that. She traces the history of God's few utterances through Hebrew and Christian scripture & locates His/Her last audible pronouncements to be those at Jesus' baptism and the Mount of the Transfiguration. But given the title of the book, I think she surrounds the question of God's subsequent silence in a cloud of poetic language that simply does not answer after Auschwitz. She even proposes that our own yearning toward God can actually be read as God communicating. This seems like a Hallmark card Zen koan to me.

What I would have liked to have read (again, given the title) would have been something like the following:

1) God has been silent for 2,000 years because He is busy with something else at this time;
2) He'll get back to us in a little while but we shouldn't take it personally;
3) We should trust the silence because--and here's the place where I can't imagine why, & she doesn't really have an answer (except the apparent answer to Job that God is omnipotent & doesn't have to explain anything to us saps).

In other words, I think the book might have been better titled: Why We Should Shut up About Spiritual Truth. I would recommend borrowing it from the library rather than buying it.

Dr Taylor has obviously done her 'homework' and presented a well researched subject. It is a matter of interest to academia, clergy and laypersons alike. She writes in an easily, readable style, that is readily understood. I've recommended it to several of my clergy friends; and, will recommend it to lay people as well.