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The Patient Love of God – 2 Peter 3:8-15

“The call is coming from inside the house.” That is, to some degree, the situation Peter describes in his servings Epistle. It is very parallel to the message in Jude, as well. Both books warn that people within the church are believing and spreading lies about Jesus. Jude calls them” blemishes at your love feasts, eating with you without the slightest qualm—shepherds who feed only themselves. They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted—twice dead.”

Peter, in chapter 2, writes that “In their greed these teachers will exploit you with fabricated stories. Their condemnation has long been hanging over them, and their destruction has not been sleeping.” Specifically, in chapter 3 here he is addressing the assertion that, because Jesus hasn’t returned yet, He never will. But Peter asserts that, first, we misunderstand how God’s timelines work, and second, any delay in God’s judgement is, in fact, a demonstration of His mercy and His patience.

And, as Peter writes in chapter 1, we are invited to “participate in the divine nature,” including in exercising the same patience and mercy that God shows. This is not “waiting for Christmas morning” patience, but waiting for people to come to repentance. Waiting for “everyone to come to repentance,” in fact – God’s patience is indiscriminate. Ours should be as well

God’s patience is also persistent and does not expire. Ours should be as well – this does not mean we should not have boundaries, or that many times this merciful, persistent patience must be exercised from a healthy distance. But it does mean that we never give up hope for restoration.

Ultimately, we have two paths in front of us and we can only choose one. We can choose the path of the false teachers who prioritize their own prosperity, stature, safety and comfort. Or we can choose the path that participates in the divine nature. And in this time of Christmas, as we celebrate the Incarnation, we should remember that core to that divine nature is the giving up of an infinite amount of prosperity, stature, safety and comfort in order to better love humanity.

— Sermon Notes, Alison Robison, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, December 10, 2023

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Wait and Be Shaped – Isaiah 64:1-9

This poem is a prayer of lament. The Prophet is feeling a desperate desire for the presence of God, for God to make Himself known.

This comes in the third part of Isaiah. The second part is actually more hopeful than the third, as the people of Israel look forward to returning from exile and being restored. The third part, though, comes as the restoration has happened and has not gone as well as they would have liked. There was conflict between the exiles returning and those who had stayed in the land. The people feel much like the Israelites coming out of exile in Egypt, resenting their very deliverance because it was not playing out as they expected.

The desire for something that isn’t happening is intensely frustrating. We see it in the tantrums of a toddler, but we also see it in ourselves when we see injustice or suffering, when we feel like our own goals or health are slipping away.

That is what the Prophet is experiencing, a deep desire that God would just come down and fix things. He understands the immense power of God and just wants so badly for it to be unleashed on the broken world he sees around him.

This is the longing of Advent. This is the time when we wait actively for “He who began a good work in you” to “be faithful to complete it.” We seek to be intentional in our waiting, to be purposefully engaged in the “already but not yet” of Christ’s work.

Ironically, this time of waiting is itself a time when the world hates waiting. There is so much to do and so many places to be and people to see, all these demands on our time and all of them immediate.

But the alternative to this active waiting is outlined in this passage – we wither and are carried away on the wind. When we wait badly, we move outside of what we should do because we grab for security even when what we grab is ephemeral. “No one calls on your name; No one bothers to hold on to you.” When our hearts are sick, we turn from holding onto the creator and instead grasp at straws and withered leaves.

So as the passage asks, how then can we be saved? We’re called here to remember and to praise as we wait, to act righteously and do so gladly, in anticipation of Jesus’ ultimate victory. We actively live into the hope that we have, living out the way we want the world to be.

How is not contingent in cumstance – the circumstances might change or might not change, but that should not change our posture because it’s a gift.

The changing itself comes from God – He is the potter and we are the clay. We are being shaped by Him, even in the waiting.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, December 3, 2023

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Legion – Mark 5:1-20

In this passage, Mark spends a lot of time describing the state of the demon-possessed man. He is not only oppressed by demons but living among the tombs, howling in the darkness, soaked in death and pain.

The man is experiencing severe isolation. He is an outcast from society, a problem for those around him and so rejected. He is exhibiting anti-social behavior, keeping himself isolated. He is homeless, only able to find shelter in the most cursed place in the region. He is self-destructive as well, cutting himself. While the specifics may be different, these are things we see on the streets of our cities regularly.

The demons controlling the man recognize Jesus and know His name, though He does not know theirs and asks. But they beg him not to send them out of the region. But why does that matter?

It implies that there is a greater strategic purpose and goals of the demons – it’s not ultimately only about one man, but about the region as a whole. It’s the people, the environment, the systems. Everything is interconnected. The demon goes from singular to plural and our understanding of evil should likewise expand.

So the demons know their time is over but they beg to keep some control. Jesus sends them into herd of pigs, which promptly commit suicide. These thousands of pigs (which indicate a gentile area) represent a huge investment, a large amount of money and serves in some ways as a corporate payment for the evil centered on this man.

And just as the demons begged to stay in the region, the people begged Jesus to leave it. Despite the miracle He has done and the freedom He had given, the people of the region prized their peace and prosperity over the health of that man – they prized the status quo despite the evil that it meant lived among them.

We see in the Greek names of the region and the fact of a herd of pigs that this was a Greco-Roman region rather than a Jewish one. Jesus’ actions here demonstrate His power over not only supernatural oppression, but also the Empire that oppresses His people.

And the final step here is the actions of the man himself having been freed. The natural next step is to jump in the boat and follow Jesus, just like the disciples – but Jesus sends him out to his own people to spread the word of what has happened to him.

Two big takeaways for us. First, we all bear responsibility for each other. We are all called to care for the howling people among us. Second, evil is real and must not be ignored. We must face the evil in both our past and our present, both corporate and individual.

In response to that evil, though, we must not despair but turn to Jesus in His person and His body, the Church. Like any predator, evil goes after the isolated and alone. Come together and draw others into the saving relationship with Christ.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, November 26, 2023

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Listen! – Mark 4:1-9

This is the first set of parables in Mark, and the theme that comes through most clearly is “Listen!” This is something we are not, as a whole particularly good at. Between personal media, social media and all the other distractions of modern life, we have many barriers to listening and building connections with other people.

There is benefit and fruit to living a life that is open. It is a scary thought for many, bringing up fears of rejection, fear of intimacy and often a weariness and lack of time. But if we do open ourselves up, it makes us more rooted, in our relationships with God and others.

The same was true of the crowd gathered around Jesus. He tells them to listen because many of them are not there for that. Some of them are just there to be part of the crowd, others want healing, others just want to see what all the guys is about, but few really want to listen. And so Jesus gives them a story that requires them to listen and engage – “whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.” Active listening requires more than an “uh huh” at the right time.

This is one of the reasons Jesus uses parables and stories. It also gives the message a chance to get past our defenses as we identify with the characters in the story before we put up barriers against the truths we don’t want to hear.

Another reason to use parables is to veil the truth to some degree. Jesus describes it as a “secret” that is revealed to the disciples, who asked Jesus directly, opening up their hearts to the truths Jesus is sharing. Jesus offers us the truths of eternity, the power that created the universe, but asks us to make the effort. “Take up your mat and walk.”

In the parable itself, the seed is the word of God and the sower can be seen as either God Himself or us, His followers, spreading that word. And the soil is those listening – that may be us ourselves, or it may be those we interact with.

So we have to ask ourselves, what is the state of my soil? At different times, we may be the sower of the seeds or any of the various soils, and it is worth considering where we stand.

One notable aspect of this story is that the sower is indiscriminate in his sowing. He does not hoard the seed based on what he thinks the soil is like, and we should not do that either. At don’t control how people receive our messages and we don’t know how God has been preparing the soil.

Let us seek to have the word deeply rooted within us, and let us be open to that word and those around us to bear fruit that nourishes the world we have been sent to.

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

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A New Family – Mark 3:7-35

Throughout Mark, Jesus has been blowing up the religious and social structures and expectations. People continue to flock to him and His message about the nature of the Kingdom of God. In the previous chapter, Jesus points out that the Pharisees and other religious leaders have their understanding of the Sabbath upside down. “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.” Rather than a restrictive, claustrophobic thing, the truth of God bursts out into a more abundant life.

What do we have upside-down? Where does God want us to burst out rather than be restricted.

This passage has a chiastic structure, where topics come up in order, a crux is reached, and then the same topics are addressed in reverse order. Here, it proceeds: Crowd / Family / Scribes / Satan / Scribes / Family / Crowd.

The point of the broader passage is that Jesus does not fit within the structures of this world. The story opens with a literal problem of people fitting, as the crowds press on around Him and His disciples, so much so that they don’t even have room to eat. Then His family comes, clearly seeing Him as the black sheep of the family, off doing something completely insane, who needs to be taken charge of.

Then the religious-political structure of the day rears its head, responding to the disruption Jesus had brought both when His words and miraculous actions. If they accept His actions at face value they also have to accept His words, and that’s not something they are willing to do. So, naturally, they blame it on Satan.

This is what Jesus addresses at the crux of the passage. He has been out there forgiving sins by the power of the Holy Spirit, and if someone denies the power and efficacy of that grace and forgiveness, how can they accept it? It’s not Jesus who is evil, but the leaders who are seeking to keep the people from the truth of God.

The metaphor of the “strong man’s house” sits at the center of the passage, an understanding of the world as being in the midst of a cosmic struggle. Jesus offers victory in that struggle, and a world more vast and varied than that imagined by the scribes or His family or the crowds.

When was the last time we recognized that vastness? When was the last time we embraced the unknown that Jesus sets in front of us? The “I don’t know” moments are opportunities for God to show us things beyond what we could have imagined.

Jesus reveals some of this by showing a new mode of kinship. The nuclear family structure becomes subsumed into the broader family of God, those around us who seek to know and do God’s will. The world around us seeks to divide and label us, but Jesus seeks a unity and reconciliation that swells beyond our fragile human structures.

We live in an era of division, suspicion, assumptions and disunity. What can we do with all the opinions, all the expectations, all the news and anxiety and claustrophobic restrictions of this world? All we can do is lay then at the feet of the One who calls us brother and sister.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church Lynnwood, WA, October 29, 2023

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Jesus Does Things Differently – Mark 2:13-22

Food is an important part of any culture, with customs and expectations. Food interacts with our social lives, our cultural lives and thus our spiritual lives as well. Jesus was very active with His mealtimes and used who He ate with and how He ate to subvert the prevailing ethnonationalist religion of His day. Paul would later call this out even more directly, but Jesus moved more subtly and subversively.

In this story, we read about Jesus sitting down to eat with Levi and many other tax collectors. Tax collectors were outcasts because of what they did (collected taxes), how they did it (skimming money off the top), and especially who they did it for (the hated Romans).

Many of us have experiences of eating alone and feeling left out. This feeling is a microcosm of the pain and loneliness of humanity that Jesus came to save. Jesus addressed this directly when criticized for eating with these sinners and outcasts – He came for the sick, not the healthy. The catch there is that we are all sick. What separates us on one hand is whether we know we are sick or not. On the other, if we are privileged in our lives, society may not consider us sick, in the way that the poor and oppressed clearly are.

Jesus’ break in protocol cut against the expectations of those around him. Who are the people around us where social interaction would have the same level of impact?

Then Jesus gets criticized from another direction. This time it is not the religious establishment, but his fellow subversives. John’s disciples leaned towards putting on a show of suffering and fasting, while Jesus was constantly eating and drinking with all manner of unsavory sorts. Jesus prods them to be human. Often times, in various circumstances, we feel the need to set ourselves apart and stay aloof from those around us, from the enjoyment and fun that others are having. But Jesus poured Himself into those around him and called His disciples His friends.

As a church we try to emulate this and to be a “centered set” rather than a “bounded set.” The latter means there’s a clear boundary between those who are in and those who are out. A centered set, though, is more about the direction we are oriented. Bounded sets can work but often begin pulling in more than they were originally designed to – culture ethnicity, social group can all designate someone in or out. A centered set is risky because it gives access even to those in the fringes but may be uncomfortable for those near the center but heading in a different direction.

So the message here is to be human, living our lives intertwined with and among the people that surround us, and living in such a way that it points all those around us to the source of our identity.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, October 22, 2023

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Healing and Forgiveness – Mark 2:1-12

In the words of the immortal Marshawn Lynch, the story of the beginning of Jesus’ ministry is “all about that action, boss.” He went on a “healing tour” of the region, and despite urging everyone to keep things quiet, he drew so much attention that he was forced into the outskirts and lonely places – yet the people still kept coming.

And so in chapter 2 we see Jesus back in Capernaum, so mobbed by people that he was unaccessible to the a paralytic man who wanted healing. But this man had such close friends that they hoisted him up to the roof of the house and dug through that roof to lower him down to be healed.

And what Jesus did was not quite what anyone expected. He forgives them man of His sins. This causes grumbling, though, from legal experts who note that only God can forgive sins. So to underscore his authority, Jesus heals him at all.

This story is in part about the relationship between sin and suffering. Jesus came to do away with both, and while sin is clearly his priority, the man came to him without being forgiven, without having dealt with the sin he is forgiven of. He had to come to Jesus first.

We also see here some of why Jesus was trying to limit the crowds. When the crowd becomes a mob, there for what they can get, the person of Jesus can be lost, and those in true need are kept to the outskirts.

Jesus is addressing a couple of systemic issues here. First, by treating sin and suffering as separate issues, he is addressing the “purity culture” of the time, the concept that suffering itself was caused by sin and that misfortune is in fact punishment for having done something wrong. Second, surrounded by the crowds of the common people, many of them trapped in cycles of debt and taxes, and also being watched by the priests with the authority to forgive debts, he pointedly heals and forgives freely, drawing a contrast between his heavenly kingdom and their earthly one.

Jesus came to give forgiveness freely, to knock down the obstacles people put in between people and God. He came to undermine the authority of religious leaders who put themselves in the place as gatekeeper, doing out forgiveness in tiny drips. Jesus wants it to flow like waterfalls.

We can take comfort in this also, whatever we are struggling with. If we come to Him, no obstacles of roof or religion or authority can keep us from His love and goodness and forgiveness.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church Lynnwood, WA, October 8, 2023

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Demons and Healing – Mark 1:21-28

Mark has been a whirlwind so far – John the Baptist is leading a revival in the desert. Then Jesus comes to be baptized and in that process the Son is received and rejoiced in by the Father and the Spirit both visually and audibly. From there, Jesus heads into the wilderness for 40 days of “basic training” and temptation by Satan. From there he comes out ready to enter the fray, but not before he enlists his first disciples, straight from the fishing boats.

And from there he heads to Capernaum where the fun begins. This was a village of about 1500 people founded in the second century, where Peter had a home that eventually became a church. It served as a home base for Jesus.

Specifically, Jesus headed to the synagogue. This was a combination religious center and community center, a place for teaching but also eating and hospitality and discussion and much more.

This is what Jesus steps into with an authority that took everyone off guard. He was That Guy, speaking of every moment of history as if He was actually there, speaking of God as someone He knows intimately. The Greek for how he spoke was exousia – out of His being.

Then all the sudden someone screams out and interrupts. Given the level of activity in the synagogue this may have been less disruptive than it would be in a church with a more formal structure, but it still would have been an interruption and disruptive.

The shouting man knows who Jesus is, identifying Him by name and hometown and His role as messiah.

While we may not see much of this sort of thing in our educated western church, in the global church and especially in other more pentecostal traditions see it a lot. But we do see evil in our communities, from drugs to oppression to hatred to abandonment. We see those around us captive to evil just as much as this demon possessed man in the synagogue.

We may not be Jesus, with His level of authority, but we have His love within us – we can speak His words, we can offer up our prayers, we can be His hands and feet.

Back to the story, Jesus commands the unclean spirit to least, and that creates even more of a stir than the man himself. The news spreads from there and prepares the way for the rest of His ministry. The Greek word often translated “amazed” can also be read “in fear of” – a fear that blends astonishment and respect, a recognition of something that cannot be controlled by the spiritual powers of the world, let alone the religious or secular authorities.

As we go from this place, may we also come to Jesus with our maladies and our unclean spirits with a recognition that He has the authority to address them in ways fat beyond what we can understand.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, October 1, 2023

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Letz Go!!! – Mark 1:16-20

Previously on “Mark”: After hundreds of years of silence God spoke to the people of Israel through John the Baptist, proclaiming the coming of the Messiah. Many people come to the desert to repent. In the midst of this surge of changing hearts, Jesus comes to be baptized and begins His ministry, with a stopover in the wilderness. He opens His ministry with a call to trust Him and believe His words.

Where we pick up the story, Jesus is calling His first disciples. But what does that word, which we throw around a lot, really mean? The concept is more like an apprentice than like a student in a classroom. This is someone learning alongside a master craftsman or a rabbi as they lived and worked together.

Where Jesus diverged from your typical rabbi is that typically disciples were recruited by “inbound” methods, attracting followers on the strength of their skill with their craft or words or theology. Jesus, though, is all about “outbound marketing.” He came directly to those he wanted to call and gave the invitation – “Follow me.”

And the disciples did – they left behind their old lives, their families, their homes, their businesses. They let go of livelihood & security and & a normal daily life to follow Jesus. Now, it’s important to note that this is a unique context – very few of us are specifically called into itinerant preaching ministries. But we are all called to something. And we don’t need to wait for us to hit rock bottom. God is always working, even when we are doing well enough to, say, have hired workers in our fishing business.

But we should consider what we are clinging to and what we are putting ahead of our identity in Christ. Often we put our secular roles first. But first of all, we are followers of Jesus, and we take that identity into our workplaces, our families, our relationships, our hobbies. Mark calls out the specific things that the disciples left, and we have specific things in our lives that we must also subordinate to our own call to be disciples.

Even though we are not called to be wandering preachers, we are called to find our identity in Jesus. Like the disciples, we are called to be followers of Jesus first, and everything else comes second. We should resist the temptation to make our work and our activities the main element of who we are.

Jesus is asking us not to hold anything back. We tend to hold things back and negotiate with God. “Right now, I want to do this thing, and later on I’ll do what I want.” But we should know that God is seeking our good in addition to His glory. We are not on opposing sides here. Jesus did not tell his disciples to drop their nets – He said “follow” and they did a cost-benefit analysis and determined that what He was offering was better than what they had.

Discipleship is a relationship and a journey. Discipleship means turning to Jesus to find our direction and our identity. When we let go of whatever we are clinging to – cynicism, resentment, idols of all kinds – Jesus offers abundance and changed lives.

This is the Kingdom of God, this is what Jesus was proclaiming – and still does, through His body. This is why we are here, this is why we worship and this is why we do what we do.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church Lynnwood WA, September 24, 2023

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The Gospel of Mark: the Way of Jesus – Mark 1:9-15

This gospel was written by John Mark who was a teenager during Jesus’ ministry, not a disciple or apostle. His two names are Hebrew and Latin, which implies that his family may have been important or wealthy – in Acts it’s noted that a church meets in his mother’s home.

This is the same Mark who runs away and loses his clothing in the Garden of Gethsemane. He was also a close friend and disciple of Peter, and it is likely that Peter is the source for most if not all of this gospel.

Mark is also the cause of the split between Barnabas and Paul in Acts. Mark was Barnabas’ cousin, and Barnabas wanted to take him along on their second missionary journey. Paul, though, considered Mark a flake because he had abandoned them in an earlier situation. The dispute became so heated that they ended up parting ways. But later on, Mark and Paul did reconcile – in his final list, Paul instructs Timothy to bring Mark along “because he is helpful to me in my ministry.”

This should be a comfort to us if we have ever messed up or failed someone, or if we have been rejected for ministry whether for good reasons or bad. Mark went through the same thing and ended up with his name on a Gospel.

Maybe for this reason, the gospel also focuses on the theme of the mistakes and ignorance of the disciples as a whole. There is a regular motif of the the disciples urging Jesus towards secular power and material success. This is utterly natural – their culture and ours, our entire species, is focused on upward mobility and the accumulation of power and possessions, especially when looking at those in authority. But Jesus came to turn that upside down – He is powerful and authoritative over both people and the elements of nature, but also humbles Himself among the most lowly in society, and ultimately becomes the Suffering Servant prophesied by Isaiah.

The book of Mark starts with a bang. Rather than starting at the very beginning – of Time in John, of Jesus’ lineage in Matthew or Jesus’ earthly life in Luke, Mark jumps right in at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry with another fulfillment of a prophecy of Isaiah – the “voice crying in the wilderness,” John the Baptist, “preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”

John was baptizing people in a long Jewish tradition of Baptism – this was not a Christian invention but a way for Jewish people to recommit themselves to the instructions of Yahweh and the looking forward to the promised Messiah. Our practice of Baptism descends directly from this tradition.

So the Gospel of Mark begins with this core notion of confession and repentance, as scores of people come out into the middle of nowhere to listen to a wild man urge them to stop doing what they are doing. This is the beginning of revival, revival that will find its culmination in the person of Christ and the Church as His body.

But it starts here, as John baptizes Jesus now as a sign of repentance but as a signal that things are about to change. The heavens are rent open and glimpses of eternity shine through, the Spirit descends like a dove, the Father speaks audibly, and the Son rises from the water to begin His work.

And, of course, that work starts with 40 days alone, enduring both physical and spiritual oppression, before returning to civilization in the wake of John’s imprisonmentsaying, “Now is the time! Here comes God’s kingdom! Change your hearts and lives, and trust this good news!”

As in those days, God is calling us back. Whether back after Covid, back after a time of wandering, back after outright rejecting the gospel.

But the church in America today is not providing the experience we see John leading in the wilderness. We cannot preach the good news until we have experienced it, we cannot lead others to the living water in the desert until we have drunk from it ourselves.

Are you ready to return? Are you ready to trust the gospel and live it out in love and service, following in the footsteps of your savior as told to us by Mark?

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church Lynnwood, WA, September 10, 2023