Taylor Mertins

Luke 1.5-20

The season of Advent gives us permission to rest in the silliness of salvation, in the wild and wondrous ways God chooses the strangest people and the strangest means to bring about the Good News for a world filled with bad news.

God will arrive in the manger, and God will come again, whether we deserve it or not. In fact, God did and will do this because we don’t deserve it - We need it.

God’s got the gift, the only thing we need is the hope.

Ephesians 1.15-23

With the world moving on from the turkey to the trimming and the trappings of Christmas, today the church pauses the frenetic pace of the season and asks the question, “Who’s in charge here?”

Revelation 21.1-5

We do what we do now in anticipation of what will come; we live according to God’s future - the new heaven and the new earth.

Which means that whatever heaven is, whatever the resurrection of the body is, it will be like this life, only different...

Matthew 18.21-35

The title for this sermon is "Preaching What We Practice." Which is, of course, a flipping of practicing what we preach. For, it seems as though we imagine that’s the purpose of the church - We exist to tell people like you how you’re supposed to be living. If that’s true, if that’s the point of the church, then I should end this sermon by telling you to go out into the world and forgive those who have wronged you.

Which, is not a bad idea, but it’s just not the Gospel.

The Gospel is not the story of what we’re supposed to do. The Gospel is the story of what God has already done...

Luke 14.15-23

There is a strange and beautiful value in looking out at the beloved community we call church and seeing the ragtag reality behind it. In the same way, there is something downright wonderful about seeing a bunch of sinners, and observing the communion of saints within and behind them.

We have a word for this. A strange word. A word not often said aloud but absolutely definitive when it comes to the church - Koinonia...

The Holy Spirit is always full of surprises, full of creativity, full of force. The Spirit goes wherever she wants, unsought, maybe even unwanted, intent on making all things new.

You see, that’s what Pentecost is all about. A whole new creation. Just as the Spirit hovered over the waters in Genesis bringing forth order out of chaos, the Spirit blows through the upper room upending their orderliness for something exciting and something new.

It has always been the nature of the Spirit to shake up the church, particularly when the church becomes too self-satisfied and content with the status quo...

Philippians 2.5-11

Stanley Hauerwas is known for his anger. He is angry, like Jesus in the Temple, because he finds himself surrounded by Christians for whom Jesus no longer makes any difference, Christians who move and live in the world regardless of whether Jesus rose from the dead.

He, that is Hauerwas, notes that his anger stems mostly from the great number of pastors who fail to challenge their churches to trust that without God, nothing is possible.

In other words, if Jesus is not raised from the dead, if Jesus is not at the center of every single thing we do as a church, then we are wasting our time.

Genesis 1.1-5

I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. There’s a reason we affirm the Creed week after week. It tells the story that gives meaning to all of our stories. For, we worship the Almighty God for whom nothing is impossible. The maker of all things, even us.

And chaos, even the empty void, is no match for the One in whom we live and move and have our being.

As the old hymn says: Summer and winter, and spring time and harvest, sun, moon and starts in their courses above, join with all nature in manifold witness to Thy great faithfulness, mercy, and love.

Exodus 17.1-7

We are saved not by our excellent decision making, nor by our decisive dogmatics, nor by our presumptive power. We are saved not by our degrees, or our progeny, or our bank accounts. Only God can do what we cannot.

The Good News of the Gospel is that when our abilities fail us, our knowledge, minds, patience, health, career, family, sanity, there is always a source of water in the dry and parched land of our lives.

In other words, when we have the fortitude to admit that all sorts of goodness has come our way even though we’re not really that good, when we can admit that we’re sinners saved by the amazing grace of God, then things start to change...

The opposite of faith isn’t doubt, it’s control. The story of the manna is also the story of learning how to be out of control.

Which might be why faith is such a challenge. For, from the time we are little children, we are fed a different story - that we have to be in control, that we have to be masters of our own destiny, that we have to make a way where there is no way.

In short, we think we have to be God.

But God is God, and we are not. God is the one who saves us, because we cannot save ourselves. Left to our own devices we can’t see beyond what we had in Egypt. We fall prey to the myth of empire and the foolishness of our own control.

But here, in the wilderness, God says to the Israelites and to all of us, "You can let go. Open up your clenched fists of self-righteousness. Stretch out your hands and receive the gift. I have what you need, and what you need is far more important than what you want..."