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Psalms of Lament – Psalm 31

Psalm 31 answers the question “what do we do when we are filled with shame and despair?”

Lament is not a popular topic. The scriptures are full of it, but our culture, our Christian culture in particular, is not. We seek to “skip ahead” to the glory of the cross, over the pain, grief & humility of the cross.

Before Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, he took time to grieve that death – “Jesus wept.” Lament is medicine for the soul and a check against injustice.

One of the key themes of the psalm is shame and disgrace. Benjamin Rush wrote, “Ignominy is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death,” and this is what David is facing in and through this psalm. His response is “Into your hands I commit my spirit,” the same words Jesus quoted as He faced the ultimate shame and despair on the cross.

In verse 15, God’s hands come into play again – David’s “times” are in His hands, the ordained moments of his very life.

The cornerstone of this relationship is the love of God, in Hebrew “hesed” – a covenantal, relational love that God lavishes on us and that He seeks from us in return.

And this is the answer to the question posed by the Psalm – when faced by shame and despair, our answer is to love God and to accept His love in return.

— Sermon Notes, Diana Cleveland, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, February 1, 2026

Image by Gemini.

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Ascent Through Time – Psalm 126

The Psalms of Ascent provide a deliberate pilgrimage framework, designed to accompany believers on their spiritual and physical journeys, originally the Israelites as they ascended to the temple. This group of Psalms is compact, intentional and deeply communal, emphasizing the shared experience of a people rooted in their history and sacred places. By focusing on the collective memory of the faithful, these psalms transform individual travel into a shared act of devotion, reinforcing the idea that the path toward God is one best traveled together.

At their core, these psalms are woven together by the overarching themes of trust, unity, and hope. This is expressed through various “micro-themes” that address the practicalities of faith, such as seeking God’s protection in Psalm 121 and finding communal joy in worship in Psalm 122. Ultimately, the collection moves the heart toward a state of humility and dependence, culminating in a celebration of unity and the assurance of God’s divine presence and blessing.

Psalm 126 provides an ascent through time, across the varied journey of life with its ups and downs. It starts with the past, when “we were like those who dreamed.” What are the “great things” the Lord has done for you in the past? As you remember God’s faithfulness in the past, what dreams are still stirring in you? In what ways can you share the story of God’s goodness with others, just as the nations recognized it in Israel?

Then it moves to the present, a time of struggle and “sowing in tears”. This is true for many of us. In what areas are you experiencing sorrow while trying to remain faithful? Where are you asking for streams in a dry place. Are you currently in a season of “weeping” while trying to plant seeds for the future? How can you find joy in the present, even while waiting for full restoration?

It is important to grapple with these honest human emotions, to not just slap a happy face over or sadness. All facets of human emotion are real and legitimate and a part of who we are created to be.

But we do look forward to Songs of Joy. What harvest (“sheaves of grain”) are you trusting God to bring, even if they aren’t visible yet? How does the image of “songs of joy” inspire you to persevere in your faith and service? How can you show hope and joy in the present, confident that God will renew all things?

All of this human experience, both the joyful and the painful, is a part of who we were made to be. God is there in all phases of our ascent through time – and we as a body should be there for each other through all phases well, as we journey together towards the throne of God.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, January 18, 2026

Image by Gemini

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Sing a New Song – Psalm 98

What is your bouy? When you are in times of panic and disorientation and despair, what do you look to?

Psalm 98 is one of six “enthronement Psalms” that declares the kingship of Yahweh, His sovereignty and His eternal reign.

There are key characteristics across all of the Enthronement Psalms. The Lord’s Divine Kingship is obviously one of them, but so is the Universal Scope of the messages. Many Psalms are specific to Israel, but these songs call all people – indeed, all of creation – to the worship of God.

On that note, Creation’s Joy is another key theme here that runs across all six Psalms. And that joy springs in part from God’s Righteous Judgment – “He will judge the world with righteousness and equity.”

Finally, the Psalms all reference singing a “new song” to the creator – a call to creativity, a warning against getting stuck in stale tradition, and perhaps also a call forward to the New Thing that God was working towards, the culmination of the universal scope and righteous judgement promised here.

For ourselves, what are the new songs we should sing in the new year? What is God putting on our lips? What are the old songs we should leave behind?

Sometimes, when we look in front of us it looks like other people are in charge, controlling things. But when we root ourselves in creation we see that our earthly divisions and challenges are as nothing when we put them in front of the King and creator who calls us to sing the new song he puts in our hearts.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, January 4, 2026

Images from the Burnet Psalter and Gemini.

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Mary’s Song

Mary’s song is a song of reversals – the high brought low, the rich made humble and the lowly raised on high. It’s an echo of Hannah’s song in the Old Testament.

Key to understanding the song is the biblical theme of waiting on the Lord – patience through times of silence and wilderness, finally rewarded in ways that are beyond our understanding. Hannah had been waiting and longing for a child, while Israel had been waiting and longing for a savior.

Unlike Hannah, Mary did not sing this song upon discovering that she was pregnant – instead of wasn’t until meeting with her cousin Elizabeth and receiving confirmation of what had been promised her.

Many of us have gone through this ourselves many times in smaller ways, and God is always bigger and always has these problems in his hand.

Mary’s song also pulls us away from our tendency towards individualism. She began her story as an individual, burdened with a great and terrible blessing. But when she meets Elizabeth, and feels the connection between their unborn children, it’s a reminder that we are all connected. Her song calls back to ancestors and calls forward to descendants, it rejoices with her nation and with all generations.

We can all do the same, rejoicing together, waiting together, looking ahead to the fulfillment of God’s promises together. This Christmas, let that be our goal.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, December 21, 2025

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No Peace Without Repentance – Matthew 3:1-12

John the Baptist was playing the role of the Grinch to the celebrations of the rich and powerful of his time. He was the ultimate party-pooper, bringing down the vibe and warning the Pharisees that their time was coming. You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, John’s telling you why – the Messiah is coming to town.

He warned them not to rest on their ethnicity and generic heritage. He warned them that an axe was at their roots, and “unquenchable fire” is in the offing. It’s not what we generally think of as a Christmas message.

But John is calling us to do exactly what Advent is there for – preparation, clearing the way, and removing those things that get in the way of our straight path to the savior.

How can there be peace when we have oppression and violence and sin? Ultimately, there can’t be peace without repentance, and there can’t be repentance without confrontation. There is real sin that impacts others and must be addressed before we can have peace – in our lives, in our neighborhoods, in our nation.

What are the obstacles in the roads of your heart that need to be flattened? Where are we going in the wrong direction and need to turn around? How do we as a church be prophetic and speak the truths that need to be told?

Where are the places we need to repent? Where are the wells we go back to that are not life-giving? What does repentance look like for us in our lives individually? What does it look like as a nation collectively? Where do we have privilege and position that we can use for the good of others?

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, December 7, 2025

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Psalms of Lament – Psalm 42

Sometimes as Christians we shy away from lament and other strong emotions, especially more negative ones. But opening ourselves up to lament is a way to open ourselves up to the pain and tragedy around us, even when things are fine on our end. It’s a way to empathize with those around us who are suffering.

As we look at the Psalms, we can break them into five categories generally – Lament, Praise & Thanksgiving, Wisdom, Royal/Messianic and the Psalms of Ascent.

Psalm 42 is the first psalm of book two of the Psalms, out of five – correlated with Exodus from the Pentateuch. It is one of the first psalms of lament, as well.

It’s a psalm we can relate to, as the psalmist wrestles with the fact that he sees evil winning and his enemies triumphing – “where is your god?” It’s a question we have all wrestled with as we see horrible things happen. But we tend to wrestle with it individually, rather than corporately. In public we often paper over our challenges with an outward face of joy that does not match our heart. We take the calls to rejoice from scripture and turn them into a mask, rather than honestly responding to the calls elsewhere to lament.

Theologian Walter Bruggeman, in his writings on the Psalms, describes our lives as moving in one of two directions – into the pit or out of the pit. This means we are in one of three places – either Orientation, when we feel like things make sense and we understand the world and our place in our; Disorientation, the crisis point when everything that made sense previously no longer does; or Reorientation, where we are given a new way of understanding the world and our place within it.

Within that paradigm, Psalms of lament are there to serve as reflections of those times of Disorientation, to point us back to times of Orientation, and forward to times of Reorientation. In Psalm 42, the speaker is so downcast that his tears are his only food – but calls on himself to remember the better times when he did feel connection with God, but also allows himself to cry out in desperation, itself an act of worship. But ends with a call forward to what he knows of God and how he will respond – “yet I will praise him, my savior and my God.”

So when we look at the world and see pain and chaos and hypocrisy, we can, with the psalmist, “yet praise him.”

We are people of rhythms – day and night, the turning of the seasons, reminding us of times of death and sadness, of times of joy and rebirth. We can use the Psalms as we go through these seasons ourselves – we can pray the Psalms of lament both as we ourselves find ourselves lamenting, but also as a spiritual exercise to open ourselves up to the sorrow of others.

What are you lamenting in your personal life. What do you lament for your family? What about your workplace, school or neighborhood? In our nation? In our world?

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, November 16, 2025

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Hostility to Hospitality to Family – Hebrews 13:2

This exhortation comes at the end of the book of Hebrews, a part of a list of closing instructions – love each other, minister to those in prison, be sexually moral, and this one. “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.”

The term is philoxenia, a combination of the terms philos or affection, and xenos or stranger. We see this same instruction in Romans 12:13 – “Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality.” Both the people of God and the stranger, the xenos, are covered here.

The concept of welcoming the stranger is a continuance of the same instructions in the Old Testament where it is often connected to the people of Israel living as strangers, whether in Egypt or in Babylon.

But there is an additional angle here, this idea that there is more to these encounters than just the practical. At one level, it’s a reference to the story in Genesis where Abram and Sarai welcome and show hospitality to angels and are blessed in turn – or the reverse of that story that results in the destruction of Sodom. This negative example gives us a strong sense of how important hospitality is to God.

Beyond that is the promise that when we serve others in this way, we are touching something more than human, beyond the material world. It’s echo of the promise that when we serve others we are really serving Jesus in a very personal way. There is a magic to hospitality that transcends the practical effects, as valuable as those are.

And if we look at the “sin of Sodom” we also see that there is a negative magic as well, associated with hostility towards the stranger. This should give us pause, and give pause to the portions of the American church in particular that have set themselves up in opposition to the strangers and immigrants in our midst, painting them as criminals and as taking resources from deserving Americans.

In reality, immigrant churches are driving forward the kingdom of God across the country, especially in urban areas where white churches have declined or closed. A majority of the baptisms performed by the Evangelical church today are by immigrant churches. Immigration of non-Christians is bringing the mission field to the USA, while the work of immigrant pastors and churches are evangelizing Americans, reversing the typical ministry flow.

We must seek to go from hostility to hospitality to family as we engage with the strangers and immigrants around us. We should seek to learn from the ways of worship and teaching that seem foreign to us instead of putting up walls. We know that the ultimate destiny of the church is exactly this congregation from all peoples and all tribes.

But this unification of all voices can look a lot like a loss of control if we are used to being the only voice being heard. We must put that fear aside and instead step into the supernatural opportunity we are given to show hospitality to strangers–and possibly even to angels.

–Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, November 2, 2025

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Save a Seat for Others – 1 Corinthians 11:17-26

A core practice of the Early Church was the Love Feast, a gathering for prayer, teaching, singing of hymns, eating together and the collection of offerings, much like we do today.

We get a good picture of this in Acts 2: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles.” Again, it sounds very familiar.

But Acts 2 goes beyond that: “All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.”

This bridging of economic disparity was a key difference between the church and the people around them – along with breaking the barriers and expectations around ethnicity and gender. The community was intended to demonstrate the unity and reconciliation brought by Jesus in a way that set it apart from the surrounding culture. The way the church brought together rich and poor to eat together showed the love of God in a way that was impossible to mistake.

Tertullian (160-225 AD) wrote in his Apology, “Our feast explains itself by its name. The Greeks call it agape, l.e., affection. Whatever it costs, our outlay in the name of piety is gain, since with the good things of the feast we benefit the needy.”

But in Corinth, things were not going smoothly. Corinth was a wealthy city, and there were many wealthy believers – but also many poor ones. The poor ones had to work more than the wealthy, which meant they arrived late. The wealthy among them were beginning their meals early, finishing the food and drink before the poorer even arrived.

Imagine a preschool classroom where there’s one single toy that everyone wants – we fight and we squabble over the Big Wheel. When we have a scarcity mentality rather than an abundance mentality, we create barriers – in families, in churches, in nations.

Over time, the Love Feast and the Lord’s Supper, which had been essentially the same thing, became divided, especially as the church became more institutional and theological, and concept of the Sacrament, the Eucharist, took center stage over the communal & social aspects of the church.

But today there are ways to recapture the spirit of the Agape Feast – James Menendez on Substack makes a few recommendations:

1. Encouraging Fellowship Over Meals.

Hosting meals that go beyond potlucks to intentionally foster spiritual conversations, testimonies, and prayer.

2. Promoting Testimonies as a Key Part of Worship.

Giving voice to those across the spectrum of age, gender, class, social status and more.

3. Practicing Generosity and Shared Resources.

Being intentional about giving to those in need, both inside and outside the church.

4. Building Smaller, Intimate Groups.

This has been a challenge for Renew but we are at work on it

5. Practicing Communal Meal and Prayer to Sunday Worship.

We work to accomplish this by combining our celebration of the Lord’s Supper with our Third Sunday potluck every Sunday.

Overall, the message is to save a seat at the table. Jean Vanier, writes in Becoming Human, “A society that honors only the powerful, the clever, and the winners necessarily belittles the weak. It is as if to say to be human is to be powerful.”

John Swinton, similarly, writes in It was Good, Not Perfect, “If God’s creation is good, then every life within it, regardless of capacity, cognition, or conformity, is already gifted with divine affirmation.”

What does it mean to save a seat at the table for the disabled? For the elderly? Wait for those who are slower, who need more time for any number of reasons. We as a church need to see those the world ignores and lift up those knocked down by society, by biology, by even their own choices. We need to save a seat at the table.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, October 19, 2025

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Widows, Orphans and Foreigners – Deuteronomy 10:18-19

We don’t ourselves have the same experience as Israel is pointed to here, but all of us have depended on others in the the past, even if just when we were infants. We have all been vulnerable in the past, like Israel, and like Israel as a faith communitand we are all called to demonstrate empathy for and actively advocate for the most vulnerable around us.

This passage comes just after the golden calf rebellion, when the people of Israel lost patience and created their own god target than waiting on the Lord. It comes as a piece of the covenant renewal, expanding the ritual purity into a broader doctrine of compassionate holiness, from ritual purity to justice and compassion. The response to divine mercy God asks for is ethical faithfulness.

This call to love the out group was radical in the ancient Near East, even more than in today’s society. The boundaries and borders of the world are real, but the first identity for them (and us) is as a child of God.

This message is a reminder that the ethnic identity – even for the chosen people of God – is a responsibility rather than a recognition of innate goodness. They literally just finished giving up their good jewelry to create a pagan idol. Likewise, if we today conflate our cultural, national or ethnic identity with our identity as children of God, we likewise make that mistake. When we see our political units and political players as anointed by God, we miss the point of what God truly cares about.

God shows us what He cares about when He orients Israel’s law to center on the dignity of marginalized.

Today, much of the church has lost this understanding. We have to make excuses to show compassion, we condemn empathy. We spend more time gatekeeping our communities and places of worship than welcoming in the stranger.

So as a community we are called to respond to God’s justice in the same way Israel was. We are called to welcome immigrants with radical, practical hospitality. We are called to support orphans, widows, and immigrants in their needs; to learn the stories of the marginalized; to use our places of privilege to advocate for justice in our communities; to build friendships across difference; to pray and worship with mercy in mind.

As a church we are a subversive community, living in the world, within particular political boundaries, but with a higher calling. Let us continually seek that calling and to live out the unconditional love God shows us.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, October 5, 2025

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Giving and Receiving Hospitality – Sermon Notes, Acts 28:1-10

It can be difficult to accept help – it can be embarrassing, demoralizing and overly vulnerable. But we are also commanded to give help and assistance to those in need – this means that if we are not careful, we can fall into a pattern of paternalism, making a separation between those who Have and those who Need. But this dichotomy is not biblical – biblical hospitality is a two way street. You cannot truly give unless you can receive.

We see that in this story in the book of Acts. People serve each other throughout the story – even at the beginning, the people of Malta rescue Paul and his companions, while Paul works to build a fire.

When he is bit by a snake, Paul’s reputation swings wildly from being a murderer to being seen as a god. This miracle does not result in an immediate conversion of the people there – they do not turn to Jesus but interpret what happened within their own pagan framework.

But even so, Paul heals the father of Publius, the chief official, and then heals many others on the island – in turn, they are given hospitality by Publius for three months, and are greatly honored by the people there, “in many ways”, finally sent off with all the supplies they need

We don’t see Paul preaching the gospel here, but rather we see him “doing life together” with the pagans around him, accepting their help and providing his own.

We can learn a lot from this passage about receiving hospitality in God’s economy. First, God’s people aren’t immune from need. If we pretend we do not have any needs, we will miss opportunities to receive help. And we will be surprised by those who step in to help. Christians are not the only people who work the will of God, just like we see on Malta. As we also see on Malta, receiving hospitality creates community. Paul and his shipwrecked companions created a community for three months with the people of Malta, a combination of cosmopolitan Jews, superstitious islanders, maybe a few sailors in the mix. And in that community, like this motley crew in the Mediterranean, we can experience home and life.

As a people, our hospitality muscles have atrophied – between the pandemic and the general drift of culture, as Paul says later in Acts 28, our “heart has become calloused.” This is true on an individual level but also on a national level.

If we as individuals and as a nation could reflect more on how we have received help and wisdom and gifts of other people and peoples, perhaps there would be less calloused behavior, and more celebration.

We, as a church, are called to be openhearted, to both give and receive hospitality with joy and gratitude. We are to be expansive in both directions as we expand our family circle and God brings all of us to His banquet table.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, September 21, 2025