Tag: diversity

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The Dance – Genesis 1:26

The Covenant Church has a three-legged stool concept of church planting, balancing strategy, chemistry and spirituality. Some people are more task-oriented and logistics oriented, others are more concerned with interpersonal relationships and others more oriented around communing with God. If any leg of the stool is too long or too short, a church will struggle.

This paradigm echoes the Trinity. Within the unity of God we see the relationality of love. We cannot know who we are fully outside of interaction with the other. The persons of the Trinity are in a dance – the technical term being “Perichoresis.” Western culture has moved to a more radical individualism than where Christianity started and what we are called to.

When we look at the passage of scripture, we see God speaking in the first-person plural – the nouns are plural but the verbs are singular. It covid be argued that this is just the “royal we” but in reality it is more likely that we are seeing an early revelation of the Trinity, along with the “spirit of God hovering above the waters,” and the participation of the person of the Son as described in John 1.

If we see this “us-ness” in the Trinity and the nature of God, and if we are made in the image of that “Us”, then we too are built to be an “us.”

God did not “need” to create, but Creation is a natural outgrowth of this relationality of the Trinity. God Himself is community and creation is the expression of that communality.

What would the church look like if we put the “we” central rather than the “I”? If we considered our actions in the light of how they affect the whole?

We are most ourselves in community. In fact, if we seek after our own personal identity first and foremost, we will come up short. If we seek our identity in community, our individual identity will be clarified and sharpened in a way far beyond we can accomplish at atomized individuals.

The Spirit works through us as a community, bringing different voices, gifts and offerings together. We have a tendency to raise up the individual leader rather than the body, echoing the desire of the Israelites for a (tall) king. But we are called to more.

This unity in diversity is a call on the church to be a light in a broken world, riven by race, class, politics, gender, age and more. When we bring together the body on mission for Christ across those lines, we shine a light into that darkness around us. In a time when disconnection seems to be the word of the day, who is God calling on us to connect with?

– Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, July 17, 2022

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Curse of Babel or Blessing? – Genesis 11:1-9

Listening to the voice of God is a spiritual discipline. Without the guidance of God, all the effort we might put out is just pushing a rope.

The two traditional passages on Pentecost are Acts 2 and this passage about the Tower of Babel, as the coming of the Holy Spirit heals the divisions described in Genesis 11.

This chapter comes after the creation story, then the flood. These first few chapters of Genesis are a high level view of God’s love for creation and humanity, his image-bearers. We see the both freedom and boundaries that He creates. We read the Creation Mandate given to humanity, to explore, prosper, flourish and multiply. This is not only a mandate but a blessing for humanity. God says “Come, let us make man in our own image.” He wants the earth to be full of people who bear his image, perhaps because only through the wide diversity of humanity can God’s true image be displayed.

Then, several chapters later, the people on the plains of Shinar echo that – “Come, let us make bricks” – and to do so in order to build a center of power, a locus of control and a monument to their own greatness. Scripture and history tell us what happens when humanity begins to consolidate power.

But God’s command was not to consolidate and gather, but rather to disperse and explore. So it may be that the “curse of Babel” is not a curse at all, but rather a blessing, the creation of cultures and nations and languages.

If it was a curse that was reversed at Pentecost, then the unity would have been brought about by a return to a single language. But that is not what happens – instead, the wonders of God are declared in a vast diversity of languages, and unity is built out of that diversity originally created by God.

When under stress and pressed by the world, our inclinations are the same as those in the plain of Shinar, to consolidate and flock together with birds of our feather. But if we allow the Holy Spirit to move, He may well scatter us in order to further His ultimate goals, His glorious plan for us and the world around us.

– Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, June 12, 2022