Taylor Mertins

No one, certainly not God, is keeping score and tallying up all of our good works against our bad. There is not a divine ledger with little tallies every time we misstep or we bring about something good in the world. And there is definitely not a test by which the accumulation of our wealth will determine whether or not salvation is in fact ours. The truth is a much harder pill to swallow precisel...

Jesus ends the story of the Prodigal without an end and it shows us that what’s most important has already happened. The fatted calf has been sacrificed so that the party can begin. Jesus has already mounted the hard wood of the cross so that we can let our hair down, and take off our shoes, and start dancing. We were lost and we’ve been found. That’s the only thing that matters.

In this particular parable none of the people who had a right to be at the party came, and all of the people who came had no right to be there. Nothing in the kingdom has anything to do with rights; God is going to deal with us in spite of our deservings, not according to them. And that just gets under our skin, or, worse, we completely ignore it. We’re so accustom to a way of being about earning...

Jesus destroys the exceptions of the dinner party crowd and he does it throughout his ministry. He is a critical Lord, though we often forget that part of him. He’s critical because he wants to destroy all of our favorite and foolish expectations. Being first, found, big, important, and alive matter little in the kingdom of God. They matter little because Jesus didn’t come to make the first firste...

At the very end, Jesus says the we who are knocking at the doors of perfect living and measured morality are nothing but workers of iniquity. Our good deeds are no more capable of getting us into the kingdom than our bad deeds are of keeping us out. Christ died for us while we were yet sinners. Not while we were perfect, and not even while we were repentant, but while we were sinners. There is not...

Jesus doesn’t give a flip whether we’ve got a fig on the tree or not. He only cares about forgiveness, a forgiveness we so desperately need because we have no idea what we are doing. For if we knew what we were doing, we would’ve solved all of the world’s problems by now. We wouldn’t have to worry about a young girl being ostracized in middle school for dressing like a boy. We wouldn’t have to wor...

We are blessed by the risen Lord, for he knocks at the door, even in our deaths, and he comes bringing the party with him. And this party is not far off and distant in both place and time from us, the party is here with us, right now. It’s just that most of us are too stubborn to notice.

Our world runs on avarice - Extreme greed for wealth or material goods. It’s the lie we were fed as children, and it’s the lie that we feed to our children. It is reinforced on every magazine cover, in every instagram post, and with every commercial on TV. Happiness is yours if you acquire this thing. And it’s all a lie.

Jesus doesn’t come just to show the disciples, and us, a new way of life but is, himself, the new way. This can be rather frustrating for the many of us who want Jesus to just be clear about what we should and shouldn’t do. Contrary to what we often hear from the church, Jesus is not waiting around for us to be perfect, but simply says the time has come for us to recognize how last, lost, least, l...

Jesus is free among the dead - He is the one who, again and again, is with the last, the least, the lost, the little, and the dead. If we want the parable to tell us to imitate the Good Samaritan, which it certainly does, then that’s fine. But if that’s all the Good Samaritan is good for, then it isn’t very good. Instead it leaves people like you and me feeling fine and guilty. We feel fine in ter...

We will never ever be able to enjoy the gift of the resurrection, a gift handed to us for nothing, if we cannot face the absurdity of our own forgiveness.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with wanting to be better - it’s just that in spite of our desires for approval and change and growth, the work of the Lord remains steadfast. Jesus saves losers and only losers. He raises the dead and only the dead. He finds the lost and only the lost. The last, least, lost, little, and dead receive more of Jesus’ joy than all of the winners in the world. And we...

Religion, in the many ways it manifests itself, often only has one thing to say: people like you and me need to do something in order to get God to do something. We need only be good enough, or faithful enough, or merciful enough, until we tip the scales back in our favor. But this kind of religious observance, which is most religious observance, traps us in a game that we will always and forever...

The resurrection of Jesus is completely contrary to our way of being. It is completely contrary because we have nothing to do with it. Jesus wasn’t waiting in the grave until there was the right amount of belief in the world before he broke free from the chains of Sin and Death. Jesus wasn’t biding his time waiting for his would-be followers to engage in systems of perfect morality before offering...

The crucifixion of Jesus puts to an end the religious categories that separate people from one another and unites us under a common banner. We might want that banner to be a declaration of love, or grace, or mercy. But the thing under which we are all included is actually our guilt. We, all of us, are the ungodly. And yet Christ dies, for us.

We Christians are a people forever stuck in the past. And we can hardly be blamed; we only know what we know. But on Maundy Thursday we are compelled to get our sense of time confused. For tonight we do what we do both in remembrance and in anticipation.

There will always be more for us to do, but the one thing we could never do has already been done for us. The work of Christ, life-death-resurrection, provides all the enoughness we could ever really hope for. It is the sign that though we are unworthy, Christ makes us worthy, though we have sinned, Christ offers pardon, though we feel empty, Christ proclaims that we are enough.

The elder brother is so convinced, too convinced, that doing all of the right things will be enough to save him. His refrain is “I did everything I was supposed to. I stayed home. I took care of my responsibilities. I planned accordingly. I was perfect.” And yet his life is anything but perfect. And he cannot stand the idea of his father throwing a party for his brother who deserves nothing. But w...

The cross is the manure of grace that is spread into and throughout our lives. It is a frightening thing that we’d rather ignore or dismiss, and yet without it we are nothing. And still, the manure that is grace is offered to our lives even when, and precisely because, we are not bearing fruit! We worship a God of impossible possibilities, a God who offers more chances than we ever deserve, a God...

There is a great leveling on the hill called Golgotha. Because until that moment, as Jesus says, the house was left to us. And when the house is left to us we, more often than not, like to chose who is able to join us in the house. We like to create our own rules about who is first and who is last, who is right and who is wrong, who is included and who is excluded. But so long as the house is left...

We are so much a people of the world, rather than the kingdom, that it is nearly impossible to see the temptation story from any point of view other than the devil’s - If you take away the fact that Jesus is the Son of God, take away the fact that we know the end of the story, the devil’s questions sound pretty good... That’s crazy. It’s a crazy thing to realize, here at the beginning of our own L...

On Ash Wednesday we gather, we listen, and we faintly begin to grasp that there is quite literally nothing we can do to get God to love us more. We look deeply into our sins, the sins of the church, and the sins of the world and we inexplicably come into contact with the God who extends mercy to us even in the midst of our horrible condition. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. We can...

We started the recent General Conference in prayer and we even had a cross up at the front of the room, but there was one person who was conspicuously absent from the proceedings: Jesus. Sure, I heard a lot about what it says in Leviticus. I heard a lot about Paul. I heard people quote precisely from John Wesley. But Jesus? I honestly don’t know where Jesus was while we were trying to figure out t...

It is crazy that the United Methodist Church has the potential to go up (or down) in flames in the next ten days all over a debate about what does and what does not count as a sin when every one of our sins has already been taken up in the cross.

Christ died for our sins. He was buried in the ground. He was raised on the third day. To Paul, this was of first importance. Not our behavior. Not even a list of beliefs. But a story. The story.