Taylor Mertins

Paul says that Abraham is righteous not because of his goodness or virtue or morality, but because God reckons him righteous. God makes Abraham righteous by grace. This is why, to quote Paul again, the Law brings wrath but the Gospel sets free. Doing all of the right things and knowing all the right people and making all the right choices can’t make us right. We all fall short of the glory of God,...

Now what? That’s what the disciples must be asking themselves when they gather with Jesus on the mountain in Galilee. Perhaps that’s the question you’re asking now that you’ve made it to the end of your confirmation adventure. Here’s the answer: no matter where life takes you, no matter what mountaintops or valleys you experience, no matter what you do or leave undone, whether you have blessed ass...

The theologian Willie Jennings says, “This is the beginning of a community broken open by the sheer act of God, and we are still yet to comprehend the extent to which God acts and is acting to break us open.” This is important. It’s important because, despite all of our best efforts, we tend to consider Pentecost only in the past tense, something that happened way back when never to happen again....

Have you listened to the birds recently? Or considered the lilies? Jesus asks us to do so not just because it’s nice, and it is nice, but it also helps to give us perspective. It opens our eyes to something more than whatever is currently weighing us down. The Gospel is a promise. Jesus cares about you, desires your welfare and your gladness. You can give him your worries, by prayer, by exhaustion...

Forming the church, a community that is sustained by the wily Lord named Jesus, is as challenging as any endeavor we will encounter. It looks like a group of people who willfully gather with nearly nothing in common save for the fact that Jesus calls us his friends. It looks like people who are willing to pray for things they wouldn’t pray for on their own, like our enemies. It looks like people w...

For God’s sake, what do you suppose we are going to be, you and I? When we grow up? That may fall a bit flat, of course. Some of us here are no longer children, though we may act like it online. Surely many of us have all of our growing up behind us. We’re responsible, committed, and decisive. We’ve already seen enough to know we’ve seen enough. Perhaps the question isn’t “What are we going to do?...

The apostle Peter pens an epistle to the early church in large part because they are trying to navigate what it means to be faithful and political in the world. They are contending against the Powers and Principalities and Politics of their day and they want to know which way to go. In chapter 2 Peter is in the middle of exhorting the faithful community to resist the empire by imitating the Lord w...

Paul and Silas travel to Thessalonica and they proclaim the Good News of the Gospel to any who will listen. But a band of ruffians, that’s the Greek for you, a band of ruffians form a mob and they send the city into an uproar. They try to find Paul and Silas in order to bring them before the authorities, and when they can’t find them they drag some other believers before the city rulers and they s...

Embarrassment is a unexplored virtue. The truth about the church is that we never really know what we’re walking into and we never really know who God is going to drag through the door. And sometimes the slides don’t work, or the microphone feeds back, or the sermon falls flat, but at least it’s real. Sometimes we sit next to someone who gets on our nerves, or the prayers hint at a reality we’re n...

Easter is a promise. It is a promise that you are worthy of love and that nothing can ever separate you from the love of God in Jesus, not even death.

Jesus is a revolutionary. It’s just a different revolution than anyone thought it would be. He’s not a lion who will supplant violence with more violence. He’s just the lamb, the lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world...

The great Robert Farrar Capon believed that the greatest challenge facing the church wasn’t questions about the afterlife but rather our present dullness. In short, he believed we lost our astonishment. He said that the Good News preached in churches is no longer life-changing, only after-life changing. And yes, the promise is that one day God will breathe life into our old dry bones, but the prom...

Jesus heals the blind man so that he can truly see. He sees the brokenness of the world but he also sees how beautiful the world can be because he sees Jesus. Whenever we look at the cross it’s like God is rubbing mud in our eyes. Grace is amazing but it’s also kind of grimy. The cross shows us the brokenness of the world and the beauty of the world to come. The cross is both a reminder of our sin...

When we survey the wondrous cross, on which the Prince of Glory died, we see the lengths to which God will go to forgive sin. The cross is both ugly and beautiful. The cross is as ugly as sin and is as beautiful as love. But in the end, love wins. Which means the past isn’t prologue. The Gospel is the proclamation and the promise that God isn’t done with anyone. It doesn’t matter what you did ten...

God so loves you that God gives it all for you. God does not send Jesus into the world to condemn you, but to save you. Once you see it you can’t really see anything else. Or, to quote CS Lewis, once you see it, by it you begin to see everything else. It’s like being born. Again.

Some things never change. God has always used fools to shame the wise, has worked to lift up the lowly and knock down the mighty, and demonstrated strength through weakness. And, oddly enough, even though Jesus refuses the temptations of the tempter in the wilderness, by the end of the gospel he will, in fact, do the things the devil suggests. Instead of turning a boulder into a biscuit in the wil...

Lent is, as Stanley Hauerwas notes, a dangerous time for Christians. With talk of ashes and repentance, renewal and sin, we can soon turn the Good News of the Gospel into the bad news of God’s dangling us over the fire pit of damnation. And, despite the fact that there are, indeed, scriptures that describe God’s wrath (particularly toward those who are responsible for injustice), the strange new w...

'Seeing is believing,' we say. Implicit in this kind of affirmation is the presumption that if we were given enough information, enough data, enough instruction then our faith meters would be full to the brim. Except, when it comes to the disciples, they had already seen it all and it wasn’t enough. Which means that with Jesus, it’s the opposite: Believing is seeing. And, if should we worry that w...

I will confess that I did not know how to end this sermon. All week I worried about how to wrap it all up and I fear the art and text may leave us with more questions than answers. But then I remembered a line from the theologian Chris Green. Basically, he says to preachers, if you don’t what to say, then tell the church what the text makes you want to pray - for them, for yourself, for your famil...

Whenever we plant seeds and harvest the fruit, whenever we break bread and share stories with our friends, whenever we are surprised by the impossible possibility of God, we practice resurrection. Maybe the Mad Farmer of Wendell Berry’s poem is just that, a person committed to the earth who has grown bewildered by the wildness of it all. Or maybe the Mad Farmer is the divine gardener who insists o...

There’s a deep pleasure in the gospel that we don’t talk about very much, and it’s the pleasure of being surrounded by others in such a safe, fun, and inviting way that we can learn to laugh. Laugh at the world, laugh at ourselves. There’s such a relief in being able to say, like Abraham and Sarah, “Oh what a fool I’ve been! I was so sure I knew how this was all going to shake out. I shaped my who...

For some reason the Holy Spirit is pleased to let these words stand as they are before us in the beginning of all things and the beginning of the Bible. Perhaps its because the Spirit, like any good artist, knows that color and shape and shadow and light and images reveal the truth. Importantly, the Word of God is both audible and visual. Artists, therefore, preach for the eye; for artists the med...

whenever we gather at this table, in this room, on a day like today, we’re certainly here in this time and place with these people, but we’re also in that room with Jesus long long ago. And we, no matter what we’ve done or left undone, no matter what happens when we leave from the table, the bread is broken and the cup is shared for us and with us. Art, as they say, imitates life. The church has b...

Chances are you’ve felt interrupted a time or two this Christmas season; you had a plan and then you watched it fall apart. And chances are your life is not what you thought it would be. Various interruptions interrupted the path you prepared. And yet, God works through interruption. God shows up, usually when we least expect it, like a knock at the door, like the crying out of a little baby, like...

What happens when the preacher preaches an unwritten sermon?