Posts

Posted on

Salt & Light – Matthew 5:13-16

The Sermon on the Mount starts in an odd way for a Sermon. The hill Jesus is speaking from is crammed with people trying to hear. No opening joke or anecdote, no catchy hook, but a list of counterintuitive statements. Blessed are the poor? It’s the rich who are blessed, that’s why they are rich. Blessed are those who mourn? Those who celebrate do so because they are the ones who are blessed. But the crowd eats it up because they are an oppressed people – they are poor, they are mourning, they are hungry.

Then Jesus pivots to a statement directly to the crowd. “You are the salt of the earth.” The Greek here is second person plural (you all), emphatic and present tense. And what does it mean to be salt? Salt is a transformative agent, enhancing flavor and preserving food. In ancient times it was far more important than we think of it today, far more valuable and essential for what was then modern life.

So Jesus is telling the crowd, “You all, right here, right now, your identity, purpose, value is to be a transformative agent on this earth.” How do we do that? By living out those odd statements Jesus just gave – by living out the beatitudes.

But what good is salt of it loses its flavor? The word “good” here means “what use is it?” The term for “lose its flavor,” mōrainō, literally means “to become foolish” and is our source for the word “moron.” What does it mean to become foolish? By failing to live out the beatitudes.

Next Jesus tells the people that they are “the light of the world.” They are the thing that drives out darkness. Again, this is a small, oppressed group and Jesus is using the same term that Cicero used to describe Rome itself! This small group of seekers is somehow the city on a hill.

But it comes with the same kind of warning – don’t hide that light. Don’t cover it over with worldliness, don’t hide it in a church building – let it shine out

Instead, Jesus gives the first command of his Sermon: “Let your good and beautiful deeds shine! So that all people will experience and recognize God, the true Father’s redemptive love and power.” This is the first time we get the word “Father” in the gospel of Matthew, very possibly as a purposeful contrast with Caesar, who was seen as the father to all. But Caesar is the evil, authoritarian, oppressive Father – Jesus is speaking of the loving Father who brings out the beatitudes.

What good and beautiful deeds can you do to encourage others to see our father in them?

Now, there were other groups out there who also had to find a way to live under the empire. The Essenes headed out to the desert, didn’t want to be complicit in empire – they hid their Lamp, and many think that Jesus’ words here were an implicit rebuke. The Saducees bowed the knee to empire, being nationalistic, securing power and economic gain for themselves. The Pharisees kept to a strict holiness and piety code, believing that their personal holiness would bring change. Then the zealots – they sought active overthrow of the empire. They were prophetic voices calling for change, but were willing to useviolent means, which Jesus clearly rejects.

We can be tempted in all these directions – we can seek to hide or avoid society. We can throw in with the world and seek power and wealth. We can retreat to our own holiness with no regard for the hurt around us. We can adopt the violent means of the world and lose our very purpose.

What should we do instead? Again, looking back to the beatitudes, living out those counterintuitive words, seeking to be salt and light in the world.

— Sermon Notes, Tim Hsieh, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, February 2, 2025

Image by Midjourney.

Posted on

The Sermon on the Mount – Matthew 5:1-2

The Sermon on the Mount is arguably the most important sermon ever given. In it, Jesus lays out his radical ethical and moral vision.

To understand what Jesus is doing in this sermon, it may help to look at how children are raised. When a baby first receives instruction, it tends to be about “no!” Don’t touch that, don’t put that in your mouth, don’t go there.” As time passes and children grow, the boundaries change and get more complicated – “Do your homework, no more screen time, be home by 10.” But at some point we want these things to change – we want our children to move out and have their own lives, their own identities, making their own decisions and setting their own boundaries.

Similarly, when the United States became a nation, the Constitution was put in place to create a framework for running the national, Federal government, enabling the creation of laws, the interpretation of laws and even the amending of the constitution itself. But it does not give instruction for every situation and is not meant to be.

When Jesus climbs up to the top of a hill to teach, it evokes Moses bringing the law down from Mount Sinai and the prophets of the Old Testament. Jesus is bringing a new word, a new manifesto for the Kingdom of God. The emphasis becomes humanity internalizing the desires of God rather than acting from external instruction from the Law. The movement is from the law written in stone to the law written in our hearts. Jesus instructs us to take the principles set forth in the law and to understand those well enough to apply them in our lives to live as God’s people.

The Sermon on the Mount is a radical reinterpretation of the Mosaic law, and a radical restatement of it. Jesus’ focus is on the heart of the matter, where the law has focused on the external behavior. In many ways, it is even more extreme, but it is also designed to enable us to adapt to new questions and new situations.

As we grow from a baby to a teenager to an adult, our questions grow from what we’re going to touch or not touch, into hard questions of how we respond to sin in ourselves, to corruption in the world, to complex relationships.

Following the Sermon on the Mount means moving from scripted moral answers to moral improv. It means internalizing the will and desires of God to the extent that we respond to those difficult questions in a godly way. It’s a message from Jesus “you’re not babies anymore.”

Maturity is a challenge, and many of us long for the simpler, easier answers from when we were young. But Jesus calls us to something greater and over the next few weeks we will dig into how He does that in the Sermon on the Mount.

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

Posted on

Overflow – Luke 1:39-45

The Incarnation at celebrate at Christmas is an overflowing of the love of God into a real tangible, concrete way. God knows we are not merely intellectual creatures, but need touch, need facts, need reality.

God could have done things differently but the fact that He descended, “became flesh and dwelt with us,” tells us something about His nature, and also ours. The Good News came in embodied form, so that we could encounter it in a personal way.

Scripture also tells us that “hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.” Humanity was made to long for things – want and desire are core to our nature. They are on one hand healthy and good, but on the other hand when left too long will make the heart sick. Hope, when combined with fulfillment, bring healing. The birth of Jesus was the ultimate fulfillment, both as the “consolation of Israel” and as the answer to the “groaning of creation”.

The nature of God is relational – the Godhead exists in trinity, an eternal relationship that we replicate in our own relationships. The coming of Jesus was followed by the coming of the Holy Spirit, the Person by which we enter into relationship with God, and by which we are bound into the Body of Christ, the Incarnation of Jesus now into His church.

Today’s passage is called the “Visitation,” the meeting of Mary and her cousin Elizabeth immediately after the Annunciation when Mary learns of her blessing and challenge. In this passage we get a picture of the physicality of the Incarnation. Jesus could have come like the Terminator, showing up as a fully formed adult but instead He began His humanity as all humans do, as a handful of cells replicating within His mother.

But even in that form, Jesus’ presence has power to bring joy, as the baby in Elizabeth’s womb reacts with rejoicing. This connection – between Mary, Elizabeth, the unborn John and the three unborn Christ is the first stirring of the church. The rejoicing comes in relationship and in community – and in diversity. The two women are in completely different stages of life, but are brought together by the work of God and ultimately the coming of Christ.

This relational aspect extends to our lives today, as we are told that Jesus is also in a way incarnate in the “least of these” around us. When we serve others we ultimately serve Jesus.

This Christmas, let us live out the rejoicing at the fulfillment that the coming of Christ brings – and let us also seek to bring that fulfillment to those around us.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, December 22, 2024

Posted on

Joy and Lament – Philippians 4:4-9

There is a tension between joy and lament in the Christian life. How do you celebrate and have joy when those around you are struggling? How do you “rejoice always” as Paul instructs when there is so much suffering, both in the world and even in our own lives?

If you grew up in the church, Philippians 4 is a very familiar passage. You see it on notecards, memorize it, hear it in words of encouragement – but often it is misapplied by what can be called “the Theology of the False Smile.” If we take the instruction from Paul to rejoice always as being focused on the outward appearance then we just end up papering over what is happening inside us.

Christmas is a season where this is felt most keenly. On the one hand, the whole world seems like it is focused on joy and cheer, but on the other hand it can be a very difficult time for many people – if we don’t have families we can celebrate with, don’t have resources to celebrate as is expected, if we suffer from the dark and cold of the season, Christmas can be a time of deep depression. If we have fallen into the Theology of the Fake Smile, we just ignore the pain and paper over with a false joy.

Verse 6 instructs us to “not be anxious about anything.” This, too, is misapplied through the “Hakuna Matata Theology”. No worries! A problem free philosophy that drives us to ignore all problems and avoid anxiety by avoiding responsibility and reality.

Paul also tells us to “let your gentleness be evident to all,” which also gets misapplied – this is the “Bless Your Heart” theology, where words and even deeds are only kind on the surface level, but underneath cut like a knife.

To properly follow Paul’s instructions, though, we need to be spiritually and emotionally healthy. Pretending to be joyful is not actually being joyful. We need to address the world, both inside of us she outside of it, the way that it actually is rather than how it is “supposed to be.”

We see this in a broader sense as well. When the American church falls into the trap of avoiding lament and only showing, discussing or allowing the positive, we perpetuate this Theology of the False Smile on a ecclesiastical level, and even on a social and political level as this bleeds into Christian Nationalism or other ways we paper over suffering and lament both in the present and the past.

To understand more about how to properly apply Paul’s words here, let’s look back at the opening of his letter. In chapter 1, he clearly acknowledges his suffering, but also the goodness that comes from his suffering. Through his suffering, many have come to see and know Jesus. We can’t show Jesus in our suffering if we ignore and downplay our suffering.

This is one of the reasons that we as a church value authenticity. We don’t want to be a place where people have to pretend to be doing well just to walk in the door. We don’t want to be a place where we ignore what is happening in the world outside. We do not need to protect God. It is not our job to make Christianity look good by pretending everything is going well when it isn’t. In fact, if we see how Paul does it, in fact we make Christianity look good by being authentic, by embracing our suffering just as Christ did, and embracing the suffering of others – just as Christ did.

An authentic community mourns with those who mourn, laments with those who lament, and allows all its members to mourn and lament authenticallyso that the community can come around them.

–Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, December 15, 2024

Images created with Midjourney.

Posted on

The Promise of Christ – Jeremiah 33:14-16

Advent is a time of anticipation of the coming of Christ, both as a memory of what happened historically, and as a coming into our lives to transform us. It’s a time of joy, also, joy in gifts and presents and songs – but as we grow in maturity, the more we see that patience and anticipation as a core part of the joy. To persevere for a good thing and finally grasp it, that is true joy. This us something we learn better as we age, though aging also comes with disappointments. Financial, relational, emotional, even faith related.

The time of Advent also comes when the world is drenched in consumerism and business. What had been a time of waiting leading up to the feast commemorating Christ’s birth has become a secular frenzy of spending and accumulating.

What we are called to do in Advent, though, is to wait in hope. Those are not exactly the same thing. One can wait without hope, but hope is a leaning into a future that is greater than what we have today.

We see that in today’s passage, written by the prophet Jeremiah in a time of upheaval and turbulence. This promise comes in the midst of condemnation of the nation of Judah. The people are breaking the Covenant of God both with idol worship and social injustices. Jeremiah warns the king of Judah, Zedekiah, not to be making alliances that will bring Babylon down on them.

In the midst of that, Jeremiah gives a promise from God – that He will raise up a “righteous branch” who will do both what is right and just, addressing both the idolatry and injustice of the present time. A leader will come who will embody all the goodness of God, who will make His people both saved and safe. Verse 16 promises both of these, again addressing both the material and the spiritual.

His name will be “The Lord is Our Righteousness.” We can look back and see this as a promise of Jesus who, through His life, death and resurrection, becomes our righteousness.

What are the promises of God? Love and Faithfulness; Strength and Help; Presence and Guidance; Provision; Peace; Forgiveness; Eternal Life and Salvation; Rest.

And that rest is a deeper and truer rest than laying around on the couch, but rather a total fulfillment of our anxieties and desires.

That promise is coming – let us seek to imitate it and live into it as best we can, especially in this season of waiting and anticipation.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, December 1, 2024

Posted on

Faithful Stewardship – Matthew 25:14-30

We’ve been going through a series called “Resident Aliens,” examining how we are called to live as citizens of heaven but residents of earth. We are not called to hide our time until heavens, but we are called to enable flourishing in the world around us.

That is much of the story that Jesus is telling in this parable. This parable came in a series of stories that focused on eschatology, with the primary point of those being that no one knows when the end will come, so that is the context.

The story is of a man who loaned huge sums of money to his servants before he went away, with the expectation that they would put the money to work for him. We may not feel like that applies to us, but each of us has some amount of time, talent or treasure that we can put to work for the kingdom of God.

Each was given a different amount “according to their ability” – note that they didn’t squabble or compare amongst themselves, since the money was never theirs to begin with. Likewise, the same is true of the resources we have.

We must be careful not to be the servant who buried his treasure in a field. He did so because he was frightened, because he had a false understanding of his master – he was overwhelmed and did not know what to do, and so he did what he felt was the least harm. In reality, not acting was the worst things he could do

Do we do the same thing? Do we bury our time, our talent or our treasure because we are afraid of what to do with it? Because we feel like it’s ours, forgetting that in reality it all comes from God?

As Peter writes in his epistle, “Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms. If anyone speaks, they should do so as one who speaks the very words of God. If anyone serves, they should do so with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen.”

So however we have been blessed, let us turn that blessing back to those around us, serving God by serving others.

— Sermon Notes, Alison Robison, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, November 17, 2024

Posted on

Do Good – 1 Peter 3:8-16

We have been exploring what it means to live Christ-honoring lives outside the walls of the church building. It means internal growth and maturity, but it also means loving others. All church mission statements boil down to “love God, love others”.

And not just others who look like us, think like us, vote like us, live like us, we’re called to love all our neighbors. This is hard! Christ makes sure we know it’s hard – he instructs us, “be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect, ” but he also offers grace to us when we fall.

As Christians, we live in a tension as “resident aliens.” We are citizens of heaven, set apart by God – and yet we are in the world and called to minister to it and love those around us. This is a tension that feeds back on itself, though, because it is that very set-apart-ness, that love God has for us that spills out into the world through us.

1 Samuel 22 tells the story of David in the cave of Adullam – he has been rejected by Saul and is hiding out in a cave with his loyal followers. He is a stranger in his own the land, a fugitive and refugee within the kingdom he was destined to rule. But his response was not what we move expect – he gathered “all those who were in distress or in debt or discontented.”

Peter references this experience, quoting from Psalm 34, which David likely wrote in that cave after having escaped from the Philistines as he sought to escape Paul.

Peter’s whole letter is an instruction to the people of God on how to live within an empire. He sets up Christians to live quietly subversive lives that worked within the pagan religious and sociopolitical framework of the Roman empire. He gives five words of instruction:

  • συνφρονέω (synphroneō) – “Be like-minded”
  • συμπαθής (sumpathes) – “Be sympathetic”
  • άγαπάω (agapao) – Love one another
  • σπλαγχνίζομαι (splagchnizomal) – “Be compassionate”
  • ταπεινός (tapeinos) – “Be humble”

All of this points us to the life of Christ, in all its complexity, and we are to seek to live like him.

Then Peter gets to the verse probably most often quoted from this passage: “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” This is often interpreted as a call for apologetics and an intellectual case for our hope. But if you look at the passage as a whole, it points us back to the words of unity, love, compassion and humility.

This passage is not about handling hostile questions from angry atheists, but about drawing people into wonder what is going on with us. It’s not about answers to the problem of evil or the historicity of scripture, but answers to questions about why we love so well, why we give so well, why we are compassionate to those others hate.

Are you living a life peculiar enough to make others ask questions about the hope that is in you?

The hardest thing Peter instructs us to do is be humble – in this age of social media it’s easy to instantly share your opinion, but it’s difficult to do that in humility. Can we live in that humility and unity? Can we walk in the tension of living in the world but not of it, as ministers of reconciliation? Can we remember where our hope truly lies?

We have an election on Tuesday and the outcome and aftermath are uncertain. What is certain is that God is still sovereign, that He still loves us and has a plan for His church. Let us rest in that knowledge and let it propel us to lives that point others to the reason for our hope.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, November 3, 2024

Images created with Midjourney.

Posted on

Graves into Gardens – 2 Corinthians 2:17-21

Paul is writing this letter to the Corinthian church, which was one of the largest and most diverse churches at the time. There was a lot of drama and conflict at this church across religious backgrounds, sexuality, gender, methods of worship and questions of authority.

This is the chaos that Paul is speaking into in this passage.

We can learn a lot about the Corinthian debacle because it is a much more diverse church than some of the smaller, more homogenous churches like Philippi and Colosse.

But this passage speaks into this diversity and points people to the unity we have as citizens and ambassadors of heaven.The message to us is that all the things in us that are dead – our sins, our broken relationships, our passion – are overwritten by the new creation made by Christ. Old things are gone and renewed things are here, regenerated by God Himself through Christ. We are reconciled to God through the cross.

But beyond that, we are then called to pass along that message of reconciliation. We are to “live such good lives” among our neighbors that they look at us and say “I’ll have what they’re having.” In our reconciled nature, we become the means of reconciliation for others.

But it’s not just about the vertical reconciliation with God, but Paul is also focused on the reconciliation between people and groups of people. This is particularly important to keep in mind when reading this passage which is speaking into such a diverse church with such fragmented relationships.

God’s first command to humanity in Genesis was to be fruitful and multiply, to steward the creation of God. The planned state of humanity is shalom, an all-encompassing wholeness of all creation, both within and without. To be ambassadors of Christ it means we seek mutual flourishing of all people and all creation. We seek to participate in the work of God, turning the graves around us into gardens.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, October 6, 2024

Posted on

Unity is Hard Work – Galatians 2:8-14

In this passage, Paul discusses “The Incident at Antioch.” It comes after the vision that Peter has in which Christ declares all foods clean. It also comes after the Council of Jerusalem made the determination that gentile Christians did not have to become culturally Jewish in order to join the Church.

After this time, per Paul, Peter lived much like a gentile in terms of cultural and ceremonial rules. But when he was with more culturally Jewish Christians, Paul would revert in how he behaved and most importantly how he treated gentile Christians.

For Paul, this was a big deal. The “New Perspective on Paul” movement suggests that much of Paul’s discussion of the “works if the law” are really focused on these cultural identity markers, those “signs of the Covenant” that marked the distinctions between Jews aha Gentiles. For Paul, unity within the church is vital because Jesus came to bring all people to himself and break down those barriers.

But real unity is hard work. It requires more than social media, but real investment in each other, across those barriers of ethnicity and culture. No matter how ‘aware’ you are, you can be called out – just like Peter, but also even in situations where you have the best of intentions.

Unity is hard work because promises get broken, and we can get hurt. The Jerusalem church and Paul agreed to how they would do ministry, but the leaders in Jerusalem backslid on that agreement. Related, leaders will disappoint us.

Unity is hard work because politics and power win the day too often. History is full of the church being co-opted for secular political ends. Peter’s behavior here was simply an early form of this, changing behavior to maintain influence. We see this across the ages of the church and certainly into the present day.

Unity is hard because it counter-intuitively involves conflict. In order to keep unity we must be willing to confront those who would subvert unity.

Unity is hard because it will mean surrendering things. This is one of the reasons Sunday mornings are so segregated – we are not willing to give up our cultural expectations of worship and church in order to come together. These things are not core to our relationship with Christ, but at cling to them because we see them as “markers of the Covenant” much like the leaders Paul came into conflict with.

So in the end the only answer is to love like Christ did, loving across boundaries and against the gradients created by culture and society. The only answer is to do this hard work on unity as we seek to be more like Jesus.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, September 29, 2024

Posted on

Jesus the Healer – Sight to the Blind: Mark 8:22-26

The biggest question around this passage is “why did Jesus heal the blind man in two parts?” Was Jesus’ power limited in some way? Was the man’s faith lacking (like Mark describes in Nazareth elsewhere)? There is clearly a connection between the faith of people and Jesus’ willingness or ability to heal them. Those is a key theme across the gospels, especially in Mark. But elsewhere Jesus seems like he can and will heal without faith on the other side at all.

So there is some kind of relationship between our faith and God’s healing, but at the same time, God can do what He wants. So in this case, was it about faith. Was Jesus tired? Did he need to retap his Mana? Is there something special about sight? Is there something Jesus wanted to demonstrate?

We may get some clues by looking at the context. Jesus has just fed 4,000 people with a few loaves of bread with 12 baskets left over, then confronted the Pharisees over their lack of faith and demands for a sign. From there they left in the boat – but they forgot the bread. Jesus tries to address the failings of the Pharisees but the disciples are distracted by the bread fiasco. And so Jesus addresses blindness three ways – the blindness of the Pharisees, the blindness of the disciples, and then the physical blindness of this man.

Then the next section is the center-point of Mark, when Peter confesses Jesus as the Christ. In the midst of all this blindness, Jesus as Messiah emerges as the light in that darkness, the one with the power and authority to heal.

The blindness Jesus heals here is like our own blindness. The sight the man receives is the sight of people, the precious creations of God that Jesus came for. C. S. Lewis writes “you have never met a mere mortal.” Jesus wants us to see people as He sees them, not merely as “trees walking around.” And even if we are not there yet, we can be confident that Jesus will ultimately heal our sight fully and we will see the world and people the way he does.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, September 15, 2024