Taylor Mertins

Mark 4.35-41

Music is perhaps the greatest technology of the heart, and singing in particular. To lift our voices together is to stand against the disorder of the world.

Notice: singing is not a denial of reality. The Moravians on the boat with Wesley weren’t singing in order to pretend like the waves weren’t beating down upon them. No, they were singing because they knew how the story ends - they had seen the whole picture.

So too, we stand and sing not out of naiveté, but because we know not all is as it ought to be. We sing in defiance of the wind and the waves because we know, deep down, that God is going to get us to the other side. It might not be pretty. And it certainly won’t go according to plan. But God will get us to the other side because God will always stay by our side...

Mark 4.26-34

In the end the parables are stories that Jesus tells about himself. He is the Good Shepherd off in search of the lost, he is the fatted calf sacrificed for the party, on and on. And the branches of his kingdom are a place of grace for everyone.

Grace, as Frederick Buechner was apt to say, is something you can never get but only be given. There’s no way to earn it, or deserve it, or bring it about, anymore than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream, or earn good looks, or bring about your own birth. And a crucial eccentricity to our faith is that we are saved by grace, by God’s action toward us in the person of Jesus Christ. There’s nothing *you* have to do, there’s nothing you *have* to do, there’s nothing you have to *do*.

Which means grace might seem like a small thing, but Jesus does a lot with a little...

Mark 3.20-35

The church is where God assembles us to imagine and day dream about how beautiful the world could be.

It’s wild stuff really. It always has been. That people like me can stand up in a place like this and say “Welcome home.” Or: “I declare the entire forgiveness of all your sins.” Or: “You are loved beyond measure.” I sound like I’m out of my mind!

But such is the power of God’s grace, it calls into existence things that do not exist, it creates a community where strangers become sisters and others become brothers, a family, where there is always a place for you no matter what.

It sounds impossible - but God does God’s best work in the realm of impossible possibility.

Mark 2.23-3.6

Jesus has a word for all of us. A word of gospel rather than a word of law. A word of relief rather than expectation. Jesus says, 'Stretch out your hand.'

Whatever it is you’ve done, or left undone, it is no match for the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world. Stretch out your hand.

Come to the altar to receive the one thing needful, the body and the blood. You are more than your worst mistake or your last slip up. Stretch out your hand.

Take hold of the Good News of salvation, this is the day that the Lord has made and we are here to rejoice and be glad in it. Stretch out your hand.

Psalm 29

The church has a word of relief, and that word is the Gospel. It’s a very countercultural word, one that threatens to undo everything we think we know about what we think we know.

The church can be safe and secure, unthreatening, unassuming, with our pews bolted to the ground, where we mutter and muster an 'Amen' only once in a blue moon.

But God will not let us remain as such. The Spirit will start stirring things up through songs and scriptures and sermons to remind us that God is God and we are not. Jesus will speak right into our heart of hearts the story of salvation and we won’t be able to help ourselves from shouting “Glory!

Acts 2.1-12

To be a Christian is not so much having a certain set of beliefs that give meaning to our lives. Instead, to be a Christian is to be initiated into a community with practices and habits that actually transform our lives.

Which is just another way of saying, we only ever learn what it means to be Christians by watching other Christians and doing what they do. To be Christian means being together. Which, of course, isn’t easy.

After Pentecost, the story of Acts tells of the great challenge of being the church. The church stand for, preaches, and speaks the language of the heart that runs completely counter to the language of the world.

The world worships the first, the greatest, the found, the big, and the alive.

God comes for the last, least, lost, little and dead.

The world runs on deception and destruction.

The Spirit conveys grace and mercy.

The world is full to the brim with bad news.

Jesus comes bringing Good News.

On Pentecost, the Spirit is poured out on all flesh, the tall and the small, the sinners and the saints, the found and the forgotten. Not because we earned it or deserved it. But because we needed it.

And we still do...

John 17.11-19

Jesus' prayer in John 17 is rather unlike the compact prayer that he taught the disciples to pray, that prayer we will all pray later in worship. The theologian NT Wright says this very long prayer of Jesus is “so rich that we may choke on it unless we chew it slowly.”

One of the people who has chewed slowly on this text is Brian Zahnd. Brian is a gifted writer and the pastor of Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, Missouri. He’s got this knack for focusing the Gospel into bite size pieces.

Like this:

“God is like Jesus. God has always been like Jesus. There has never been a time when God was not like Jesus. We have not always known what God is like - but now we do.”

Psalm 22.25-31 & John 15.1-8

The odd proclamation of the Gospel is that there is no hope in us. We are all withering branches in need of some pruning and care. We’re all sinners. We’re all incompatible with the Messiah because we tend to make such a mess of his message.

But that’s okay. In fact, it’s better than okay because Jesus comes to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. He says, Abide in me as I am in you. All of you.

God meets us where we are, not where we ought to be. That’s the difference between the bad news of religion and the Good News of the Gospel...

Psalm 23 & John 10.1-18

The first task of a Christian is not to forgive, but to learn to be forgiven.

Luke 24.36b-48

I don’t know the last time you took a stroll through the strange new world of the Bible, but let me tell you, it is strange! It tells of cosmic creation, rainbowed repentance, kaleidoscopic covenants, profound prophets, geriatric geniuses, sacred psalms, liturgical litanies, paradoxical poems, and one heck of a messy Messiah.

What begins on the day of Easter, and is continued through the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of the early church, is the stark claim that knowing the scriptures does little good unless we know it as part of a people constituted by the practices of a resurrected Lord.

In other words: our faith is always faith seeking understanding...