Denver Community Church

April 11, 2010: Sharing With God – Michael Hidalgo

Shalom is not just the absence of war. When somebody flashes the peace sign and says, “Peace dude.” They may only be saying, “End war.” While the absence of conflict is good, it is only one small snapshot of what peace is. Shalom is its fullness is having all parts of your life and your world make sense. It is having all parts of your life and your world exist in harmony with each other. 

 

Many Hebrew words, the word we commonly translate as peace, shalom, has a wider latitude of meaning than the English word. We tend to understand it as the absence of war or as calmness of spirit. But along with these ideas, the Hebrew word shalom also carries a greater connotation of well-being, health, safety, prosperity, wholeness, and completeness.

 

In modern Hebrew, the common greeting is, "Mah shalomkah?" Meaning, how is your shalom? How is your well-being? In the Aaronic benediction, when it is said "May the Lord look upon you with favor and give you his peace," it is a much broader, wider blessing that we may think, talking about God supplying our physical and material needs as well as our emotional needs.

 

One important concept that has to do with shalom, peace, is that it also speaks about having a covenantal relationship with God. When the covenant was first enacted between God and Israel, some of the sacrifices were peace (shelem) offerings, to celebrate the relationship between the people and God. 

This is the Hebraic understanding of salvation, not just that we will go to heaven when we die, but that we have an unbroken, loving relationship with God here on earth.

Most sacrificial offerings were given entirely to God, but the peace (or fellowship) offering was different. Part of it is eaten by the worshipper, as if he is sharing a meal with God, the ultimate picture of friendship. The Passover meal was a type of peace offering, because it was a sacrifice that the people ate from. When Jesus held up the bread and wine as a new covenant, he was using this as a peace offering to show their new relationship with God. Through atonement by his blood, God offers all of us shalom. 

April 4, 2010: The Resurrection is Within You – Michael Hidalgo

We can say we believe this or that. But the truth is that what we say we believe about God, life, love, or anything for that matter is often a false representation of who we are. We need moreso to look at the way we live our daily life. How do we treat our friends? What do we privately scheme in the recesses of our minds? How much do we consume? The answers to those questions are what penetrate us deeply … getting to what we really believe. 

 

When we go there, that is often a difficult depressing place. Perhaps this is why Paul frequently calls followers of Jesus to die and rise again with Christ. To experience a rebirth a new life. But we cannot experience this new life without dying first … and we have to die every day so that every day we can be reborn. 

And if we are a people who are reborn and experience new life everyday, then we become a people of the resurrection. Which means that wherever the people of God are, there is the resurrection. So we ask, “Where is the resurrection true?”

April 2, 2010: Good Friday – Michael Hidalgo

March 7, 2010: Sick and Dead – Michael Hidalgo

When God approaches Moses in the burning bush he tells Moses, “I want you to lead my people out of Egypt … as a matter of fact you will be like God to Pharaoh.” In a unique way Moses, the stuttering shepherd was given the responsibility to speak for God. He was told that his voice would be God’s voice. 

 

More than forty years later, Moses is in the wilderness. He has been leading the people. The people who have been complaining for a long time about their situation in the desert. This particular day is nothing new. The people are complaining again. They are thirsty. Their livestock is thirsty. Things are not looking good. 

Moses goes before God and says, “What now?” God says, “Go and talk to the rock, and it will give water.” God seems pretty chilled out. Then Moses goes out and says to the people, “Listen you rebels!” He does not seem relaxed, rather he seems mad. The man who represents the very words of God then hits the rock with his staff. 

February 28, 2010: Running Naked – Michael Hidalgo

When God tells Moses that he is going to rescue his people he does not speak about the space between. He simply says, “out of slavery” to a “land flowing with milk and honey.” There is no detail about the wilderness. The dry, desert filled with dirt and rocks. Yet a time later in the dry desert is exactly where the people of Israel are. 

 

After a few years of God giving manna to his people they begin to get sick of it. They begin to grumble, they begin to complain. They want this and that … they even say to God, “We would be better off without you.” Moses, who has been called into the desert before God gets really honest with God. He cries out to God. It is gut-level honesty. In his outcry, God hears him.

 

God does not say, “How dare you Moses?!?” He simply says, “I will give you help.” As we begin our journey in the wilderness we must do so with eyes wide open knowing that it is a difficult journey. One often marked by pain, sorrow, trying times, but God is in the desert.

February 14, 2010: A Choice to Practice – Michael Hidalgo

During the Observance of Lent we will spend our time studying the wilderness. In some ways Lent is a time of hopelessness. It is a time where we are confronted by our own sin and shame. It is a time where we look deep within us to see our own “space” where we cry out to God wondering if he will hear us. We will explore a few themes. Creating our own wilderness, the richness of the wilderness, and the God of the Wilderness during the season of Lent. 

February 7, 2010: Living and Giving Forgiveness – Michael Hidalgo

“How do you know when you are in love?” The typical response to this question is, “You will just know.” If the person being asked were honest he or she would say, “There is no answer to that question, because it is the wrong question.” Being “in love” is a myth. This speaks toward a feeling that some call the warm fuzzies that one person has for another. Over time, everyone knows, the warm fuzzies slowly fade and become less frequent. Then the two fall “out of love” typically much faster and more painfully than they fell in.

 

This myth is perpetuated in our culture because love is marketed as a feeling that one causes you to feel. However, the love spoken of in the Scriptures in a practice, a way of living toward others, that one chooses. Three times humans are commanded to “love their neighbor” and it is always in the context of vengeance, grudges, and division. Not a very romantic setting in which to speak of love. But it does bear the reality of it. We choose to love. And love is not a disposition as much as it is a practice, a way one chooses to live toward another.

January 31, 2010: The Art of Incarnation – Dave Neuhausel

Forgiveness is not an easy thing. She did this. He did that. We want things to be even. We want someone to pay. We want it all to make sense. To forgive someone, as God forgave us, is to give up the right for things to be “even” in an earthly sense. It is to say, “I demand no payment from you.” So often we hold onto unforgiveness partly because we are unable to do it, and partly because we believe down deep inside that we are making the other person pay. Yet in the end it only ends up killing us. 

None of us are responsible for sins committed against us. None of us ask someone to betray or wound us. But those things come to us, seemingly more than we would like. In those moments we have a choice. To forgive or to stay bitter. If we choose the latter, we enter into an endless emotional cycle that begins to slowly erode who we are inside – and destroys relationships in the future. 

January 24, 2010: Pursuing and Waiting for Justice – Michael Hidalgo

January 17, 2010: The Downward Path – Michael Hidalgo

There is something to be said about someone who has what it takes to trust that everything happens in its time. This is the spirit of the gentle and patient person. It is the meek person, who believes that there is no use in getting mad, because in the end truth will win out. The gentle, or meek, person knows that there is injustice – their response – to withstand the heat (which is what this word translated as patience really means). To be this kind of person takes a tremendous amount of hope, belief and faith. This only happens when people set their minds on things above.