The Letter

Eight years after The Forbidden Sermons, Leon Scheffield is sixty-eight years old and still driving between dying churches, still delivering the sermon that changes things, still carrying the letter his mentor left him about a table he hasn't found yet.Then a stranger writes to him using words from that letter.Words he's shown to no one.The Letter follows Leon through one year and six traditions - Reformed, Pentecostal, Progressive, Baptist, Catholic, Methodist/Wesleyan - each one in a specific form of collapse, each one asking him something the sermon he already knows cannot reach. A dying man in Asheville whose hands are shaking. A worship leader in San Antonio who knows the difference between the real thing and the manufactured thing. A deacon in Memphis who is furious at God and done with being handled. A priest in Portland who has been sitting on the truth for six years.And running alongside all of it: Marguerite Fontaine, a music teacher who has been through every tradition Leon is visiting and belongs to none of them, who appears in cities she wasn't told about, who has been composing a piece of music for seven years that she cannot finish because the final movement is in a place she hasn't been able to reach alone.What Leon has been calling the prior grace is not the destination of the sermon. It is the ground the sermon was always happening inside of. That discovery requires a year, seven encounters, and a kitchen table in a small town in December.A continuation of The Forbidden Sermons.