what the tourists don’t see
had a long overdue day off yesterday, and did something I don’t do too often – only if there is an out-of-town friend to show around – 
clambered up to the roof of King’s College Chapel. A few years back I was the Chaplain there, so I know the building well.
The fantastic carved, fan vaulted ceiling is a famous sight, 
but clambering about in the ceiling/roof cavity you can get a picture of how the stones were fitted together in the late 15th/early 16th century.
Right up on top of the roof, though, (and I say this despite struggling somewhat with vertigo) not only do you get a great view of Cambridge and the surrounding countryside, 
you also get a magical sense of being removed from the stresses of everyday life.
In a county of flat fenland with no hills this is about as close as you get to being "on top of the world".
Yesterday we watched the sun set on one side of the Chapel as the moon rose on the other. Pure magic.
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Maggi has kept a blog since September 2003, writing about theology and faith, the arts and literature, and a little about life and random nonsense...
In an increasingly secularised society few people have a good working knowledge of the Bible. Yet a great deal of our culture is built on stories or ideas that come from the Bible. Literature, art, music, language and even the fabric of our society - such as our justice system - are built on Christian concepts and biblical references. The Writing on the Wall provides a fascinating introduction to the Bible's best-known, and most influential, stories. Each chapter gives some background to the text of the Bible, and shows how the stories have become enmeshed in Western culture. Adam and Eve, the ten plagues of Egypt, The Prodigal Son and Mary Magdalene all feature - along with how the Bible has influenced everyone from Shakespeare to Monty Python, and Caravaggio to Banksy. 
Giving It Up explores the Lenten idea of 'giving up', taking it beyond the traditional idea of simply abstaining from something, and suggesting instead that what we need to give up is our existing ideas about God. With a daily readings for each day of Lent, from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday, it follows the heroes of the Bible who had to give up their own too-small ideas about God.
This is Maggi’s bestselling book of daily readings for each day of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany. Advent is the beginning of the Church year, and marks the anticipation of the coming Messiah. These readings explore how beginnings and endings in our own lives are illuminated by the different Gospel narratives of Christ's coming.
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Hi Maggi, looking forward to reading Chris’ book too. As I read your ‘review’ I thought of Anna Carter Florence’s “Preaching As Testimony” (Westminster John Knox Press) I haven’t read the book, but linked to the introduction on my blog sometime ago. She, like Chris (and you) offers alternative ways of talking about “preaching” that I think are useful.
Maggi – I love your description of what preaching ‘really is’ and have linked to it from my blog – hope that’s ok!! Thanks for posting this – it’s a real encouragement to people like me with one foot in ‘emerging’ and the other in ‘inherited’
my community struggled with this too…
borrowing from the internet:
we use the term “content” instead of “sermon”; and “content provider” to describe the role of the person who preaches, uh, provides said content.
this idea of “content” has so many good connotations for us … (living near the AOL backbone) because e.g. for webpage design… “content is king”… (vs flash, hype, gloss)
This sounds great Maggi. A friend and I have started a service in a cafe for folks who want to be a part of a community but maybe have issues with church. We decided that there would be time after the sermon for people to respond and discuss the sermon. I’ve read of places doing this but I wasn’t sure how it would go. It was really good though. I had images of the disasterous dialogue sermon in “Mass Appeal” but everyone participated in the discussion and it was insightful.
I love your description of preaching too.
We all, each and every one of us, are really remarkable vessels. “Cracked pots,” “jars of clay,” as St. Paul tells us…and yet it’s precisely through that humanness that the light of Christ shines through.
Too long has preaching been imagined as a something done by folks who resemble a China vase sitting on the mantle…and that’s what’s gummed up the natural, God-breathed brilliance that wants to shine through us. Maggi’s got it right in her language about “gospel-tellers.”
You know how marvelously and beautifully and authentically we speak in an unguarded moment. That’s what we are, by the Holy Spirit, summoned to offer. Then, and only then, will we be any good at all. Then, and only then, will preaching or whatever you want to call it, will be any fun or joy or sense of that wondrous mystery God’s intended it to be.
Not that it’s going to be easy. Lord knows, we just might get ourselves killed for voicing this news. But if we’re inauthentic we’re already dead. If we’re true to our own God-breathed originality, then there’s nothing in this world that can really kill us. There’s something exquisitely joyous about that, and that’s something God can really us.
That, in part is what my book is about. Freeing up “preachers” to live more fully into the selves God has made them to be…whether engaging politics, war, the exegetical task, weddings, funerals, natural disasters and whatever else. I’m most concerned about the formation of the preacher herself.
Thanks Maggi for posting on this.
I just want to commend Brother Erdman’s book to all the readers of this blog. Thanks Maggie for having raised awareness of it. His words allow the preacher to breathe under the light load of preaching authentically, and yet he raises all expectations for what preaching might be. This gift of freedom within the powerful call to testify is a beautiful one for every preacher.