Taylor Mertins

Stanley Hauerwas: “Beware when you hear a Methodist minister quote his/her twelve-year old in a sermon. When that happens you know you’re fixin’ to hear some baloney.”

Though, when he says it, he uses a much saltier expression than baloney...

Jesus’ parables are intentionally designed to pop every circuit breaker in the minds of those who receive them. And yet, they are all confounding and head-scratching Good News - They declare that God saves losers and only losers. God finds the lost and only the lost. God raises the dead and only the dead.

The hiddenness of God is revealed in the person of Christ. The incomprehensibility of God is made known through the life, the teaching, the parables, the miracles, the healings, the feedings, and ultimately the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Which, when you think about it, is rather confounding. Or, perhaps it would be better to call it offensive...

What wondrous good news it is that, when Jesus showed up proclaiming the beginning of God’s new kingdom, he did so not with sermons about the Trinity, or the atonement, or justification, or any other big and abstract theological mishmash. Instead, Jesus began by pointing right at our stomachs, to that gnawing, unsatisfied, emptiness within and then invited us to dinner.

Jesus has a temple tantrum, flipping over tables and calling out the powers and principalities all as a commentary against what the faith of God’s people had become.

Jesus was nothing if not zealous.

Jesus did not belong to the nice clean world of all the worst Hallmark Christmas movies, he did not belong to the reasonable, or honest, or sincere world of decency that we all too often claim for ourselves today.

Jesus belonged to a family of murderers, cheats, cowards, scoundrels, adulterers, and liars.

Jesus belonged to people like us, and he came for people like us.

We often present Christmas as something spiritual or mystical. Or, on the other hand, we criticize others for making this time of year too materialistic.

But Christmas really is a reminder that Christianity is inherently materialistic. God becomes material in Jesus.

God becomes us.

How Odd.

Over and over again in scripture, and in life, God chooses the unexpected to bring about the Kingdom. God plucks people out of complacency and says, in different ways, shapes, and forms, “I’ve got a job for you!” God stirs up our understandings of the world, flips them upside down, and calls it Good News.

The very best worship services are those from which we go forth not to more of the same, but to more of the name that is above all names: Jesus the Christ. For, in him, we begin to see that the Good News really is good.

Advent, for better or worse, is a time set apart in the church when we make a conscious effort to recover some of the strangeness from the strange new world of the Bible - and John embodies it all. Because, like J the B, Advent is rather peculiar. It’s out of sync with time.