Tag: Advent

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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

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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.

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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

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Peace Building – Ephesians 2:14-22

We live in an age when tearing down the walls of hostility seems impossible. Whether vast societal chasms or arguments with family members, the distances feel too wide to span. Likewise, the distance between us and God also often feels too wide as well. But Paul offers us hope in this passage.

God does not want barriers between Him and us – we see this when Jesus took a whip to the money changers and merchants the temple creating barriers between the Gentiles and the worship of God. In that instance, Jesus warned everyone that He would destroy the temple and raise it again in three days. He Himself would be that temple, and He Himself would be the new way in which all people access our Heavenly Father. He Himself becomes the intersection of eternity and our finite, fleshly realm.

The Church, then, as the Body of Christ, serves that same purpose – we are the intersection of Earth and eternity, we are the pathway between the people around us and the Creator God of the universe.

Here in Ephesians, Paul emphasizes how Christ’s work at the Cross creates this pathway and removes the barrier between God and Man. The breaking of the relationship described in Genesis is healed by the work of Jesus Christ.

But Paul then moves from the vertical relationship between God and His People, to the horizontal relationships between all His peoples, both groups and individuals. The focus here is on groups, specifically between the Jews and Gentiles, those set apart in the Old Testament and those grafted on by the Cross, fulfilling the promise of God to Abraham that all peoples would be blessed by his family.

Paul here writes that the two groups are coming together as one oikeios or household. In Rome, this was the fundamental social/political unit of the empire, the base layer of the hierarchy that went from the lowest infant and slave to the Emperor himself. But as in other places, Paul takes this term and subverts it. The household is not Cesar’s, but God’s, and we all live together within that single great oikeios.

But even though we know and believe this to be true, there persist chasms, deep chasms of culture, of politics, of ethnicity. All of them are ash and dust in comparison to the love of God and community of His people, and yet we grasp them so tightly.

This means the work of the church, as Christ’s Body, has the same mission as Christ Himself did when presented with worldly structures preventing people from coming to God. Peace cannot exist without that connection to God, and so the Peace Jesus brings often must come after the smashing of the structures that prevent the unity and peace that God calls us to. Sometimes in the work of peace, something has to die in order for something new to emerge.

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

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The Magnification – Matthew 1:46-55

Let’s take a look at Mary’s situation here. We don’t have the full context here but we can try to get a better understanding. Mary would have likely been very young by our standards, 13 or 14. She was betrothed to Joseph, probably as an arranged marriage. Then suddenly she finds herself in this new situation, completely upending her life socially, physically and more.

We aren’t told what happened between the annunciation and visiting her cousin Elizabeth. It is possible that she ran away to Elizabeth or was cast out from her family. But when they came together the baby in Elizabeth’s womb – also a prophesied child, John the Baptist – leaps with joy. That is the context of this song.

This song is the first of four songs in the first two chapters of Luke – the others are Zechariah’s song in Luke 1:67-78, the angels’ song in chapter 2:14 and then Simeon’s in 2:29-32. There are notable parallels with Zechariah’s song in particular.

This is actually a key aspect of Luke, who regularly and purposefully pairs stories about men with stories about women. This is true both in terms of miracles and in person interactions but also parables – notable because women in that age were deeply oppressed and never treated as equal in the way that Luke does here. It’s a radical affirmation of the equality of men and women in their access to the love of Christ and the work of God m

The song opens with essentially a statement on the nature of praise. Mary’s soul and spirit are what are erupting into praise and rejoicing.

It follows as a song of reversals. The rich and powerful are brought down but the poor and lowly are raised up. This is particularly relevant for Mary herself who is arguably in the lowest state possible, a member of an oppressed people group, a young woman pregnant out of wedlock. It also closely parallels the song of Hannah in 1 Samuel, the story of a barren woman given a son devoted to God. Both are stories of reversals and the glory of God. Both point to the nature of God as Someone who loves the lowly and casts down the mighty.

This is who God is. God sees you when you are are at your lowest and when, like Mary, your life is spinning out of control. In Genesis another woman at her lowest, Hagar, calls Him “the God Who Sees” – and He sees Hannah, He sees Mary and He sees you.

On that note, the song is in past tense despite the promise of Gabriel being future-tense. She places herself and her story in the broader context and history of God’s relationship with humanity, calling back to Hannah and Hagar and all the work of God that came before.

It’s also and a song that calls us to participate in this work of feeding the hungry and empowering the powerless.

In this Advent season, it is easy to see these concepts of Hope, Peace, Joy & Love as the worldly, two dimensional versions all around us. But we have access to deep and full realities. Hope is more than wishful thinking, but a sure security in the person Ave return of Christ. Love is more than the conditional emotional state or the transactional engagement of the world. Rather it is a participation in the unconditional, sacrificial and eternal love of the Creator for His creation. Joy is more than feigned happiness and peace is more than the absence of conflict.

Let us rejoice along with Mary in the works of God past, present and future. Let us seek the hope, peace, joy and love God offers us.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, December 17, 2023

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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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Nontraditional Family – Matthew 1:18-25

Today we look at the story of Joseph, and his response to God’s plan. Those of us who have had children that have gotten older often miss the times when our children would jump into our arms, triggering our parental instincts and desires to protect and provide. We promise to keep our children safe, but ultimately we know that we don’t have full control, we can’t be with them every second. For that matter, we ourselves are sinful people, and at times we ourselves will hurt the ones we love.

Consider these feelings and instincts in the person of Joseph, within his patriarchal cultural contact. All his plans and hopes and expectations, gone in a moment.

We hear this story all the time, and may associate the Holy Family with the cozy Western peppermint mocha-style of Christmas. But the reality is not particularly cozy.

Joseph’s world would have been completely upended, and he likely felt hurt and upset. A natural response would be a desire for revenge, but even though he has lost face and felt hurt, he did not want to cause more pain or expose Mary to public disgrace. He would let her go away quietly and live the rest of her life as best she could.

While we may not have gone through that, we have certainly gone through our own dark night of the soul. Loss, disruption, betrayal, our world upended and our future thrown into doubt.

But it is into this darkness and storm, that God speaks the words of the angel to Joseph – God is with us.

And so when he woke up, he did as instructed. Most of us would rather avoid these situations, and the pain and emotions that go along with stuck disruption. But Joseph engages with it, living with the fact that he is no longer in control, and that his life was not going to be what he expected. Joseph is faithful, listens to the voice of the Lord and obeys. We have the same opportunity in our lives.

And when we do this, we have new possibilities. Even amid the challenges that come in that difficult situations, God acts. He did things in the middle of a chaotic, oppressive tax accounting scheme. He did things with a family seeking refuge from political violence. When we ourselves are fearful, anxious, greedy, jealous, vindictive, hurt – God is with us.

The bonds within the Holy Family were not the traditional bonds – the child was not conceived in the traditional way, and the parents did not even come together physically. This is something adoptive families, blended families, broken families can all look to.

And all of us can find hope in the promise that God is with us.

–Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church Lynnwood, WA, December 18, 2022

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Fire and Fruit – Matthew 3:1-12

We are introduced to John the Baptist in this passage, and he comes onto the scene with one very clear message – repent! This message is not quite the one we think of at the time of Christmas, but it’s hard to miss this clear, hard message from a hard man. John serves as a bridge from the prophets of the Old Testament to the gospel of the New Testament. Elsewhere, Matthew describes John as a second Elijah.

John lived apart from the culture and away from the population centers – he set the pattern later picked up by the Desert Fathers of the early church as well as the broader monastic orders. John serves as the model, establishing himself away from the rest of the world but serving as a magnet for people seeking the truth being shared – truth about sin and repentance.

How do we talk about sin and repentance? Some talk about it in the context of judgement, others in terms of broken relationship with God, others in a more postmodern way, addressing our behavior in relation to our own personal beliefs.

John’s role was to call for paths to be made straight, to point Jesus out to people in a way that was clear, insisting that his listeners reorient themselves around the coming Messiah. John’s whole identity was as a witness to the person of Christ. He spent a lot of time insisting he was not the Christ, but pointed the way to Him.

Carl Ellis describes a matrix of righteousness, addressing the personal and social working out of both piety and justice. As evangelicals, we tend to live in the personal piety quadrant nearly all the time, while other traditions may live more in the social quadrants. The challenge is to seek righteousness in a holistic way.

This was the challenge laid out by John the Baptist, looking ahead to Jesus who will make all things new. Some of that new-making, though, will be destructive, an axe at the root of the tree. These processes can be painful, but “joy comes in the morning.”

As a church we have felt like we have been in a time of wilderness. As a society, as well. And so our responsibility is to, as John instructs, produce fruit in keeping with repentance – to emulate John, speaking the truth that clears the way for the truth of Christ’s love to enter all situations.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, December 4, 2022

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Hope – Isaiah 2:1-6

Christianity is sometimes accused of being naive, the hope offered dismissed as a false hope or crutch in the midst of a hurting world. But in reality, life in Christ is lived in the tension of “now but not yet.” Christ has come, but will come again.

We see this in the Old Testament prophets at well, as they proclaim the coming kingdom and the promise of ultimate peace, but also prophesy judgement and captivity. In this passage, Isaiah proclaims the hope of the mountain of God in the midst of the Assyrian Empire conquering the kingdom of Israel and going into exile.

The mountain of God is identified with the Temple Mount, even though it is not the highest in the region. The imagery is of the mountain rising above all others, and of the peoples of the world’s streaming towards it like rivers. The law of God, the life-giving teachings of God, go out from the mountain, and God Himself judges between the nations and settles disputes.

This justice brought by God is itself a prerequisite for the peace promised in the second half of verse four – you cannot have peace without justice.

That’s the vision we seek to live out as a church, a diverse group of people, like all the nations streaming to the temple to receive life. It is easier to work as a homogeneous group, but we seek out brothers and sisters different than ourselves because that is the picture of God’s kingdom we are promised here.

And so we walk together in the light and hope of God. When people are fighting, we walk as ambassadors of peace. When people are selfish, we walk in generosity. When people are in conflict, we walk as reconcilers. Let us walk in the light of the Lord.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, November 27, 2022