Taylor Mertins

Contrary to how we often talk about it, and even how we live it out, Christianity isn’t a religion - if it is anything it is the declaration of the end of religion. Religion consists of all the things human beings have ever thought we have to do to get right with God. Christianity tells us that God in Christ does what we could never do in order to reconcile the world to himself. Or, as Martin Luth...

The joy of the church is realizing how God delights in gathering people together who otherwise have nothing in common save for the fact that Jesus calls them his friends.

It’s outrageous stuff, forgiveness. It just also happens to be the way Jesus runs the kingdom.

In Christ, we encounter the incomparable new reality of God which both humbles us and exalts us, which knocks us down and builds us up, and that is our peace. You see, peace, at least peace as defined by the Gospel, comes when we recognize our universal incompetence and our total need for someone to do for us that which we cannot do on our own. God has claimed us. And, as Karl Barth put it, unity...

Being a Christian isn’t natural. It runs counter to the ways of the world. Turn the other cheek? Love your enemies? Pray for those who persecute you? We are different. However, we have often tried to avoid the differences that make us different. We don’t want to appear strange, or evangelical, or like those other kinds of Christians (whoever they may be). We’ve been content to let our faith be som...

Again and again in the strange new world of the Bible, God meets the people of God in the midst of their sins, down in the muck of life, and offers grace. And grace, as Robert Farrar Capon so wonderfully puts it, isn’t cheap or even expensive, its free.

Jesus does not work according to the ways of the world. He does not say, “Bring to me your perfect lives and your perfect jobs and your perfect families.” Instead, he says, “Bring to me your burdens and I will give you rest.” Jesus does not look at our choices and our actions in order to weigh out whether or not we’ve done enough to make it through the pearly gates. Instead, he says, “I have come...

We might rejoice in viewing one another through our mistakes and our shortcomings, but in the kingdom of God we are viewed only through what Christ did and does for us. We might enjoy holding our judgments and prejudices against one another, but in the kingdom of God Jesus knows none of deserve anything, and yet we receive everything. We might love propping up all of our good works for everyone el...

God, unlike us, delights in impossible possibilities. The insanity of the Gospel is that, over time, God actually changes us. We are not what we once were because God will not let us stay that way. God, through bread and wine, through water and Spirit, is making all things new. Including us!

It’s one thing to sing “What A Friend We Have In Jesus” but it’s another thing entirely to think “what a friend Jesus has in us.”

Hear the Good News: God in Christ arrives in a world, in a vineyard, that cannot bear any fruit on it’s own. It has given itself over to disease, and abuse, and pestilence, and all sorts of other failures. But the (di)vinegrower tills the ground, enriches the soil, and plants the seeds that are the Word to bear fruit.

We truly are sheep without a hope in the world unless we have a shepherd who is willing to do for us that which we cannot do on our own. Thankfully, that’s exactly what we get in Christ Jesus.

Resurrection, believe it or not, is forever inextricably tied up with our food and love of it. It is quite literally by the death of corn, cabbage, and collards that we have lived until today.

The world is going down the drain, but we’ve got a Savior who works at the bottom of the drain and he’s the only one who can do anything about it. And what is the anything our savior does? He forgives!

In just about every other part of our lives, there are expectations. And yet, Jesus is all about the unexpected. Jesus doesn’t wait on the cross until we right all of our wrongs. Jesus doesn’t hide behind the stone in the tomb until there’s enough do-goodery in the world. Instead, the proclamation of Easter is we don’t have to do anything, because the everything we’ve always needed is already done...

Consider the strange new world of the Bible - God looked upon us and our sin and what did God do? God did not remain above and far removed from our struggle. Instead, God chose to come right down into the muck and mire of our existence. God looked upon us and our sins and God entered into our very condition, birthed as a baby to a virgin in a manger. That baby grew to proclaim the Good News for a...

The foot washing has always been a little strange and a little weird to the people called church. For one, only John includes it and, for another, it reveals the heart of God in a way that feels uncomfortable. Not only does Jesus, God in the flesh, get down on his knees to wash the dirty feet of the disciples, one of whom will shortly betray him, another will deny him, and the rest will leave him...

The Good News of Jesus Christ is that we have already been forgiven, and we’ve been set free. What was done to us does not define us. What we’ve done, and failed to do, is no longer kept in a ledger of God’s design.

The great gift of the church is that God in Christ makes our lives far more interesting than they deserve to be. You see, Christianity is neither a religion nor a club nor a civic organization - Christianity is an adventure.

Jesus has taken the cleanup of the cosmos entirely into his own hands, hands with holes in them. He does not hang from the cross until we confess our sins, he doesn’t wait in the grave until we get our lives together. He does what he does without us having to do anything - which makes the Gospel the most radical thing in history.

Usually, when we picture Jesus, he’s this hippy-dippy character who throws up a peace sign every once in a while, he asks us to all get along, and above all he is nice. But Jesus wasn’t nice. You don’t crucify someone for being nice...

The devil wants Jesus to do what we want Jesus to do. Or, perhaps better put: The devil wants Jesus to do what we want to do. But here’s the Good News, the really Good News: Jesus is able to resist temptations that we would not, could not, and frankly do not.

A reminder for Lent: we are forgiven not *after* we confess our sins, but right smack dab in the middle of them. (But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us - Rom. 5.8)

Jesus is not just some ethical teacher who wants us to behave ourselves. Jesus is not some political revolutionary whose words we can cherry pick to suit our needs. Jesus is not a new David come to elevate us to the places of power and prestige. Jesus is God! In himself he is the new creation.

Contrary to how the church so often functions, Jesus isn’t really trying to convince us, or the crowds, of anything. He simply stands to deliver story after story giving us glimpses behind the curtain of the cosmos and dares us to do nothing more than believe.