Taylor Mertins

Hosanna. I’ve always loved that word. It’s such a churchy word. And, every Palm Sunday, we reach into the vault of churchy words, we dust off this old familiar declaration, and we proudly put it on display. We shout it in our hymns, we put the word on the lips of our children, we hear it read in the scriptures. And then, at the conclusion of worship, we wrap it up and place it back into the church...

Our world is built on the assumption that whatever ails us can be fixed by us. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It is good and right for us to dig deep into our wallets and purses to help those in need. We do have an obligation to love our neighbors and our enemies as ourselves. We need to believe in a better world. We need hope. But we aren’t the hope of the world. If we were then we would...

Contrary to how we might often imagine it, the whole ministry of the Lord isn’t about the importance of our religious observances, or our spiritual proclivities, or even our bumbling moral claims. It’s about God having a good time and just dying, literally, to share it with us.

We are all fruitless fig trees standing alone in the middle of God’s vineyard. We are doing nothing and we deserve nothing. And yet (!) Jesus looks at our barren limbs, all of our fruitless works, and he says the three words we deserve not at all: “Lord, forgive them.”

Grace, what we talk about all the time, isn’t so amazing unless there’s a reason for it. Put another way - the law of God is given in order that grace might be sought, and the grace of God is given in order that the law might be fulfilled. We need rejection and election. We need law and gospel. Because that’s what life is like. Karl Barth put it this way: “There is no light which does not also kno...

Notice: the things the devil offers to the Lord, they’re all objectively good things - bread, political power, miracles. And yet, Jesus refused them. And he even used scripture to defend his refusals! Perhaps if the devil offered Jesus an unending buffet at the golden corral, or the nuclear codes, or David Copperfield’s assortment of illusions, we could sympathize with Jesus’ dismissals. But the d...

We can’t fix ourselves. In any other place and in an other institution and around any other people that is unmitigated bad news. But here, in the church, it’s nothing but Good News. It’s good news because nobody, not the devil, not the world, not even ourselves can take us away from the Love that refuses to let us go.

The voice from the cloud commands us to listen to Jesus. But, and it's a big but, if we’re honest with ourselves, we don’t want to listen to Jesus. We’d rather listen to ourselves. We’d rather listen to ourselves because we are downright addicted to control. Or, at least to thinking we’re in control. And yet, do you know how God responds to those who think they’re in control? Laughter. It is humbl...

Prayer is, and must be, more than bringing our wish lists to Jesus, asking him for occasional help when our bodies are no longer functioning the way they are supposed to. Prayer, instead, is the risky attempt to let Jesus speak.

I can’t prove the resurrection. No one can. "Believe this," "Believe that," we say in the church. And somehow the genuine character of one’s belief has become the litmus test for Christianity. Which is made all the more strange when we consider the amount of doubt right smack dab in the Bible! My former professor Stanley Hauerwas puts it this way: “What a lost people we must be to think that God r...

"The story of Jesus Christ, the one Paul proclaimed to the Corinthians, is that God comes to us not because we are good, but because we aren’t. And when we start to see that, not just in the strange new world of the Bible, but in our very lives, it is the difference that makes all the difference..."

Heaven is the party of the streaming sunlight of the world’s final afternoon. Heaven is when all the dead beats and all the success stories, all the losers who never got anything right and all the winners who finally give up on winning, simply waltz over to the judgment seat called the Kingdom of God, with nothing to show for their lives except an eternal invitation from the host of the party that...

What we believe shapes how we behave. And if we believe that God in Christ really reveals the fullness of love, then we need not look further than that love to see how we are to be. Therefore, in the great and somewhat adapted words of John Wesley, though we may not think alike, though our differences of opinion and religious understanding may vary considerably, though we may not agree even on wha...

When the incarnate God in Jesus Christ comes to us, we nail him to the cross. And then, three days later, God gives him back to us. Which is just another way of saying: Hear the Good News, Christ died for us *while* we were yet sinners, and that prove’s God’s love toward us.

We are called to practice resurrection. That is, we Christians live according to the Good News of the Gospel which means we are different. We belong to a new age and a new time and a new kingdom in which death is not the end. Our rejoicing, therefore, is not naïveté. We don’t come here to pretend that everything out there isn’t actually out there. We come here precisely because the darkness is so...

Contrary to how it’s been portrayed in the church or even in our wider culture, we never really pick Jesus. When all is said and done, when the King of kings and Lord of lords comes to dwell among us, we nail him to the cross. We, to put it bluntly, pick Barabbas instead. Which makes some of Jesus’ final words are the more powerful: “Forgive them Lord, for they do not know what they are doing.”

No matter how wild the world might become, and no matter how poor our priests might be, there is one thing that hasn’t changed, and it never will - the power of God’s unconditional love and the call on our lives from the One who is Love.

The church, at her best, is a storied enterprise - that is, she exists because of the story and lives by telling the story - the story of God.

The “all” in “All Saints” is important. Lest we fall prey to the temptation of believing that saints are only those perfect Christians - Saints are just sinners in the hands of a loving God. In fact, if there’s any real requirement for being a saint, it is merely the admission that we are not yet what we can be. It’s about coming to grips with the condition of our condition all while holding fast...

Jesus is in the business of transformation - of taking us from where we are, to where we can be. That’s what church is all about. We don’t do what we do just to sing a few songs, and think a few lofty thoughts, and feel a few warm fuzzies only to do it all again next week. We do what we do because it changes us!

At the end of the day it’s important to remember that the Gospel, the Good News, is a story. It’s not a self-help program, it’s not a textbook with steps to salvation, it’s not program for perfect morality. It’s a story, actually the story, that re-narrates all of our stories.

A one-sentence sermon - God meets us on the roads of life, proclaims the Good News through likely and unlikely places, is revealed when we eat at the table, and sends us to the share Good News to all who will hear it.

Grace is what happens when, no matter how hard we’ve tried to do more and be better, we see ourselves for who we really are AND we discover that God does not abandon us.

If you ain’t first, you’re last - so says the world. From the time we’re young adults until the day we die its always this break-neck competition for firstness, greatness, foundness. But in the Kingdom of God Jesus does his best work, his only work really, with the last, least, lost, little, and dead. People like us.

God in Christ has this knack for making outsiders into insiders, for reaching beyond beyond the boundaries of propriety, for meeting people where they are and not where they ought to be. God meets us in our mistakes, not in our triumphs. God meets us in our sins, not in our successes.