Chip Shots

Church at the Chip, 11/4/2012 Buried in the midst of a lot of detail about the consecration of Israel’s priests is a jewel we might miss if we are not careful:  “There I will meet with the people of Israel.... I will dwell among the people of Israel and will be their God.  And they shall know that I am the Lord their God,  who brought them out of the land of Egypt that I might dwell among them.  (Exodus 29:43-46) Did you see it? “There I will meet with the people…. I will dwell among the people of Israel and will be their God... that I might dwell among them.” Do you realize how beautiful this is? At last, God will live among his people. What a day this would be! From the time Adam and Eve first ate the forbidden fruit, God had been seeking a way to be with his beloved children. Remember? Although made in God’s image, disobedience ruptured their relationship with God. The image was cracked. An epic story of love lost and found began that day. Somehow, someway, someda...

The Passover meal is at the heart of the Jewish faith tradition. In slightly revised form, it is also one of the central observance of the Christian faith. In both cases, it involves the death of an innocent victim. Wait a minute! "The death of an innocent victim"? Yes. Both the Jewish Passover and the Christian Eucharist memorialize a sacrificial death. In the first instance, it involves the death of a perfectly spotless lamb, whose life was taken to set the Israelites free. In the second, it involves the death of the perfectly spotless Lamb of God, whose life was given to set humanity free. Christians and Jews find this a meaningful act of worship, a powerful reminder of God’s rescuing love. But how does it look from the outside? For many, it raises a lot of difficult questions. For example: Why should the innocent suffer for the guilty? Isn’t sacrificial death a barbaric practice that should be abandoned in the face of modern sensibilities? And if, as is generally asserte...

Jacob is a complicated biblical character, a man whose relationship with God was rocky at best.  We first meet him grabbing his twin brother’s heel while they are being born, as if to say, “Me First!” His name means, literally, “He who grasps the heel.”  What began at birth continued throughout his life. However, despite his character flaws, Jacob is the one to whom God promised his covenant blessing.  But he is unwilling to trust God work to things out in his own way. He tricks his older brother out of his birthright. Then he tricks his father out of the family blessing.  As a result, fearing for his safety, he must seek his fortune elsewhere. He runs away to his grandfather's ancestral land. There he finds the love of his life, his cousin Rachel — and the bane of his life, her father, Laban. In his unscrupulous uncle, Jacob seems to have met his match. Laban tricks Jacob into marrying his older daughter Leah, rather than her beautiful sister, Rachel. The trickster ...

The first few chapters of Genesis have flown by, but they are incredibly important to the rest of the story. Like the opening credits to Star Wars, they set the stage for the action to follow. What have we learned thus far? First, we discovered that the world is here as a result of God’s loving design. It is not the by-product of a war between the gods (as per ancient Babylonian and Egyptian creation myths), nor is it merely an accident of nature (as per contemporary secular materialism). No. By whatever means God chose to do it, it was God who formed day and night, the sky, the sea, and the land. It was God who filled these with planets and stars, with fish and fowl, and with plants and animals. And it was God who breathed life into humanity, giving us the privilege of caring for his creation as his image bearers on the earth. Next, we have learned that the root of this world’s problems are found in humanity’s desire to live life on our own terms. Rather than relying on the God who ma...