Shalom and the Mission of the Church

The Garden of Shalom - (Eden Slide)

In the beginning the world was formless and void, Tohu va-Vohu, wild and waste, uninhabitable chaos.

And God spoke into the dark, watery chaos and he ordered it according to his good pleasure. Light, land, and living things all appeared exactly where God told them to be. He gave form to the wild, he gave function to the waste. He shaped the shapeless according to his own infinite wisdom (Proverbs 8:22-31).

And it was Good. Tov!

He turned this new well-ordered world into a home for him and his people. Don’t miss that, God was there too! This holy house was actually a flourishing garden. You may know it as the Garden of Eden. Have you ever thought about that? Adam and Eve lived “outside” inside the garden. What we call “outside” was actually a perfectly comfortable home before the Fall. But that’s how well ordered everything was, that a garden was a suitable home for God and his people. Again, don’t miss that God was in the Garden as well as Adam and Eve.

I’ve already mentioned a few Hebrew words (Tohu va-Vohu and Tov), so i’m just assuming you folks are eager to nerd out on the Bible today. Because today we are talking about another Hebrew word, but don’t worry, you might have heard this one before. Today we are talking about Shalom.

But what exactly is Shalom?

Does anyone here watch The Chosen? In season 3 of The Chosen, a Roman asks Simon Peter what he means when he says “Shalom Shalom.” He mentions that Shalom means “peace” and that Shalom Shalom means “perfect peace.” Then he pauses for a few seconds and says, “complete wholeness.”

What I’ve tried to do by painting a picture of Eden in our imaginations is to show you what true shalom is. Eden is a place of complete wholeness. Adam and Eve have everything they need. They have bounty in every sphere of human existence. They have been given all the physical provisions they could ever need, they have deep relational harmony, and in Eden they dwell in the life-giving, soul-nurturing presence of God - and thus their spiritual needs are met. God has ordered this place in such a way that Adam and Eve are set up to flourish and thrive to the fullest extent possible. In chapter two of Genesis, after the creation of the woman, they are truly, fully human. This is the paradigm of shalom. Everything is working as is ought to – meaning everything is working as God has ordered it to be.

The City of Shalom - (Holy City Slide)

Can you imagine with me what this would look like after thousands of years? Adam and Eve would be fruitful and multiply. They would have children and their children would have children, and so on and so forth. Oh and no death! Everyone is still alive from the beginning. Great great great great great great great great great great great Grandpa Adam would be telling the story of how he named the animals for the 17 billionth time…and it would be just as glorious as the first time he told Eve.

Adam and Eve were tasked with ruling the earth as God’s vice-regents, they were meant to cultivate the garden and expand its riches to the corners of the earth. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine a great global garden-city filled with billions of people living in the life-giving presence of God. Every person, truly and fully human. Every need, physical, relational, and spiritual met with infinite abundance. The Garden of Shalom would become an everlasting City of Shalom.

Selah.

The Unraveling of Shalom - (Fall/Babel Slide)

But, I know what you’re thinking – we don’t live in the Garden or City of Shalom. “Complete wholeness,” to use The Chosen’s definition, is definitely not how we would describe the human experience at the moment. We all desperately want it, but none of us have it.

You may have heard that chapter 2 of Genesis is followed by chapter 3. Everything goes terribly, miserably wrong. Discord is sewn, lies are believed, the forbidden is consumed. Beneath the boughs of the Tree of the Knowledge of God and Evil God’s well-ordered world is being ripped apart in an act of pompous, self-oriented rebellion. God’s goodness is being rejected and man and Devil alike initiate a program of decreation. The tov (the good) is exchanged for the lo-tov (the not-good).

And you know what happens next. God, exiles humanity out of the Garden of Eden, The Garden of Shalom, the place of complete wholeness, and into the wilderness. Relationships are marred, physical needs are hard to come by, and spiritual death is at hand…with physical death soon to follow.

Before the first two humans could give birth to a third they lost shalom. Choosing their way over God’s way led to loss instead of life. Genesis 3-11 is a decreation story. The wild and waste, the Tohu va-Vohu, that God tamed and ordered for our good and his glory was reappearing in the hearts of humans. They were surely multiplying, but their human experience was so much less than what God had designed and intended.

At Babel we sought to place ourselves in the heights of the heavens, above God, but ironically, we actually hit rock bottom as humans.

You and I, and everyone else walking this world, are the descendants of these people, and we have inherited broken hearts and a bent world. We are scattered and confused. No matter how sweet our grandmamas were, we are rebels raised by rebels.

Here’s my point: Apart from God we cannot access and experience shalom.

Shalom as the Gift of God - (Tabernacle Slide)

But let’s get to the heart of the biblical story - Hope! You see, God knows that we won’t have true shalom apart from him. He designed this world, from the very beginning, in such a way that his people cannot flourish and thrive apart from his life-giving presence. That’s the ethos of Eden. The cosmos are ordered according to this truth. It is by design. Humans apart from God are like fish out of water.

We allied with the Serpent (that terrible dragon of death and decreation), and our hearts and the world around us began to fray…but God is a mending God. While we wallow in the wasteland apart from his presence, barely human, he pursues. Of his own loving initiative he meets us in the wilderness and gives shalom as an undeserved gift.

We don’t have shalom, and we can’t get it or produce it on our own…so, in his loving kindness, he gives it.

Consider the passage we read this morning from Leviticus 26:3-13

Leviticus 26:3–13 (LEB)

“ ‘If you walk in my statutes and you keep my commands and you do them, then I will give you rains in their time, and the land shall give its produce, and the trees of the field shall give their fruit. And for you the threshing season shall overtake the grape harvest, and the grape harvest shall overtake the sowing, and you shall eat your food to your fill and you shall live securely in your land. And I will give shalom in the land, and you shall lie down, and there shall not be anybody who makes you afraid, and I will remove harmful animals from the land, and no sword shall pass through your land...And I will turn to you, and I will make you fruitful, and I will make you numerous; and I will keep my covenant with you. And you shall eat old grain, and you shall clear away the old before the new. And I will put my dwelling place in your midst, and my inner self shall not abhor you. And I will walk about in your midst, and I shall be your God, and you shall be my people. I am Yahweh, your God who brought you out from the land of Egypt, from being their slaves; and I broke the bars of your yoke, and I caused you to walk erectly.

When we walk in the ways of the Maker, we flourish, we thrive. In short, we begin to experience shalom, wholeness, fullness. But when we walk in the ways of the world, abundant life eludes us.

God rescued his people out of bondage and death in Egypt and brought them into his shalom-giving presence at Sinai. He had them build the tabernacle so that he could dwell with them a source of life and light in the wilderness. And here in Leviticus he’s promising to give the gift of shalom to those who delight in his will and walk in his ways.

Shalom is, and always has been, a glorious gift from God.

(Transition to Jesus) - Slide of Jesus and the Disciples

In a marvelous turn of events, the shalom-establishing Creator King in Genesis emptied himself and took the form of a servant, being found in human form in the NT. The one who designed and established humanity, took on flesh and lived a fully human life. The vision of shalom established in creation comes into focus in the person of Jesus.

Just as God tabernacled in the midst of his people in the book of Leviticus, promising the gift of shalom if they walked in his ways, so Jesus “tabernacled” (same word in Greek) in the midst of his people in the first century. John tells us that Jesus is the Creator, the Maker of all things, and that in him the world was formed and filled. He, along with the Father and Spirit, ordered chaos and established the boundaries of the waters. He was fashioning a house and turning into a home for him and his people. He is the God of the garden, he walked in midst of Eden with the first couple. He is the God of shalom.

Jesus tells us that if we drink his water we will never thirst. If we eat his bread we will never hunger. And that in him we will find full and abundant life. He restores sight to the blind, opens the ears of the deaf, feeds the hungry, cast out demons, cleanses the leper, comforts the afflicted, and raises the dead.

It is through Jesus that God is reconciling all things to himself. Jesus extends his mending mercy to the broken. Bringing shalom through the blood of his cross.

The gift of shalom is found only in God, and to to be more specific, Jesus. If shalom – “complete wholeness” – being fully human, is found only in the life-giving, shalom-bringing presence of God, then it can not be found apart from Jesus, who is “God with us” Immanuel.

Shalom and the Mission of the Church

I should say here that my sermon only has two points. The first is that shalom is a gift from God. We saw Eden as a picture of shalom - Something we can only experience in God’s presence. Wholeness, fullness, no needs unmet. And we wondered what this world would’ve looked like if the Fall hadn’t happened, a Garden of Shalom becoming a global City of Shalom (more on that in a minute). We saw that Humans rejected the Designer’s design and were exiled from the Garden of Shalom, but we also saw the relentless love that God has for us as he pursued his people in the wilderness…promising them the gift of shalom, of wholeness, of things working as they ought to. Here a vision of broken humans becoming fully human comes into view. And we have just seen how far God will go to restore shalom. God so loves the world that sends the Son, to heal and to mend, to forgive and reconcile, to call rebels to repentance, and to provide abundant, never-ending life.

So if the first point is that God gives shalom as a gift to his people through Jesus. The second point is this: His people are commissioned to bring shalom to the world.

- Point one: God provides shalom in Jesus. “complete wholeness” “abundant life” “relational, physical, and spiritual needs met”

- Point two: God pours that shalom out into the world through his people.

But here’s the kicker. Jesus, the God who spoke to Moses on Sinai, spoke from the top of another mount, this one in Galilee. In his famous “Sermon on the Mount.” Jesus gives divine wisdom and instruction and puts forward a vision for flourishing among his people.

In the midst of the beatitudes in Matthew 5, Jesus says this:

Matthew 5:9 (LEB)

Blessed (or Flourishing) are the peacemakers, because they will be called sons of God.

Now here we run into a small translation issue. You see the english word “peace” is too small of a container to hold all that shalom communicates. The greek word “εἰρήνη” is the word of choice for translating “shalom” from Hebrew. And “peace” is the usual translation into English. But each time we translate we lose a little something. “Peace” in English usually means something like a lack of conflict, or some kind of inner tranquility, but I hope you can see that shalom is so much bigger than that. Remember Simon Peter in The Chosen? He said shalom means peace, and shalom shalom means perfect peace…then he paused for a moment and said “complete wholeness.” Eden isn’t a safe place from harm, it is the very picture of flourishing, of fullness, of thriving, of every thing in creation working in perfect harmony, just as God intended it to.

When the prophet Isaiah talks about Jesus he says,

For a child has been born for us;

a son has been given to us.

And the dominion will be on his shoulder,

and his name is called Wonderful Counselor,

Mighty God,

Everlasting Father, Prince of _____ (Shalom!).

His dominion will grow continually,

and to shalom there will be no end.

So back to the Sermon on the Mount, what is the Prince of Shalom saying? He’s not just saying be peaceful people. He’s telling us to be peacemakers. So we need to blow that up into Shalom Bringers! Jesus’ people thrive and flourish when they bring shalom. Did you catch that? We flourish as followers of Jesus, when we help others flourish, when bring shalom to others. We also imitate Jesus when we bring shalom into the wild, disordered world around us.

You’ll notice that God regularly uses people to bring about his purposes.

Adam and Eve where to extend God’s shalom to the ends of the earth.

When God wanted to begin the mending process he called Abraham.

When he wanted to release the captives from Egypt he called Moses, Aaron, and Miriam.

When he wanted to call the Ninevites to repentance he had a fish swallow a reluctant prophet and vomit him out on the shore.

There are a myriad of examples, but just don’t be surprised that the shalom-bringing mission of Jesus is now being carried out by his Spirit-empowered Church. We are ministers of reconciliation and restoration.

The resurrected Jesus said to his disciples, “Shalom to you. As the Father sent me, I also send you.”

Bringing shalom is the mission of the Church! We bear the good news of Jesus, the fount of every blessing. But we don’t just bear this in word only. Shalom-bringing is so much more than speaking. We need to be mending the frayed ends around us. Like Jesus, we need to bring order to chaos, and help broken people in a bent world.

Jame says, If someone is poorly clothed and lacking food for the day, and one of you should say to them, “Go in shalom, keep warm and eat well,” but does not give them what is necessary for the body, what is the benefit?

As the body of Christ, the God of Shalom, we feed the hungry, comfort the afflicted, clothe the naked, and so one. All in the power of the Spirit, and thus to the glory of God.

The message of the gospel on the lips of those who are actively mending what is broken has the power to transform the world.

Closing - That’ll be the Day!

Some of you will know that that scene from The Chosen i’ve mentioned has one more line. The Roman asks Simon Peter why he says shalom shalom, and Peter says that shalom means peace, and that shalom shalom means perfect peace…then he pauses and says “complete wholeness.” But after that the Roman reflects on what Peter is saying and says, “That’ll be the day.”

And you know what, he’s absolutely right! There is a day coming that every follower of Jesus longs for. A day when all brokenness and rebellion is cast into outer darkness forever. When all tears will be wiped away, and death will not exist any longer, and mourning or wailing or pain will not exist any longer. Yes, that’ll be the Day! When the Holy City of God makes his dwelling on earth once and for all.

God’s vision for complete wholeness in a well-ordered global city filled with his life-giving, shalom-bringing presence will come. When you get home today, read the first two chapters on the Bible, and then go read the last two, it will blow your mind and swell your soul up with hope!

Let us move out of this gathering this morning with a new sense of mission. Let us, as we anticipate the Day the God of Shalom returns, take up the burdens of the needy and bring wholeness to the empty and broken.

As we prepare to drink the cup of Jesus, and feast on the bread of heaven, let us celebrate his never-ending provision and his sacrificial commitment to our flourishing.

And as we pass the peace to one another, let us extend that shalom beyond these walls.

A benediction from the second letter to the Thessalonians:

The Lexham English Bible (Chapter 3)

Now may the Lord of shalom himself grant you shalom through everything in every way. May the Lord be with all of you.