Taylor Mertins

"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 goes on forever.

And the celebration is so good and so loud and so fun that it drowns out all the party poopers in the world.

Which is why we should take seriously the words we say week after week in the Lord’s Prayer - thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

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 what it means to believe, may we not love alike?

Without all doubt we may.

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 overwhelming, and we need something we can cling to in the midst of it all.

That something has a name: Jesus Christ.

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 to the wonderful Good News that Jesus does his best work with people like us - Jesus deals in the realm of impossible possibility - Jesus is in the business of resurrection.

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!