Taylor Mertins

Prayer is, and must be, more than bringing our wish lists to Jesus, asking him for occasional help when our bodies are no longer functioning the way they are supposed to. Prayer, instead, is the risky attempt to let Jesus speak.

I can’t prove the resurrection. No one can. "Believe this," "Believe that," we say in the church. And somehow the genuine character of one’s belief has become the litmus test for Christianity. Which is made all the more strange when we consider the amount of doubt right smack dab in the Bible! My former professor Stanley Hauerwas puts it this way: “What a lost people we must be to think that God r...

"The story of Jesus Christ, the one Paul proclaimed to the Corinthians, is that God comes to us not because we are good, but because we aren’t. And when we start to see that, not just in the strange new world of the Bible, but in our very lives, it is the difference that makes all the difference..."

Heaven is the party of the streaming sunlight of the world’s final afternoon. Heaven is when all the dead beats and all the success stories, all the losers who never got anything right and all the winners who finally give up on winning, simply waltz over to the judgment seat called the Kingdom of God, with nothing to show for their lives except an eternal invitation from the host of the party that...

What we believe shapes how we behave. And if we believe that God in Christ really reveals the fullness of love, then we need not look further than that love to see how we are to be. Therefore, in the great and somewhat adapted words of John Wesley, though we may not think alike, though our differences of opinion and religious understanding may vary considerably, though we may not agree even on wha...

When the incarnate God in Jesus Christ comes to us, we nail him to the cross. And then, three days later, God gives him back to us. Which is just another way of saying: Hear the Good News, Christ died for us *while* we were yet sinners, and that prove’s God’s love toward us.

We are called to practice resurrection. That is, we Christians live according to the Good News of the Gospel which means we are different. We belong to a new age and a new time and a new kingdom in which death is not the end. Our rejoicing, therefore, is not naïveté. We don’t come here to pretend that everything out there isn’t actually out there. We come here precisely because the darkness is so...

Contrary to how it’s been portrayed in the church or even in our wider culture, we never really pick Jesus. When all is said and done, when the King of kings and Lord of lords comes to dwell among us, we nail him to the cross. We, to put it bluntly, pick Barabbas instead. Which makes some of Jesus’ final words are the more powerful: “Forgive them Lord, for they do not know what they are doing.”

No matter how wild the world might become, and no matter how poor our priests might be, there is one thing that hasn’t changed, and it never will - the power of God’s unconditional love and the call on our lives from the One who is Love.

The church, at her best, is a storied enterprise - that is, she exists because of the story and lives by telling the story - the story of God.

The “all” in “All Saints” is important. Lest we fall prey to the temptation of believing that saints are only those perfect Christians - Saints are just sinners in the hands of a loving God. In fact, if there’s any real requirement for being a saint, it is merely the admission that we are not yet what we can be. It’s about coming to grips with the condition of our condition all while holding fast...

Jesus is in the business of transformation - of taking us from where we are, to where we can be. That’s what church is all about. We don’t do what we do just to sing a few songs, and think a few lofty thoughts, and feel a few warm fuzzies only to do it all again next week. We do what we do because it changes us!

At the end of the day it’s important to remember that the Gospel, the Good News, is a story. It’s not a self-help program, it’s not a textbook with steps to salvation, it’s not program for perfect morality. It’s a story, actually the story, that re-narrates all of our stories.

A one-sentence sermon - God meets us on the roads of life, proclaims the Good News through likely and unlikely places, is revealed when we eat at the table, and sends us to the share Good News to all who will hear it.

Grace is what happens when, no matter how hard we’ve tried to do more and be better, we see ourselves for who we really are AND we discover that God does not abandon us.

If you ain’t first, you’re last - so says the world. From the time we’re young adults until the day we die its always this break-neck competition for firstness, greatness, foundness. But in the Kingdom of God Jesus does his best work, his only work really, with the last, least, lost, little, and dead. People like us.

God in Christ has this knack for making outsiders into insiders, for reaching beyond beyond the boundaries of propriety, for meeting people where they are and not where they ought to be. God meets us in our mistakes, not in our triumphs. God meets us in our sins, not in our successes.

Contrary to how we often talk about it, and even how we live it out, Christianity isn’t a religion - if it is anything it is the declaration of the end of religion. Religion consists of all the things human beings have ever thought we have to do to get right with God. Christianity tells us that God in Christ does what we could never do in order to reconcile the world to himself. Or, as Martin Luth...

The joy of the church is realizing how God delights in gathering people together who otherwise have nothing in common save for the fact that Jesus calls them his friends.

It’s outrageous stuff, forgiveness. It just also happens to be the way Jesus runs the kingdom.

In Christ, we encounter the incomparable new reality of God which both humbles us and exalts us, which knocks us down and builds us up, and that is our peace. You see, peace, at least peace as defined by the Gospel, comes when we recognize our universal incompetence and our total need for someone to do for us that which we cannot do on our own. God has claimed us. And, as Karl Barth put it, unity...

Being a Christian isn’t natural. It runs counter to the ways of the world. Turn the other cheek? Love your enemies? Pray for those who persecute you? We are different. However, we have often tried to avoid the differences that make us different. We don’t want to appear strange, or evangelical, or like those other kinds of Christians (whoever they may be). We’ve been content to let our faith be som...

Again and again in the strange new world of the Bible, God meets the people of God in the midst of their sins, down in the muck of life, and offers grace. And grace, as Robert Farrar Capon so wonderfully puts it, isn’t cheap or even expensive, its free.

Jesus does not work according to the ways of the world. He does not say, “Bring to me your perfect lives and your perfect jobs and your perfect families.” Instead, he says, “Bring to me your burdens and I will give you rest.” Jesus does not look at our choices and our actions in order to weigh out whether or not we’ve done enough to make it through the pearly gates. Instead, he says, “I have come...

We might rejoice in viewing one another through our mistakes and our shortcomings, but in the kingdom of God we are viewed only through what Christ did and does for us. We might enjoy holding our judgments and prejudices against one another, but in the kingdom of God Jesus knows none of deserve anything, and yet we receive everything. We might love propping up all of our good works for everyone el...