I am sometimes amazed, even alarmed, at the extent to which people judge ministers by their preaching, and preaching by its rhetoric.

To do so is to make the entirely spurious but nearly universal assumption that God is better served by a poet than by an accountant.

It may be that the most eloquent sermons consist of the ways in which ordinary people bear pains in their hands and sides, their necks and backsides, in the daily crucifixion of being alive…

Inasmuch as we are all carrying a cross, we are carrying a pulpit, too.

The best pulpit.

from A Dresser of Sycamore Trees