Taylor Mertins

Robert Jenson once said, “It is a great achievement to know yourself a sinner.” It sounds paradoxical, but to know you’re a sinner puts you (and me) in a place to really listen to what Jesus is saying. Hence the parable of the publican and the pharisee. The dirty rotten scoundrel of a tax collector leaves worship justified, rather than the do-gooding religious adherent, because only he is able to confess that he is a sinner.

It’s not easy to receive this sermon from Jesus (particularly the woes) but somebody has to say such things. One must really know the people to which these words are delivered lest we leave thinking the preacher is talking about other people.

Bashing people with the law achieves nothing unless the one preaching is the One who comes to fulfill the Law.

Martin Luther reminds us that “God receives none but those who are forsaken, restores health to none but those who are sick, gives sight to none but the blind, and life to none but the dead. God does not give saintliness to any but sinners, nor wisdom to any but fools. In short: God has mercy on none but the wretched and gives grace to none but those who are in disgrace.”

People always assume that the church’s primary business is to get people to behave themselves, to teach morality, and then keep them on the right track. Which is fine, except it often leads people to feeling more overwhelmed than they were before they walked through the door.

Jesus doesn’t meet Peter by the lake and clobber him with calls to righteousness and goodness and the law. He doesn’t belittle him for his lack of fish or for his lack of faith. Instead he invites him to a new reality, an adventurous life, filled with unbelievable beauty and wonder and grace.

So, open you ears and eyes and hearts to what Jesus says to Peter and what Jesus says to you. Jesus comes to your life, sits down, and says, “I am with you. I will never leave you. I believe in you. I see possibilities that you can’t even imagine. I have plans for you, I’m going to show you what makes the Good News so good, or I’ll die trying.”

There’s nowhere Jesus goes without outsiders becoming insiders. That’s part of the mission. But it’s nothing new! Over and over and over again in scripture God commands the people to care for the people no one else cares about.

Open your eyes, God says, to the plight of your neighbors who have no bright hope for tomorrow.

Open your ears, God says, to the anguish of your enemies.

Open your hearts, God says, to the very people who drive you crazy.

If the gospel isn’t good news for everybody, then it isn’t good news for anybody...

Whenever there is deliverance, liberation, recovery, and release, there is the preaching of the Gospel.

In other words, preaching isn’t just for preachers, it’s also for all of you.

Preaching doesn’t just happen in church. It happens in our words and actions in the classroom and at the grocery store. Preaching happens at the bank and in the backyard bbq. Preaching happens in the hospital and in the home.

Preaching happens whenever there is deliverance and liberation, recovery and release.

It’s as if Jesus is preaching to us through scripture today and he says, “Things are not as they ought to be. People are afraid. They don’t have hope. Well, I’m here to bring good news to the poor, to announce pardon to prisoners, to include the excluded, and to set the burdened free. Who’s coming with me?”

Robert Farrar Capon said, “Whatever the church is, it should enable us to realize we are at a party of outrageous proportions; and, at the same time, it should make us want nothing so much as to shout the invitation to that party at the top of our lungs.”

Is that how we feel about the faith? Is that how we feel about church?

Does all of this feel more like a funeral, or a wedding?

What John points to in Cana, what we are being called to see, is the glory revealed in Jesus Christ. The party that is salvation is right here and right now. We have been invited to the marriage Supper of the Lamb and we didn’t have to do a thing except show up for the festivities. Just as Jesus commandeers the wedding and becomes its host, so too Jesus has conquered the world and now rules at the right hand of the Father.

This is what glory looks like. The author of the cosmos condescends to our existence and opens up the doors and clears the dance floor and says, "The time has come to celebrate!"

With the magi and the manger we discover how the kingdom inaugurated in Jesus extends even to the Gentiles.

And with the baptism in the Jordan we learn that we do not have the righteousness we require to acquire the kingdom, but that’s okay because Jesus fulfills all righteousness.

In other words, the heavens open at the river not just for Him, but also for all of us.

The wild proclamation of the Gospel, made manifest in a baby in a manger surrounded by some certainly strange gifts, is that God knows everything about us, the resolutions we keep and break, and chooses to be with us anyway.

You see, this odd God delights in getting down in the muck and mire of life to dwell among us. This odd God speaks and heals and teaches and preaches and reveals the truth that we all need but struggle to believe. This odd God even goes to the cross on our behalf, manifesting the paradoxology of the Gospel: There’s nothing you can do to make God love you any more, and there’s nothing you can do to make God love you any less...

Here’s the truth of Christmas, the great proclamation of the Gospel - God makes time for you and me. And not only that, but God has given us all the time in the world, redeemed our time and our foolish use of it because Christmas is the reminder of the lengths to which God was and is willing to go to give us the one thing we really need.

The wonderful word of Christmas is "with." God takes on flesh in Jesus Christ and moves into the neighborhood "with" us.

There is, of course, elements of “for” in Jesus’ life: Jesus is for us when he teaches and heals. Jesus is for us when he dies on the cross and rises on Easter. Jesus does for us what we can’t do for ourselves.

But the power of what God does for us is made manifest because God is with us.

The strange and serious proclamation of Christmas is that though things change, we’re always in the moment of Christmas. Even when we snuff out the candles, and get in our cars, and go to bed, we’re still in Christmas.

Because Christmas is the miracle of God making time for us...

Mary praises God through song for cracking open the heavens and pouring out justice on a world thirsty for it. She points to the power of the Spirit because her Son will relieve the proud and powerful from their self-righteousness, and He will fill the poor with more than money can buy.

And she sings of it already having happened because time is different with God.

The incarnation is not God’s last minute hail Mary to fix the world. It is, was, and always will be God’s decision to dwell with us. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God. God was always going to dwell with us because God always dwells with us and God will always dwell with us...