Taylor Mertins

According to the strange and mysterious wisdom of God, it is in the crucified death of Jesus that all of the cosmos is altered (and altar-ed). This death makes our lives possible. This death is what makes the Christian experience intelligible. This death is at the heart of who God is.

The generosity of God means the crucifixion of the Son.

We don’t gather to contemplate how Jesus would respond to a certain situation, we don’t wonder about what Jesus would do, instead we ask ourselves What Did Jesus Do?

Because that question, and the struggle to answer it, is at the heart of the mystery we call faith. This night, tomorrow night, Easter Sunday, every Sunday, they’re not about what we should do. It’s about what Christ did.

During the March For Our Lives, one of the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School proclaimed, "Today the revolution begins!"

But he was wrong.

The revolution began a long time ago, when a poor Jewish rabbi entered Jerusalem on the back of a colt.

I’ve been in ministry for roughly 5 years and I’ve finally figured it out. After all the sermons and all the meetings, after all the prayers and preparation, I know how to fix all the church’s problems.

It’s time to make the church weird again.

It’s incredibly ironic that many of the people who want the Ten Commandments up in public are the same who perpetuate a culture in which divorce is over 50% (you shall not commit adultery), where we have more guns than human beings (you shall not kill), where capitalism is more important than community (honor the Sabbath), and where we spend more time worshipping celebrities than Almighty God (you shall have no other gods before me).

Lent is the perfect time to read about Abram and Sarai in church; they were imperfect people through whom God made the covenant promise a possibility -- just like us.

If God was willing to refrain from violence upon the world, if God was willing to hang up the bow, why haven’t we done the same?

When we wrestle with our mortality we catch a glimpse of who we really are, and we wonder about what we could become, should we have just a little more time.

The work of the Lord, of going to the margins for the sake of people on the margins is no easy task. For many, it results in punishment, isolation, and even death. Yet staying the course results not only in our transfigured lives, but also in the transfiguration of all things.

Fair warning: “practicing what you preach” is no easy thing. There will come times when the last thing we want to do is gather with the people whom we call the church. Whether it’s because they stand for different political realities, or they speak the truth in love (and it hurts), or they simply remind us too much of whom we really are, it is not easy being a faithful community together. Even Jesus needed time alone.