Think and Let Think’s Top Ten – 2018

Posted on January 2, 2019 by taylormertins

I started Think and Let Think a few years ago as a way to compile my thoughts, sermons, and theology. After starting at my first church in 2013 the blog quickly became an easy way for parishioners to access the sermons from Sunday if they were unable to attend. However, over the years the audience of the blog has grown far beyond the people I serve in the local church and in 2018 the readership more than doubled.

Below are the 10 most popular posts from 2018…

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The Problem Is Bigger Than A Name

A few years ago I (foolishly) attempted to preach about the controversy surrounding the name of a high school in the community I was serving in. This year the school board voted to change the name and when I reposted the sermon it became (in 24 hours) my most visited post of the year…

“We make so many assumptions of people without ever doing the good and difficult work of learning who they really are. We see a bumper sticker, or we hear an accent, or we observe a skin tone, or we read a Facebook post, and we let that dictate who they are to us. When truthfully, what we make of those limited observations says far more about us, than about the ones we see.

“Are you the only one in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place these days?” “What things?””

The Case Against “Ashes To Go”

Relative controversy seems to be a theme on the blog this year, and when I decided to write about my feelings regarding churches that offer “Ashes To Go” I inadvertently started a social media battle about the theology (or lack thereof) behind this liturgical practice…

“Ash Wednesday is not supposed to be easy or convenient; that’s kind of the whole point. It is a disruption of our way of being, a reminder of our finitude in a world trying to convince us that we can live forever, and because the practice is not self-interpreting, it requires the context of a liturgy in which we can begin to understand what we are doing and why.

And I use the term “we” purposely. I use “we” because Ash Wednesday is not about individual introspection and reflection. It is a practice of the community we call church.

While the world bombards us with the temptation to believe we can make it out of this life alive, the world is also trying to convince us that we don’t need anyone else to make it through this life at all. According to the world, the individual triumphs. But according to the church, no one can triumph without a community that speaks the truth in love.”

We Always Marry The Wrong Person

I was blessed to preside over a lot of weddings this year and one particular homily captured the strange and wonderful thing we call marriage.

“Marriage, being the remarkable and confusing thing that it is, means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary challenge of marriage is learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.

Marriage is only made possible when you know who you are such that you are willing to enter into the mystery of the other with your whole self.”

The Problem With American Christianity

In response to the reports about the warehouse in south Texas that was filled with children separated from their families after crossing over the southern US border, I decided to write down some of my thoughts regarding the so-called “Christian response.”

“We don’t like to talk about divine judgment in the church these days. Most of us are far more comfortable with a God of peace and mercy and justice if it doesn’t require anything on our part. But the psalmist is frighteningly wise to call for the Lord to judge the nations and to not let mortals prevail. Whether we like to think about it, or even admit it, the Lord will judge us for how we treat the least of these.”

To My Youngest Sister On The Occasion Of Her Engagement

My youngest sister got engaged this year and I couldn’t help myself from posting the letter that I wrote her.

“I gave thanks to God not because you’ve found your partner, or that you were asked in accordance with your romantic desires; I gave thanks to God because your engagement is a sign (and reminder) of God’s covenant with all of us.

When the day of your wedding arrives, I will stand with the two of you by the altar, and I will ask you to make promises (read: covenants) with each other about the future. A future that you cannot possibly imagine. And I will save more theological reflections for that particular moment, but until that holy time, I will share this – there is a difference between the promise that is now present on your finger, and the promise that marks our hearts.”

Make The Church Weird Again

Jeremiah is often overlooked in the great pantheon of the prophets, and I found myself gravitating to his words a lot in 2018.

“If you take a step back from all of this, from the pageantry and the pedagogy, from the liturgy and the lighting, being the church is a pretty weird thing. We take time out of our schedules every week to sit in a strangely decorated room, to listen to somebody wearing a dress talk about texts that are far older than even the country we’re in, and then we do the even weirder practice of pouring water on people’s heads and eating a poor Jewish man’s body and drinking his blood.

We are pretty weird.

But, because Christianity has become so enveloped by the world, we often see and experience what we do as being normative. We make assumptions about ourselves and others based on the fact that this is “what we do.”

But if we only focus on “what we do” instead of “why we do it” then we neglect to encounter the weirdness of who we are.””

Christianity And The Fourth Of July

The strange and problematic relationship between the church in the state is getting more and more complicated to the degree that many American Christians consider their national identity before their baptismal identity. (This one got me in some trouble)

“The 4th of July does not belong to us not because Christians are against America, but simply because our hopes, dreams, and desires have been formed by the Lord. What we experience across the country as we mark the independence is fun and full of power, but it will never compare to the weakness that is true strength in the bread and wine at the communion table and the water in the baptismal font.

Americans might bleed red, white, and blue, but Jesus bled for us such that we wouldn’t have to.”

Dear Church

Taking a cue from John’s epistles I asked a lot of people the same question: “If you could say anything to your/the church, without consequences, what would you say?” And I got a lot of answers.

“Fair warning: some of this will be hard to hear. It will be hard to hear because at times the messages can be convicting, just like John was. Some of them are short and to the point, some of them are a little longwinded and introspective, some will leave us scratching our heads, some will make us lift our chins with pride, and some will make us droop our heads in shame.

But that’s the thing about communication today – sometimes we say what we’re thinking without thinking about how it will be received. And maybe that’s okay…”

Incompatible

The United Methodist Church will be voting in February about our denomination’s language about human sexuality, and in order to prime my church for the unknown future, I preached about what happens when we label particular people as being incompatible with Christian teaching.

“Paul does not say the mission of the church is to tolerate the behaviors of others.

Paul says the church is called to be one.

But can’t we all just get along? Can’t we be one by just being nicer to each other?

There is a tremendous difference between loving one another (like Christ), and being nice. Being nice often means being quiet, and not calling out the behavior of others. Loving like Jesus however, often means speaking up and actually calling someone out.”

Easier said than done.

Trust And Disobey

Obedience is often a dirty word but I wanted to recapture the theme of obedience in scripture and how it often pans out in the world and in the church today.

“It is precisely because God loves us, in spite of us, that we can love others. It is in the recognition of our unworthiness that we can actually meet the other where they are and, in spite of differences, we can love one another.

We follow, we are obedient to this law, not because being close to Jesus helps us get what we need or want.

We follow, we are obedient to this law, because we believe that being close to Jesus allows God to fulfill whatever God wants to get out of this world!”

On How To Read Barth or: Why The Tamed Cynic Is Wrong

Posted on July 12, 2016 by taylormertins

Back in February of 2013, Jason Micheli (The Tamed Cynic) proposed an invitation to read Karl Barth’s writings over the following two years. Throughout this time Jason periodically reflected on what he read for the whole world to read on his blog. I like Jason a lot. I’ve written about him here on the blog, I’ve used him as an example in a number of sermons and devotionals, and I genuinely believe he is one of the most faithful followers of Jesus I’ve ever known. Because I like Jason, and I grew up listening to his sermons, I like Karl Barth.

Barth is most well known for his writings in the theologically shattering Epistle to the Romans and his dialectical approach in his Church Dogmatics. Reading his work over the last few years has profoundly shaped the way I understand what is means to be a Christian and how to read scripture.

When Jason invited me to start reading Barth from afar I was already familiar with The Epistle to the Romans, I had read sections from Church Dogmatics, and had read a number of his sermons from other compilations (Deliverance to the Captives and The Early Preaching of Karl Barth). Though relatively familiar with Barth’s style and larger project, I was excited to read Jason’s “Tips for Reading Karl Barth”:

Barth is the opposite of the social media, fast food age. Read slow. Barth’s thought frequently unfolds in long clauses and sentences that double back almost like music. It’s better to focus on a page or a long paragraph and understand it than try to read everything I’ve scheduled in the given week.
Barth uses the term “being” a lot. IT’s a freighted philosophical term that would be better translated for you as “character.”
Whenever Barth speaks of the “Word of God” he’s usually referring to Jesus NOT scripture. This will be obvious in the next sections.
The footnotes. Skip over them. You can read them if you want but don’t let them slow you down or intimidate you.

Jason’s “tips” are on point when the daunting task of reading Barth is open on the table. Barth’s Church Dogmatics is divided into fourteen volumes and takes up the entirety of one of my bookshelves. I fully agree with his first three “tips” but I respectfully and wholeheartedly disagree with the fourth: “The footnotes. Skip over them.”

If theology is like jazz, then Barth’s footnotes are his greatest improvisational work over the larger melody.

Reading Barth is challenging and requires patience. There are times when you will come to the end of a long paragraph and have no recollection of what you just read. There are times that you are sure you know what he is driving at only to have him turn the whole topic upside down and address it from a different angle. But it is in his footnotes (or excurses) that he exegetes the biblical texts that brought him to the conclusions in the rest of the text. The excurses are where Barth does the true work of theology.

For example, in part III.1 The Doctrine of Creation, Barth makes the claim that “Creation is the external basis of the Covenant.” He breaks down arguments for the watchmaker analogy as if God created the Earth like a watch and is not sitting back and watching the hands go round and round and instead posits that God, as the divine creator, created freely in love and is forever bound with creation. This is all good and true, but it is the long excurses on Genesis 1 that the brilliance of Barth’s theology comes to light.

In it he goes through the scripture with a fine-toothed comb and provides reflections on each day of the creation story. He looks at the presence of light and darkness: “The best analogy to the relationship between light and darkness is that which exists between the elected and the rejected in the history of the Bible: between Jacob and Esau; between David and Saul; between Judas and the other apostles. But even this analogy is improper and defective. For even the rejected, even Satan and the demons, are the creation of God.”

He spends a great amount of space analyzing the power of created water and its relevance throughout the entirety of scripture: “The Old Testament ranks a sea voyage with desert-wandering, captivity and sickness as one of the forms of extreme human misery; of the misery from which it is the gracious and mighty will of God, which we cannot extol too highly, to redeem us. It is thus the more note-worthy that the most striking Messianic deeds of Jesus are His walking on the sea in royal freedom, and His commanding the waves and storm to be still by His Word.”

All of this and much more can only be found in the places that Jason suggested skipping over. The more I have read Barth, the more I am convinced that the most important parts to read are his footnotes where he dives deeply into the strange new world of the bible.

Therefore, over the next few weeks, I will be posting reflections on some of my favorite excurses from Church Dogmatics including Barth’s thoughts on Creation, the Tower of Babel, and the Doctrine of Election.

Jason’s proposal to read Barth was a great challenge, and I am grateful for his “tips”, but the ripe fruits of Barth’s work should not be skipped over.

On Reading Sermons Online

Posted on June 28, 2016 by taylormertins

I preach from a manuscript in the pulpit every Sunday. During the week I carefully craft the words that will be proclaimed and I humbly pray that the Lord will show up through, and even in spite of, my sermons. Personally, preaching from a manuscript allows me to articulate how I believe the Lord continues to speak through scripture without going off on tangents in the middle of the proclamation. Because I use manuscripts, I have a copy of every sermon I’ve ever preached from the first one as a teenager at Aldersgate UMC in Alexandria, VA to the one I preached at St. John’s UMC in Staunton, VA last Sunday.

By my cursory calculations I have preached over 200 times including Sunday sermons, special occasions, funerals, and weddings. Each of these sermons contain, on average, 2,000 words, which added together, comes to about 400,000 words on God’s holy Word. With the exception of funerals, all of these sermons are available to read online at any time via www.ThinkandLetThink.com

And the sad thing is, more people read my sermons online than come to worship on Sundays.

I spent some time today going over the data points and statistics for the blog and I realized that on any given day nearly twice as many people read my sermon from Sunday than were in attendance in worship. Moreover, if the number of people who read the blog every week attended church on Sunday, I would be leading one of the larger churches in the entire Virginia Conference of the UMC.

I want to be clear that I am humbled by this kind of readership and I hope what I have posted has been fruitful for the people who view this blog. But I also want to be clear about another thing: reading a sermon online is not a substitute for gathering in worship.

Throughout the last century, the American Protestant Church has elevated the role of the sermon to the highest of worship elements. Just look at any bulletin on Sunday morning and the whole service usually builds up to the proclamation, and then people are sent home. More than prayers, and hymns, and God forbid the Eucharist, the sermon has come to define what it means to worship.

On one hand, sermons are important. They are the moment in worship whereby the Word of the Lord is proclaimed in a new and exciting way and becomes incarnate in the way that we live out what we hear. But the sermon is unintelligible without the rest of the service. The prayers and the hymns and the silences are what lend light to the words striving to resonate with God’s Word. What we preachers offer from the pulpit mean little, if not nothing, without the other parts of the worship experience.

Additionally, the sermon should not be the pinnacle of worship, but instead one of the integral parts that make the totality of worship life giving and fruitful. To equate all of worship with a sermon prevents the Holy Spirit from moving among the people in such a way that they can respond to God’s great word. To equate all of worship with a sermon implies that our words about God are more important than God’s Word about us. To equate all of worship with a sermon makes the preacher the focus of the worship rather than almighty God.

I am grateful that thousands of people have read this blog over the last few years. I am hopeful that the words found here have given life and meaning to the people who read them. But more than that, I hope these words have inspired people to gather with other Christians at least once a week. What we do, and who we are, is made incarnational in the practice of worship, not by reading sermons online.