Taylor Mertins

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.

Stanley Hauerwas: “Beware when you hear a Methodist minister quote his/her twelve-year old in a sermon. When that happens you know you’re fixin’ to hear some baloney.” Though, when he says it, he uses a much saltier expression than baloney...

Jesus’ parables are intentionally designed to pop every circuit breaker in the minds of those who receive them. And yet, they are all confounding and head-scratching Good News - They declare that God saves losers and only losers. God finds the lost and only the lost. God raises the dead and only the dead.

The hiddenness of God is revealed in the person of Christ. The incomprehensibility of God is made known through the life, the teaching, the parables, the miracles, the healings, the feedings, and ultimately the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Which, when you think about it, is rather confounding. Or, perhaps it would be better to call it offensive...

What wondrous good news it is that, when Jesus showed up proclaiming the beginning of God’s new kingdom, he did so not with sermons about the Trinity, or the atonement, or justification, or any other big and abstract theological mishmash. Instead, Jesus began by pointing right at our stomachs, to that gnawing, unsatisfied, emptiness within and then invited us to dinner.

Jesus has a temple tantrum, flipping over tables and calling out the powers and principalities all as a commentary against what the faith of God’s people had become. Jesus was nothing if not zealous.

Jesus did not belong to the nice clean world of all the worst Hallmark Christmas movies, he did not belong to the reasonable, or honest, or sincere world of decency that we all too often claim for ourselves today. Jesus belonged to a family of murderers, cheats, cowards, scoundrels, adulterers, and liars. Jesus belonged to people like us, and he came for people like us.

We often present Christmas as something spiritual or mystical. Or, on the other hand, we criticize others for making this time of year too materialistic. But Christmas really is a reminder that Christianity is inherently materialistic. God becomes material in Jesus. God becomes us. How Odd.

Over and over again in scripture, and in life, God chooses the unexpected to bring about the Kingdom. God plucks people out of complacency and says, in different ways, shapes, and forms, “I’ve got a job for you!” God stirs up our understandings of the world, flips them upside down, and calls it Good News.