Taylor Mertins

Today we live in a world where we are forever asking, "Who deserves to come into our country?" and "Who is worthy of receiving healthcare?" and even "Who should be admitted to college?" But in the kingdom of God, at the Lord's Table, all are welcome. Always.

Do we feel like the merchant from Jesus' parable? Are we willing to risk it all and throw ourselves completely in for the kingdom? Or, at the very least, have we found a pearl in the church?

If the church is no better than the culture that surrounds it, if it doesn’t embody a different way of being, then it simply isn’t the church.

We might not want to let God take care of our backyard gardens, wasting seeds left and right. But when it comes to the garden of the church, when it comes to people like you and me, there is no greater gardener than the Lord.

We are captivated more by the optimism of “what if” than the pessimism of “it’s too late.” We are held in bondage to the belief that we are more than the mistakes of the past, more that the pain of the present, and more than the unknown of the future. We are prisoners of hope.

The goal of preaching is the hope that people will not remember what you said. The goal should be that the next time someone turns to that part of the Bible it will say a little more to him or her. The purpose of the church, of doing worship week after week, is to give the bible a little more room to shine.

We become God’s people, a people of holy kisses, when the pews of the sanctuary are more like avenues of connection and less like walls of division.

Pentecost may be the birthday of the Church, but it is NOT the birthday of the Spirit.

Today, we throw the word “heaven” around like we throw around the word “love.” We use it as a filler or a descriptor to such a degree that it no longer means anything. And therefore when we say that Jesus ascended into heaven and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, we no longer know what we are saying.

What has God done for me? God sent me to a church that listened to me, prayed with me, and loved me in spite of myself. What has God done for you?

Thomas wanted to know how to get where Jesus was going, he wanted an answer to his question, he wanted to know the way. And Jesus responded like this, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”

For far too long we’ve limited our imagination of the church to being the mechanism by which we can develop strategies that, to put it in political terms, Make America Great Again. But that is not the task nor is it the mission of the church. The task of the church is to be a community of character that can survive as a witness to the truth.

We make so many assumptions about people without ever doing the good and difficult work of learning who they really are. We see a bumper sticker, or we hear an accent, or we observe a skin tone, or we read a Facebook post, and we let that dictate who they are to us. When truthfully, what we make of those limited observations says far more about us, than about the ones we see.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself.

The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the epitome of God’s power and grace. Through it we see how God took something like a cross, a means of death, and turned it into the joy of life-everlasting. On Easter God transformed the tomb in the same way that He did on Christmas in a virgin’s womb. God made a way where there was no way. On Easter, Jesus opened up a strange new world for people like...

While sitting at the table with his friends, it’s as if Jesus is telling them that when they see him hanging on the cross, they should see a door with blood. It’s as if Jesus is telling them that his sacrifice, his death, is their exodus.

Don’t be mistaken; Jesus is as political as they come. But he rules not at the head of an army, but from an old wooden cross. He rules not by filibustering particular Supreme Court nominees or demanding democratic political policies, but by laying it all down for the ungodly. He rules not by ordering his troops to use chemical weapons against innocent civilians or even sending tomahawk missiles to...

One of the things we struggle to remember, here in our comfortable Christianity, is that Jesus was a revolutionary. He was not killed for loving too much. He was killed for calling into question who was really in charge, for confronting the elite about not taking care of the poor and the marginalized, and for telling the truth. Jesus was a revolutionary and calls us to join the revolution.

Our lives have changed forever. We can’t just retreat to the ways of the past because grace abounds. God in Christ has made in us a new creation! The gift of God in Christ on the cross was, and is, such that we are forever freed from the tyranny of sin and death. Should we continue to sin in order that grace may abound? HELL NO!

Truly I tell you, we cannot know who we are to be, if we do not know our story. This inexhaustible, unexplainable, indescribable moment from the beginning (Genesis) is who we are. It is the story of how the life of order fell into disorder. But, thanks be to God, it is not the end of the story.

We don’t like admitting our shortcomings, our faults, and our helplessness. We reject that gospel and substitute our own. We’d rather believe the American gospel: God helps those who help themselves. Actually, Paul tells us quite the opposite: When we could not help ourselves, when we were stuck in the shadow of sin, Christ died for us.

We can have the perfect advertising campaign, with our slogan in big capital letters, but that does not redeem our sinful actions and behaviors. We might think we are righteous and that we are “color-blind” or “LGBTQ affirming” or “economically transparent” but we are nevertheless sinners in need of God’s grace and forgiveness. We can even leave the church doors unlocked all week long, but we will...

By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

In an attempt to live into my fear, I stepped up to the pulpit without a pre-written sermon and offered this about the Transfiguration.

When we pray like the psalmist, when we utter words with true faith and humility, when we ask for God's will to be done and mean it, our prayers will always mean more than what we hear from the pulpit.