Taylor Mertins Taylor Mertins

Acts 2.1-12

To be a Christian is not so much having a certain set of beliefs that give meaning to our lives. Instead, to be a Christian is to be initiated into a community with practices and habits that actually transform our lives.

Which is just another way of saying, we only ever learn what it means to be Christians by watching other Christians and doing what they do. To be Christian means being together. Which, of course, isn’t easy.

After Pentecost, the story of Acts tells of the great challenge of being the church. The church stand for, preaches, and speaks the language of the heart that runs completely counter to the language of the world.

The world worships the first, the greatest, the found, the big, and the alive.

God comes for the last, least, lost, little and dead.

The world runs on deception and destruction.

The Spirit conveys grace and mercy.

The world is full to the brim with bad news.

Jesus comes bringing Good News.

On Pentecost, the Spirit is poured out on all flesh, the tall and the small, the sinners and the saints, the found and the forgotten. Not because we earned it or deserved it. But because we needed it.

And we still do...

John 17.11-19

Jesus' prayer in John 17 is rather unlike the compact prayer that he taught the disciples to pray, that prayer we will all pray later in worship. The theologian NT Wright says this very long prayer of Jesus is “so rich that we may choke on it unless we chew it slowly.”

One of the people who has chewed slowly on this text is Brian Zahnd. Brian is a gifted writer and the pastor of Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, Missouri. He’s got this knack for focusing the Gospel into bite size pieces.

Like this:

“God is like Jesus. God has always been like Jesus. There has never been a time when God was not like Jesus. We have not always known what God is like - but now we do.”

Psalm 22.25-31 & John 15.1-8

The odd proclamation of the Gospel is that there is no hope in us. We are all withering branches in need of some pruning and care. We’re all sinners. We’re all incompatible with the Messiah because we tend to make such a mess of his message.

But that’s okay. In fact, it’s better than okay because Jesus comes to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. He says, Abide in me as I am in you. All of you.

God meets us where we are, not where we ought to be. That’s the difference between the bad news of religion and the Good News of the Gospel...

Psalm 23 & John 10.1-18

The first task of a Christian is not to forgive, but to learn to be forgiven.

Luke 24.36b-48

I don’t know the last time you took a stroll through the strange new world of the Bible, but let me tell you, it is strange! It tells of cosmic creation, rainbowed repentance, kaleidoscopic covenants, profound prophets, geriatric geniuses, sacred psalms, liturgical litanies, paradoxical poems, and one heck of a messy Messiah.

What begins on the day of Easter, and is continued through the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of the early church, is the stark claim that knowing the scriptures does little good unless we know it as part of a people constituted by the practices of a resurrected Lord.

In other words: our faith is always faith seeking understanding...

Psalm 133 & John 20.10-31

The story of Thomas seemingly ends with his triumphant and faithful declaration: "My Lord and My God!" But John isn’t quite finished. For he actually concludes with a strange note about how “Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book.” But, John continues, “These are written so that you may come to believe, to trust, that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through faith you may have life.”

Do you see? Faith is a gift given to people like us. And it makes people like us exactly what Thomas insisted he required to belief. This wondrous church, this body of Christ, wounded and weary, bold and beautiful, we are what the world beholds and knows that Jesus is the something more they’ve been looking for.