Denver Community Church

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.

January 10, 2010: Be Still – Michael Hidalgo

Humility has not always been a virtue that has been praised or even appreciated. In the ancient Greek world, man was central to all things. The idea of being humble – which in its context meant lowly or poor either mentally, physically, or materially – was scoffed at. Who would want to be low? In an anthropocentric culture being the high and mighty was what one should pursue.

Yet, Paul tells us differently. Our attitude should be like Jesus’, who humbled himself and became obedient to death on a cross. Apart from a Theocentric we cannot be humble as human beings. But with God at the center we can learn through him and from him how to truly see ourselves for what we are. Children, in need of a loving father. 

It is in this moment that the seeds of awe and wisdom are planted. For awe is the beginning of wisdom. After all what person, if they think they are wise, are going to ask God for it? It is in this posture of living that we learn if we see ourselves as we are we will be lifted up. 

January 3, 2010: Community – Karla Crabb

Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “It is precisely the function of prayer to shift the focus from self-centeredness to self-surrender.” Prayer is about our being able to move to where God is, because he has moved to where we are. By simply speaking to God we express our full dependence on him … in essence saying, “We cannot do this, we need you.” 

Often prayer is asking God to do this or that … we will explore that prayer is in fact taking it all one step backward and saying to God, “I need help simply to ask you for what I need.” As we begin a fourth time for gathering on Sunday, we approach God with our hands out and ask, “What do you want us to be?” Where do you want us to go.