Taylor Mertins

I’ve been in enough hospitals to hear doctors refer to their patients not by Mrs. Smith or Mr. Jones, but by a room number (or worse: by their disease). There are plenty of people who are judged simply because of the color of their skin, or their political persuasion, or their sexual orientation without their names ever being mentioned. Names are important.

In the realm of the church, in Christianity, to reject Jews, or any other marginalized group, is simply unchristian. For in God’s vision of the holy mountain, Christians are the gentiles who are gathered to join the Jews. We are the outcasts, the foreigners, the outsiders grafted into God’s great communion. To reject the outcast is to reject ourselves.

We can tell ourselves that what happened in Charlottesville will never happen in our town, but it does; it happens each and every day in some small way, shape, or form.

Today we live in a world where we are forever asking, "Who deserves to come into our country?" and "Who is worthy of receiving healthcare?" and even "Who should be admitted to college?" But in the kingdom of God, at the Lord's Table, all are welcome. Always.

Do we feel like the merchant from Jesus' parable? Are we willing to risk it all and throw ourselves completely in for the kingdom? Or, at the very least, have we found a pearl in the church?

If the church is no better than the culture that surrounds it, if it doesn’t embody a different way of being, then it simply isn’t the church.

We might not want to let God take care of our backyard gardens, wasting seeds left and right. But when it comes to the garden of the church, when it comes to people like you and me, there is no greater gardener than the Lord.

We are captivated more by the optimism of “what if” than the pessimism of “it’s too late.” We are held in bondage to the belief that we are more than the mistakes of the past, more that the pain of the present, and more than the unknown of the future. We are prisoners of hope.

The goal of preaching is the hope that people will not remember what you said. The goal should be that the next time someone turns to that part of the Bible it will say a little more to him or her. The purpose of the church, of doing worship week after week, is to give the bible a little more room to shine.

We become God’s people, a people of holy kisses, when the pews of the sanctuary are more like avenues of connection and less like walls of division.