Taylor Mertins

Food is important! And yet here, in America, our connection with and to our food is one that has altogether lost its sacredness. 20% of all American meals are eaten in car. And the overwhelming majority of those meals are consumed alone. 1 out of every 5 children will go hungry, multiple days without eating, at least once a year. And among Black and Latino children the rate is 1 in 3. And somehow...

Prayer is at the heart of the Christian life. It is something Jesus consistently did throughout the gospels, it is something we do here every single week, and I would venture to guess that most of us here, in a variety of ways, pray every day. But prayer, with all of its prevalence in the church, is something we don’t really talk about. Sure, we might do it, but what is the it we are doing?

For many of us The American Dream has become The American Nightmare when it comes to money and finances. So many of us are unwilling to delay gratification and we use tomorrow’s money to finance today’s lifestyle. Few us us save money appropriately because we keep thinking that tomorrow won’t come. But then it does. Over and over again.

In the United States there are more self-storage facilities than Starbucks and McDonalds combined! With the crazy and ridiculous ways that we are accumulating more items than we could ever possibility need, far too many us us are are focusing on earthly things instead of heavenly things.

Time is a harsh mistress.

Being a Christian isn’t popular, and it certainly isn’t easy. Paul calls for us to put on the armor of God because we’re going to need it!

When we, the church, are out of touch with our vocation it’s as if we’re stumbling around in the darkness like drunken fools. We might feel a welcome reprieve from the mundanity of life, we might get the hit we need to forget our frivolity, but without our call we cease to be the church.

We are an angry people, we Christians, and that's okay. We worship a Messiah who spent most of his earthly ministry being angry. But our anger, like Christ's, should not send us into despair or violence. Our anger, like Christ's, should send us to an even stranger place: truth.

There is a tremendous difference between loving one another (like Christ), and being nice. Being nice often means being quiet, and not calling out the behavior of others. Loving like Jesus however, often means speaking up and actually calling someone out. Easier said than done.

God loves us and there's nothing we can do about it.

Jesus’ peace is greater than any earthly vision we could possibly imagine. It is more powerful than any political policy, it is mightier than any magistrate’s order, it is more life giving than any piece of legislation. Jesus’ peace is revolutionary.

This country, and our love of it, flirts very closely with what Jesus called idolatry. When the country we live in becomes more important than the God who created us, when the lights in the sky on the 4th of July shine brighter than the bread and cup on this table, when we care more about what’s happening in Washington DC than what’s happening in our local community, then we have a problem. And pa...

We need Jesus to smack us across the head not with smooth stones from the wadi but with the hard wood of the cross. We need to be brought low to the ground before we can be raised high. We need to be defeated in order to be redeemed.

We complain about politics all the time. We hold our elected leaders to standards that we ourselves do not adhere to. And when they disappoint us we act as if no one could have predicted this. But we get the politicians we deserve.

Words are important. What we say often shapes what we believe and, perhaps even more importantly, it shapes how we behave.

Most of us have come of age in a world where the God of scripture has been conveyed to us through analogy after analogy, where professional Christians like me have endeavored to bring people like you closer to the divine, when the truth of the matter is that we cannot describe God, and God is the One who encounters us.

Easter boldly proclaims that at the end of our possibilities God creates a new beginning – Pentecost shows us how we take the first steps.

The whole truth of God’s testimony is that God gives us eternal life through Jesus Christ. It is that simple, yet truly profound witness that gives us the power and the courage to speak our whole truth regardless of the consequences.

Right now the contemporary church, from the realm of United Methodism to conservative evangelicalism, is struggling. The church struggles, in large part, because of our failure to recognize how we are bound to God and not to the world – such that many churches take their theological cues from the powers and principalities and assert them on scripture, rather than the other way around. It is precis...

It is in the loving of the other that we, and they, are made both human and holy. And this is at the heart of it all. We can talk about how much we love God because God loves us, but without loving our fellow human beings, we cannot know God! Let that sink in for just a moment – without love for one another, we cannot know God.

If you could saying anything to your/the church, without consequences, what would you say?

For some reason, as we mature into adulthood, our joyful play begins to fade and for some of us it completely stops. We just accept things the way they are, we make peace with the labels placed on us by society, we accept the love we think we deserve. And, more often than not, we'd rather relax than play. But not today...

All of us, particularly those of us with a self-righteous leaning, are sinners in need of God’s grace. From the racists to those who abandon their racist family members. One of the harshest realities this side of Easter is that most of us believe we are without sin, and we deceive ourselves.

Hear the Good News, the best news. Hear the three most important words you will ever hear: He is risen!

On Easter we have reason to celebrate; death has been defeated! But Easter is also a reminder that God has inaugurated a strange new world, in which all of our priorities have been flipped upside down. Are we afraid? If not, maybe we should be.