Taylor Mertins

For as much as we love the notion of God’s amazing grace, we don’t actually like it. Because it’s all so backward. It lets rotten sons and crooked tax farmers and red light district harlots and all sorts of other disreputable types, into the kingdom and thumbs its nose at all the so-called good people. Why? Because grace only works for those in need, and we don’t ever want to seem like we’re in ne...

The great writer Annie Dillard died this week. Her 1975 nonfiction book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the Pulitzer and it is about the titular creek that’s just outside of Roanoke. In the very beginning of her memoir about a year of living near the creek, she writes about a curious habit she had as a child. She would sneak pennies from her parents and hide them in the cracks of the sidewalk. Then, s...

How much we make of ‘wellness’, ‘health’ and ‘wholeness’; The ideal body, the unblemished form, How deeply we despise and hide our weakness And worship all the world thinks strong and firm. And how each facile photoshopped appearance Haunts and accuses children as they grow Until they pine for their own disappearance And waste away and never tell their woe. But you have never fallen for this idol,...

There’s a word I’ve heard a lot recently, and maybe you have too. That word is “for.” I don’t know what to do for my mother. She’s in a home that provides everything for her but she sleep for hours a day and she clearly needs more. My children need all sorts of new things for school. You would think the backpack we bought last year would work for them, but they are convinced they need a different...

I wonder if your life feels like a mess. If it doesn’t, well good for you. But, sooner or later it will because the world has a knack for piling it on. And even if you feel like you’ve got it all worked out, that you can handle whatever the world throws your way, God weirdly delights in turning things upside down too. But here’s the Good News of the Gospel: God in Christ Jesus is more powerful tha...

God’s house of prayer isn’t restrictive. It’s not some super exclusive club where only the best and the brightest and the most faithful get to enjoy the party. No, God’s house of prayer is inclusive. To use a line from Robert Farrar Capon, it’s like a backyard wedding reception where a whole bunch of uninvited people show up and they refuse to move indoors even when it starts to rain.

The truth, of course, is that we all wish God was a little more obvious. We, like Elijah, are looking for big signs and clear signals. But God’s love is not like the over-bearing parent who wants to do every little thing for their child to the degree that the child never does anything on their own. No, instead God shows up and speaks up and gets super quiet in ways that we can scarcely imagine but...

Listen, says the Lord, listen so that you may live. I am making a promise, an everlasting covenant; behold the one who comes from the line of David. Because of the one who makes a way where there is no way, people will come to you who you would otherwise never know, they will flock to you because I am doing a new thing, I am filling you with life and delight. Here, in the strange and wonderful pla...

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...