Taylor Mertins

'Seeing is believing,' we say. Implicit in this kind of affirmation is the presumption that if we were given enough information, enough data, enough instruction then our faith meters would be full to the brim. Except, when it comes to the disciples, they had already seen it all and it wasn’t enough. Which means that with Jesus, it’s the opposite: Believing is seeing. And, if should we worry that w...

I will confess that I did not know how to end this sermon. All week I worried about how to wrap it all up and I fear the art and text may leave us with more questions than answers. But then I remembered a line from the theologian Chris Green. Basically, he says to preachers, if you don’t what to say, then tell the church what the text makes you want to pray - for them, for yourself, for your famil...

Whenever we plant seeds and harvest the fruit, whenever we break bread and share stories with our friends, whenever we are surprised by the impossible possibility of God, we practice resurrection. Maybe the Mad Farmer of Wendell Berry’s poem is just that, a person committed to the earth who has grown bewildered by the wildness of it all. Or maybe the Mad Farmer is the divine gardener who insists o...

There’s a deep pleasure in the gospel that we don’t talk about very much, and it’s the pleasure of being surrounded by others in such a safe, fun, and inviting way that we can learn to laugh. Laugh at the world, laugh at ourselves. There’s such a relief in being able to say, like Abraham and Sarah, “Oh what a fool I’ve been! I was so sure I knew how this was all going to shake out. I shaped my who...

For some reason the Holy Spirit is pleased to let these words stand as they are before us in the beginning of all things and the beginning of the Bible. Perhaps its because the Spirit, like any good artist, knows that color and shape and shadow and light and images reveal the truth. Importantly, the Word of God is both audible and visual. Artists, therefore, preach for the eye; for artists the med...

whenever we gather at this table, in this room, on a day like today, we’re certainly here in this time and place with these people, but we’re also in that room with Jesus long long ago. And we, no matter what we’ve done or left undone, no matter what happens when we leave from the table, the bread is broken and the cup is shared for us and with us. Art, as they say, imitates life. The church has b...

Chances are you’ve felt interrupted a time or two this Christmas season; you had a plan and then you watched it fall apart. And chances are your life is not what you thought it would be. Various interruptions interrupted the path you prepared. And yet, God works through interruption. God shows up, usually when we least expect it, like a knock at the door, like the crying out of a little baby, like...

What happens when the preacher preaches an unwritten sermon?

Whenever we come to the table for communion, we share this short and ancient creed: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. We live in the in between, right smack dab in the middle of the already but not yet. The dawn from on high has come upon us, and it will come upon us. Whatever our personal darkness may be, whatever it is we are sifting through and trying to navigate, whatev...

Lent and Advent are the most challenging seasons of the Christian calendar because during them we receive the most difficult, demanding, bad news ever to be called good - The Cross. Twice a year our worlds are rocked, our tables are turned, demons are put to wrought, and dead dreams are brought back to life. Jesus is the reason for this season, and frankly for every season. And lest we domesticate...

Let there be no mistake, we, all of us, stand on the threshold of God’s kingdom. We never really know from moment to moment when an opportunity will come our way. It’s a mystery, but that’s where the real power lays. The Lord is always out in front of us. God’s futures approaches us, God’s future in which we will all be made new. We wait with hope by lighting whatever little lights we can, for no...

“Jesus always comes to us in the brokenness of our health, in the shipwreck of our family lives, in the loss of all possible peace of mind, even in the very thick of our sins. Jesus saves us in our disasters, not from them.” - Robert Farrar Capon

I’ve joked before, though its not really a joke, about how despite the beauty of the wedding liturgy, it would be far more appropriate if the couple made this public affirmation together: “We are both broken. We have been idiots and we will be idiots again. We are both difficult to live with. We sulk and get angry and hold grudges. We both blame other people for our own mistakes, we’re not very go...

A saint is simply someone whose life manages to be a crack through which God’s grace peaks through.

God uses music to help us enter the mysteries of life, death, and life after death. We sing our faith. The words and melodies of our music transcend space and time; they tunes us in to God’s frequencies in the world. Music gives us the space to experience what we believe and how we pray when we don’t know how to put those things into words - music gives us the opportunity to feel whatever it is we...

Baptism is the gift of God’s living water that never runs dry. And it’s not just a sign of God’s love. It’s a sign of God’s love for the ungodly. Like the Samaritan woman at the well, Jesus knows every little thing about us, the good and the not so good. Jesus knows us better than we know ourselves and Jesus still goes to the cross for us anyway. The living water seals us in the Spirit and nothing...

It’s by grace, and only by grace that Jacob makes it to the well and to the banks of the Jabbok river. It’s by grace, and only by grace, that the conniving, heel-grabbing, con-artist extraordinaire receives the name that names the nation: Israel. It’s by grace, and only by grace, that this flawed and fantastic figure fathers the twelve tribes of Israel and is the many-times great-grandfather of Je...

From his very first sermon Jesus identifies the work of the Lord with rescue, release, and relief. And the rest of the New Testament is ripe with such stories! Jesus delivers people from their captivity to demons, illness, loneliness, death, and isolation. The Holy Spirit delivers the disciples from captivity to preconceived notions and literal prisons. And, as we say in the liturgy, God delivers...

One of the most compelling and evergreen reasons to follow Jesus is that discipleship is playful. There’s a dance to the life of faith and it’s fun, or at least, its supposed to be. I know a pastor’s whose church’s motto is: We take Jesus seriously, but not ourselves. Even Karl Barth noted that one of the truest tests of faith isn’t whether or not we can laugh, but whether or not we can laugh at o...

Dave Zahl writes, “The very notion of a weekly Sabbath breaks the twenty-four-seven cycle of more and reminds us that we are God’s treasured children, not slaves to the ever-mounting demands of the pharaohs in our lives.” To anyone who feels like they can’t keep up, slowing down is a relief. Notably, according to Genesis, to be made in God’s image is to be a person who needs rest. And, according t...

When Jesus commands the disciples to be like children, he’s telling us to recognize how much we’re like children no matter how old we actually are. Because the truth, the inconvenient truth, is that we don’t have it all together. Most of us are just barely scraping by and we need all the help we can get. If our standing in the world is based entirely on what we can do and achieve, then the status...

We're all obsessed with control and we tend to mask it under the guise of efficiency. We adopt and adapt new behaviors and practices that promise order in a world out of control. But it is precisely from the burden of control that we need relief. We don’t need better ways to control because, as Dave Zahl notes, “the problem with control as the be-all and end-all of existence is that [all the thing...

Salvation has personal, domestic, social, economic, and theological dimensions. Salvation, in the New Testament, is the same word for health and well-being. There’s more than just heaven at stake here. Or, perhaps better but, heaven is at stake here and now. Jesus says salvation has come to Zacchaeus’ house because he, himself, is salvation in the flesh. He is wholeness and saving and everything e...

All of us have some moment we would redo if given the chance, some past decision or action or utterance that we would take back if we could. Our pasts exert pressure on us in the present. Sure, we can become very good at moving on or pretending we’ve moved on, but the truth of us, what we’ve done or left undone, never really leaves us. Regret is real. Which is why forgiveness is so important. Forg...

The prodigal perfectly proclaims the paradox of the gospel: Jesus dies and is resurrected for us whether we deserve it or not. Like the younger brother, we don’t even have to apologize before our heavenly Father is tackling us in the streets of life with love. And like the older brother, we don’t have to do anything to earn an invitation to the party, save for leaving our judgments and self-righte...