PODCAST · religion
Taylor Mertins
by Taylor Mertins
thirty something pastor, podcast host, and fan of parables
Episodes
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Act Justly
Just about every news article, every social media post, and every “over-the-fence” conversation in our communities are actually about justice. It may not seem like it, but if you drill down just far enough, you’ll see that it’s true. We love to talk about what’s wrong, and if something’s wrong…
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Choose Gracefully
The gift of the church is a whole community of people who have made lots and lots of mistakes and thus have a treasure trove of knowledge to share with us about what prudence actually means and looks like. The church covenants to remain with us when we get it right AND when we get it wrong. Every...
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The End of Religion
For as much as we love the notion of God’s amazing grace, we don’t actually like it. Because it’s all so backward. It lets rotten sons and crooked tax farmers and red light district harlots and all sorts of other disreputable types, into the kingdom and thumbs its nose at all the so-called good...
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Unfair
The great writer Annie Dillard died this week. Her 1975 nonfiction book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the Pulitzer and it is about the titular creek that’s just outside of Roanoke. In the very beginning of her memoir about a year of living near the creek, she writes about a curious habit she had as…
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Reckless
How much we make of ‘wellness’, ‘health’ and ‘wholeness’; The ideal body, the unblemished form, How deeply we despise and hide our weakness And worship all the world thinks strong and firm. And how each facile photoshopped appearance Haunts and accuses children as they grow Until they pine for...
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What's In A Name?
There’s a word I’ve heard a lot recently, and maybe you have too. That word is “for.” I don’t know what to do for my mother. She’s in a home that provides everything for her but she sleep for hours a day and she clearly needs more. My children need all sorts of new things for school. You would...
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Remember Who You Are
I wonder if your life feels like a mess. If it doesn’t, well good for you. But, sooner or later it will because the world has a knack for piling it on. And even if you feel like you’ve got it all worked out, that you can handle whatever the world throws your way, God weirdly delights in turning...
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The First Task Of The Church
God’s house of prayer isn’t restrictive. It’s not some super exclusive club where only the best and the brightest and the most faithful get to enjoy the party. No, God’s house of prayer is inclusive. To use a line from Robert Farrar Capon, it’s like a backyard wedding reception where a whole…
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Silence!
The truth, of course, is that we all wish God was a little more obvious. We, like Elijah, are looking for big signs and clear signals. But God’s love is not like the over-bearing parent who wants to do every little thing for their child to the degree that the child never does anything on their…
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Hear!
Listen, says the Lord, listen so that you may live. I am making a promise, an everlasting covenant; behold the one who comes from the line of David. Because of the one who makes a way where there is no way, people will come to you who you would otherwise never know, they will flock to you because…
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Resting On Grace
Paul says that Abraham is righteous not because of his goodness or virtue or morality, but because God reckons him righteous. God makes Abraham righteous by grace. This is why, to quote Paul again, the Law brings wrath but the Gospel sets free. Doing all of the right things and knowing all the...
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Now What?
Now what? That’s what the disciples must be asking themselves when they gather with Jesus on the mountain in Galilee. Perhaps that’s the question you’re asking now that you’ve made it to the end of your confirmation adventure. Here’s the answer: no matter where life takes you, no matter what...
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The Early Church
The theologian Willie Jennings says, “This is the beginning of a community broken open by the sheer act of God, and we are still yet to comprehend the extent to which God acts and is acting to break us open.” This is important. It’s important because, despite all of our best efforts, we tend to...
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Help!
Have you listened to the birds recently? Or considered the lilies? Jesus asks us to do so not just because it’s nice, and it is nice, but it also helps to give us perspective. It opens our eyes to something more than whatever is currently weighing us down. The Gospel is a promise. Jesus cares…
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The Difference Who Makes Us Different
Forming the church, a community that is sustained by the wily Lord named Jesus, is as challenging as any endeavor we will encounter. It looks like a group of people who willfully gather with nearly nothing in common save for the fact that Jesus calls us his friends. It looks like people who are...
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The Priesthood of All Believers
For God’s sake, what do you suppose we are going to be, you and I? When we grow up? That may fall a bit flat, of course. Some of us here are no longer children, though we may act like it online. Surely many of us have all of our growing up behind us. We’re responsible, committed, and decisive....
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The Church of the Second Chance
The apostle Peter pens an epistle to the early church in large part because they are trying to navigate what it means to be faithful and political in the world. They are contending against the Powers and Principalities and Politics of their day and they want to know which way to go. In chapter 2...
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The Revolution That Remade The World
Paul and Silas travel to Thessalonica and they proclaim the Good News of the Gospel to any who will listen. But a band of ruffians, that’s the Greek for you, a band of ruffians form a mob and they send the city into an uproar. They try to find Paul and Silas in order to bring them before the...
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The Unexplored Virtue of Embarrassment
Embarrassment is a unexplored virtue. The truth about the church is that we never really know what we’re walking into and we never really know who God is going to drag through the door. And sometimes the slides don’t work, or the microphone feeds back, or the sermon falls flat, but at least it’s...
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Love Alone Is Credible
Easter is a promise. It is a promise that you are worthy of love and that nothing can ever separate you from the love of God in Jesus, not even death.
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Anthem of the Lamb
Jesus is a revolutionary. It’s just a different revolution than anyone thought it would be. He’s not a lion who will supplant violence with more violence. He’s just the lamb, the lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world...
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Can These Bones Live?
The great Robert Farrar Capon believed that the greatest challenge facing the church wasn’t questions about the afterlife but rather our present dullness. In short, he believed we lost our astonishment. He said that the Good News preached in churches is no longer life-changing, only after-life...
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The Truth Will Set Us Free
Jesus heals the blind man so that he can truly see. He sees the brokenness of the world but he also sees how beautiful the world can be because he sees Jesus. Whenever we look at the cross it’s like God is rubbing mud in our eyes. Grace is amazing but it’s also kind of grimy. The cross shows us…
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The Crucified God
When we survey the wondrous cross, on which the Prince of Glory died, we see the lengths to which God will go to forgive sin. The cross is both ugly and beautiful. The cross is as ugly as sin and is as beautiful as love. But in the end, love wins. Which means the past isn’t prologue. The Gospel…
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Jesus Is What God Has To Say
God so loves you that God gives it all for you. God does not send Jesus into the world to condemn you, but to save you. Once you see it you can’t really see anything else. Or, to quote CS Lewis, once you see it, by it you begin to see everything else. It’s like being born. Again.
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Some Things Never Change
Some things never change. God has always used fools to shame the wise, has worked to lift up the lowly and knock down the mighty, and demonstrated strength through weakness. And, oddly enough, even though Jesus refuses the temptations of the tempter in the wilderness, by the end of the gospel he...
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Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God
Lent is, as Stanley Hauerwas notes, a dangerous time for Christians. With talk of ashes and repentance, renewal and sin, we can soon turn the Good News of the Gospel into the bad news of God’s dangling us over the fire pit of damnation. And, despite the fact that there are, indeed, scriptures…
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Believing Is Seeing
'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...
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The Last Word
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...
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The Mad Farmer
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...
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The Closest Thing To The Grace Of God
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…
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The Big Beginning
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,...
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A Crowded Table
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…
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The Fullness of Time
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…
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An Unwritten Sermon
What happens when the preacher preaches an unwritten sermon?
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The Hopes And Fears Of All The Years
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....
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Keep Lent In Advent
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...
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Things Without Mystery Have No Power
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...
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The End Of The World (As We Know It)
“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
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One Bride For Seven Brothers
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...
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At The Same Time
A saint is simply someone whose life manages to be a crack through which God’s grace peaks through.
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The End is Music
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...
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The Story Behind The Story
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…
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The Church Is God's Message For the World
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...
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The Relief from Captivity
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...
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The Relief from Productivity
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…
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The Relief from Keeping Up
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....
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The Relief from Status Anxiety
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...
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The Relief From Control
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...
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The Relief From Rejection
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...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
thirty something pastor, podcast host, and fan of parables
HOSTED BY
Taylor Mertins
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thirty something pastor, podcast host, and fan of parables
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