Tag: Genesis

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Unhealed: Origins

To paraphrase M. Scott Peck, life is difficult, and once we accept that, we can transcend it. Much of this difficulty stems from the dysfunction we all have in our family of origin. There are generational messages transmitted, both purposefully and otherwise, that impact our lives.

So no family is perfect – and when we look to scripture we see this emphasized. The families in Genesis paint a clear picture of dysfunction and generational trauma. From Cain & Abel to the Jacob/Rachel/Leah love triangle, we get many, many stories of people chosen by God but still hurting within themselves and hurting others. But out of that chaos comes the legendary 12 Tribes of Israel, the People of the Covenant the line of Christ and the mechanism by which God saved the world.

We can take some comfort in this, that we are not alone – there is nothing we have ensured or are enduring that God has not seen before, that God has not used for the good of His people and the glory of His name.

The dynamics in our families of origin still impact us. They help determine how we interact with people we love, what we value, and how we respond to both hurt and success.

Scripture tells us that the sin of parents impact their children and their children’s children (Exodus 34:7). But it also tells us that His grace is even more pervasive.

We get a picture of this grace and healing in a family, also in Genesis. Joseph came out of this same dysfunctional brood, with favoritism, pride and jealousy all coming together to leave him considered dead by his family and enslaved in a foreign land. But Joseph turns his focus to following God even in his circumstance, so that when he is brought face to face with the brothers who wronged him, he (eventually) finds a way to forgive and find healing. First, though, he is overcome and finds a private room in which to weep. What are your private rooms, where you go to when triggered by a reminder of past hurt?

When Joseph finally confronts his brothers, he does so with mercy and forgiveness that is nearly unfathomable. The story of Joseph is the story of the Gospel, turning trauma and tragedy into salvation.

In the same way, our misery becomes our ministry. When God takes us through healing, He gives us the words and the ability to reach others with that same message of healing. Sometimes that trauma itself will even push us to God and to that healing.

Joseph’s brothers deserved to be cursed and to have revenge taken on them. Instead, God made their sin the mechanism of material salvation for their family, and even of healing for the relational trauma of the family.

What are the traumatic events of your past that have wounded you? God is big enough. There is nothing too bad or too overwhelming such that He cannot bring healing and redemption.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, June 2, 2024

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The God Who Sees… All of Me – Genesis 16

As we walk through the names of God, let us pray that we learnThis passage is about God seeing us in our suffering, but it is also about much more.

First, God understands us within our context – the context here is thorny. Second, God restores – what did God say that changed things for Hagar?

This story takes somewhere around the turn of the 19th century BC. Sarai and Abram cannot have children (we know that changes, but at this point they don’t). It takes place in a culture where there were various forms of servanthood, slavery and concubinage, all of which were very different than American chattel slavery or modern human trafficking. The idea of a servant coming in as a second wife and bearing children was a well accepted concept, and the raising of Hagar’s status was a natural result.

Unfortunately, Sarai’s messy response was also natural. Often our best laid plans go wrong and when they do, we often blame other people.

So Hagar is sent away, and is then met by the angel of the Lord who asks her two questions. “Where are you from, and where are you going?” But Hagar only answers the first one, because she does not know where she is going. And so the angel provides an answer to that question, and the answer is, back into the context she came from. That’s where a typical sermon might end, with the idea that sometimes God keeps us in our hard situations in order to bless us further.

But that’s not this sermon, so let’s go back to verse 4. Hagar begins to despise Sarai. This despising comes out of pride. CS Lewis sets the stage for this particular sin:

There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are  more unconscious of in ourselves.  And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others…

According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride.  Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind…

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of
it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

So what we can learn from this story is that God sees us not just in our suffering but also in our contempt and our pride.

— Sermon Notes, Paul Cabellon, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, February 18, 2024

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The Call – Genesis 12:1-4

One of the patterns you see in Genesis is the “tôlḏôṯ” structure, which means “generations” or “account” or perhaps most accurately “story of what came forth.” All the patriarchs get their own toldot structures, as do the heavens and the earth.

At a high level, Genesis is broken into chapters 1-11 which covers creation, fall, flood and Babel, and then the rest of the book which tells the story of the patriarchs and forebears of Israel. The first part sets the stage and provides the context, and the second part is the story of Israel within that context. One of the key takeaways of this whole story is the unmerited favor of God, because these patriarchs did not earn that favor.

The toldot of Haran is where we come in. Terah has left Ur and is supposed to be heading to Canaan, but Terah stopped in Harran, in the north. The family is in a hard place. Terah’s son Haran died in Ur, with his only son Lot unmarried. Nahor, his other son, is married to his niece, Haran’s daughter, but they have had no sons. Finally, Abram is married to Sarai, but they are aging and have no children either.

Part of the context set by the creation story is God’s instructions to humanity, “be fruitful and multiply.” Terah’s family is in danger of failing this and dying out.

And into this, God steps with an incredible promise – “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

Children are always learning and changing. They have more elastic brains and are able to absorb new situations and information. For adults, true learning and adapting requires a disorienting experience. That is exactly what Abram got in this case. It’s not clear if he even knew who God was before this call – his father came from Ur and worshipped the pagan gods of the Mesopotamians.

At the same time, God did not bring an entirely new concept into Abram’s life. Terah was already journeying to Canaan, but got stuck in Harran. God brought context and purpose into this process – the journey that had petered out made sense in the context of God’s call and direction. God turns this into a generative story, a toldot.

And there is even further purpose behind this call. God promises Abram that he will bless all of humanity through him and the nation God will build from him. That blessing is ultimately the person of the incarnate Christ, both Abraham’s offspring and the God who called him into the land where He would die and be raised again, in order to make a path for all of us to have a relationship with Him.

God called Abram “into the unknown 🎶” – where is He calling you? Where is He calling us as a church? Let’s continue to seek those answers as we serve the God who called us.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, March 5, 2023

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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

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Living Face to Face – Genesis 33:1-11

This is a continuation of the “Embody” series, examining how we as a church are to embody the love of God for those around us. As the pandemic deconstructed church, we are putting it back together around the essentials, and that embodiment is indeed the deepest essential.

This passage is one of two in the scripture that demonstrates (or embodies) the forgiveness of God. The other is the Prodigal Son, a direct parable of God’s forgiveness. In both stories, a reconciliation occurs, and the offended party runs out to meet the offender and embraces him, weeping. As Jacob says, this forgiveness is “like the face of God.” In reconciling face to face, he sees the face of God and experiences His forgiveness as well.

Likewise, when we extend forgiveness and grace to those around us, we show the face of God to others.

The context of this story is the turmoil, infighting, trickery and other dysfunction that surround the family of Abraham – like something out of a reality show. Though they were God’s chosen people, they were not chosen by merit, but grace. The patriarchs are not the heroes of the Bible – God is the hero of the Bible, and His grace shines through even in the Old Testament. We run into trouble as a church when we see the characters in the Old Testament as heroes in the earthly sense, and then place ourselves (whether as a church, a nation, an ethnicity) at the center of the story as the inheritors of this worldly power and wealth.

The seeds of this story were planted even before Jacob and Esau were born, as the twins wrestled with each other in the womb. Jacob’s very name comes from holding his brother’s heel as he was born, a term that also means “supplanter” or “usurper” – and he lived up to that name, conspiring with his mother to steal Esau’s very birthright as the (barely) firstborn. Esau swears to kill him.

This leads to Jacob fleeing to extended family to find a wife, and a bit of turnabout as his Uncle Laban tricks him into marrying both his daughters and working for him 14 years. Jacob turns that back on him, gaining wealth at Laban’s expense and eventually leaving in the night and taking all his flocks and family. Fleeing from Laban brings Jacob back to Esau in this story.

That’s when he gets the news that Esau is advancing with 400 men, and so Jacob’s reaction is yet another scheme, stacking children and flocks ahead of him in order of importance to him, in order to be able to flee if things go south.

This preparation to flee calls back to the time he wrestled with God (or the angel of God, or something), when his hip is struck, likely to prevent Jacob, whose nature (like many of us) is to respond to problems by running. Again, Jacob is in a place when he cannot run, but has to reconcile.

Reconciliation, to one another and between us and God, is the role of us as the church today. But the next step of this story – when Jacob bails on his brother entirely and goes in a different direction – reminds us that reconciliation is not easy, and is not a quick fix.

But it is still what we are called to, both individually and as a church. We are called to put aside our worldly reactions she striving, and live face to face in the grace and forgiveness of God.

– Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, May 8, 2022

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Genesis as Rebuke

The first chapter of the Bible these days gets swept up into debates about evolution, science, etc. But how was it understood by the ancient Israelites when it was written? Why did they consider it important enough to be written down?

It is notable that God calls two things good that the ancient Israelites would generally not have considered to be good, but rather terrifying. Darkness and the abyss of the sea were both symbols of evil, danger and chaos, but God calls them “good” when he places them in their appropriate contexts and within their appropriate boundaries.

Another note – vegetation was created before the sun, which may seem strange. But keep in mind that the Israelites knew very well that the sun was required for plants to grow. This order was purposeful, and the contradiction was purposeful.

Later, man was created – in the image of God. This is in stark contrast to how surrounding cultures saw man. The image of God (or rather, of the gods) was restricted to rulers. The Israelites, though, put the basis for equality and democracy right in their own “founding document.”

The book of Genesis may have been formalized, compiled from oral tradition and other written accounts, during the Babylonian exile. If that is the case, this chapter would have served at least in part as a rebuke to the Babylonian creation account, in which Marduk tears apart the body of Tiamat in order to create the world.

The Genesis creation account puts forth two bold statements that go after the theology of the cultures around them. First, there is one God, not many. Second, the creation of the Earth did not happen in the midst of war and conflict, but was rather a purely good act of creative construction.

The counterintuitive order of creation may also have had something to do with this. The sun gods of the era were vital because of the importance of sun for crops, yet here Israel says “no, in the end even the sun is subservient to the creator God, and if He wants plants, he gets plants, and the sun is irrelevant.”

So how does this creation account impact our own relationship with the culture around us? Regardless of how you interpret the specifics of the passage, we all should take from this passage the understanding of the one God as the creator of heaven and earth. How does this understanding of a creator God set us apart from those with their own creation stories, their own gods of science and chance?

–Sermon Notes, Dave Lester, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA

Genesis 1

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