Taylor Mertins

Feb 15 2025 421 ep. 18 mins 23

Taylor Mertins Podcast artwork

thirty something pastor, podcast host, and fan of parables

Religion & Spirituality

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The Teaching

Feb 15 2025 14 mins

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, becau

The Call

Feb 08 2025 14 mins

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

The Response

Feb 01 2025 15 mins

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 e

The Sermon

Jan 25 2025 16 mins

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

The Wedding

Jan 18 2025 13 mins

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 wed

The River

Jan 11 2025 13 mins

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.

Paradoxology

Jan 04 2025 15 mins

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 rev

The Wonder of the Word

Dec 24 2024 13 mins

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.

The Time Being

Dec 24 2024 7 mins

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...

The Fullness of Time

Dec 21 2024 13 mins

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 incarnati