Denver Community Church

October 14, 2012: Below the Raging Ball of Fire – Michael Hidalgo

A phrase that is used throughout the book is, “under the sun.” It refers to everything that is not in God’s domain. It is a poetic way of saying “here on this dirt clod we call earth.” This is the place and space that the Teacher explores, tests and examines closely. We learn throughout the book what he finds, which leads us to the question, “What do we find?”

October 7, 2012: The Meaninglessness of Breath and Vapor – Michael Hidalgo

In the first two verses of Ecclesiastes we encounter one word five times. Meaningless. It literally means breath or vapor. The only thing that life shows us is that it is a vapor. This can bring us to the point of depression or to a place where we tell lies to cover up the truth. Asking questions like, “Is this it?”

 

Perhaps this is our greatest fear in the world today. What if at the end of all of this nothing that I have said or done matters at all? Is this the great ruse of religion? Perhaps. But this raises an interesting question. Who defines meaning?

 

If the writer is able to say that something is meaningless, then he must understand meaning. Which raises another question, what gives meaning its … meaning? These questions must be wrestled with so they can serve as a framework for how we organize and live our lives everyday. It can inform who we are and exactly what we are called to do and be in our world. 

September 30, 2012: What is the Bad News – Michael Hidalgo

September 23, 2012: The Joy of Failing – Michael Hidalgo

J.D. Crossan and Marcus Borg suggest that the one of the themes of Mark is “failed discipleship.” It’s obvious really. All of them betray, abandon and misunderstand Jesus at every turn. Yet in all of this we see the disciples lead the Jesus revolution that changed the world. So the question is what did they know that we don’t?

Perhaps it’s the reality that even the failed pieces of our lives are essential. Failure is perhaps one of the best teachers.

September 16, 2012: For – Dave Neuhausel

September 9, 2012: Watch Out Here I Come – Michael Hidalgo

Jesus begins by telling the disciples that many would come who would try and deceive them. Modern scholarship suggests that he was referring to those who would claim to be Messiah and would come after Jesus and mislead many. They were the ones who often used the usual way of thinking – military, political, etc. – to establish God’s kingdom. They are not the ones who are from God. 

The one to come is Jesus himself. He warns them at the end by using a parable. One about not being caught sleeping. Like the servants in the parable, we need to be about our master’s business – hard at work. It’s the recognition that we all live in the moment when God could return to restore all things to himself. We must then be prepared.

September 2, 2012: When Small is Big – Michael Hidalgo

There is something about religion that is almost competitive. We all seem to want to appear good, right, attractive, and “holy” in our own way. This is often the result of submitting ourselves to “group think” or accepted collective thinking. This is what Jesus points out about the “religious” in his day. As soon as the words leave his lips, an illustration happens right in front of them. Two offerings: one big but small and one small but big.

Many immediately want to contrast this woman’s faithfulness in giving all she had. And we should, for Jesus points to her faith. But some suggest a dark side to this story given Jesus’ declaration about the religious “devouring widows’ houses.” There is a sense that there is something wrong with the system of religion that leads her to act this way. 

August 26, 2012: The Anatomy of Evil – Dave Neuhausel

August 12, 2012: Jesus and Women – Michael Hidalgo

Throughout the gospel of Mark Jesus is constantly interacting with women, and heralding them as examples of a devoted disciple. This was scandalous in his day, and sadly is still scandalous for many today. How should we then, follow Jesus’ example and continue to honor and empower women? What would it look like in our day to empower the lowliest, and those without a place in our society and our world? What we see in Jesus is a radical new direction in his vision of women and the place they play in the Kingdom.

August 5, 2012: Kingdom Come – Michael Hidalgo

Jesus’ sermons almost always involved the kingdom of heaven. So just what is this Kingdom that he speaks so much about?

In his 2008 book titled, The Great Awakening Jim Wallis writes, “In all my growing-up years in our evangelical church, I never heard a sermon on the Sermon on the Mount …But after leaving the church and reading all the revolutionaries, I encountered the Sermon on the Mount afresh, as more revolutionary than anything I had found in Karl Marx, Che Guevara, or Ho Chi Minh” (Page 63). 

This perspective of Wallis is nothing new, ten years before in his book titled, The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard quotes several evangelical leaders, from the previous twenty years, who point to the fact that the presence of Jesus’ central message about his Kingdom was absent. He quotes Peter Wagner, a leading figure in the “church growth movement” who said, “… I honestly cannot remember any pastor whose ministry I have been under actually preaching a sermon on the Kingdom of God.”

It is surprising, perhaps even disheartening, to hear evangelical leaders speak about how teaching on the Sermon on the Mount and the Kingdom of God have been absent from the church. However, surprising this may be, the necessity of recapturing the words of Jesus cannot be understated. 

To date, much of what has been written, specifically in regard to the Sermon on the Mount, has been removed from the cultural, historical, and revolutionary context of the First Century in which Jesus taught. Writers and commentators continually spiritualize and privatize the most radical of Jesus’ teachings boiling them down to clever, spiritual maxims that end up bring printed on a book mark or a refrigerator magnet.