Tag: Old Testament

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

The Lord is Our Banner – Exodus 17:8-16

Yahweh Nissi means “the Lord is Our Banner” – in Exodus 17, Moses named an altar this after defeating the Amalekites. Banners were key to pre-modern warfare, telling soldiers who is leading and where to attack. “Under the banner” can also mean “in the name of” – “under the banner of love* for example.

The name is used only once, in a passage that is ultimately problematic. The Amalekites ambushed the people of Israel, and after God enables victory, the Amalekites are marked out as a people for destruction.

This destruction becomes relevant again in 1 Samuel, when Samuel instructs Saul to wipe out the Amalekites, down to the children.

This story is hard to square with the teachings of Christ, and is even difficult to reconcile with the teachings of the Old Testament like “do not kill.” This is important because we see leaders today justifying violence in God’s name as well. In reality, if the Lord is our banner then it redefines our relationship with our enemies.

Irenaeus was an early church father who struggled with this difference as well. He sees the story of the Old Testament as one of “gradual pedagogy” where His gradually moves a primitive, violent people to a full understanding of the God who is Love. Origen was another, who saw over time a development and revelation of how to interact with enemies, finding its fullness in the Cross.

If the Lord is our banner, He redefines the source of our security. We no longer place our faith in our own strength or resources, but rather in God Himself. We no longer need to have a scarcity mindset, but can rest in His abundance, letting that impact our engagement with others in love rather than fear and competition.

If the Lord is our banner, it redefines our identity, our vocation and equips us with a different ethic. We are to participate in God’s work of lifting up the marginalized, freeing the captives and giving sight to the blind.

— Guillermo Jimenez, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, July 21, 2024

Posted on

I Am – The God of Surprise

God first calls himself I Am when he reveals himself to Moses in the burning bush. This is one of the key “theophanies” in the Old Testament – the visible, physical appearance of God to humans.

There are many of these across scriptures, mostly by surprise. The appearance to Hagar in the wilderness, the promise of a child to Abraham, the wrestling with Jacob, the appearance to Samson’s parents, the call of Samuel and many others. He also appears in other forms, like the pillars of cloud and fire, or the storm on Mount Sinai.

If you look at a map of these theophanies, the miracles of Jesus, or even all the locations mentioned in scripture, you will see a relatively small window of geography. But if you consider the eternal nature of the name “I Am” you’ll understand that God is everywhere and can work in any and all places – hence the surprise.

We get a taste of this in the story of Jonah – Jonah thinks by leaving the physical location of Israel he will escape the call of God. In reality, God meets him in the middle of the sea, and in a notably surprising way. Jonah’s prayer from the depths gives us a picture of what this surprising encounter can look like when we are at our lowest.

And so he finally obeys and heads to Nineveh where something equally surprising happens – they listen, and are forgiven. Like Jonah, many of us seek for justice, even vengeance, and so the end of the story where Jonah rages at the compassion of God. Ever dramatic, he wishes he would just die. Then comes the story of sitting beneath a plant God causes to grow, but then that God causes to be destroyed by a worm. Again, he wants to die. The story of vengeance deferred because of the mercy of God is a surprise and also a challenge.

— Sermon Notes, Melanie Malone, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, June 16, 2024

Posted on

Where Can I Carry My Shame? – 2 Samuel 13:1-22

The subtitle of this sermon series is “Renewed Life in Christ and His Body”. That last part is key because healing is not only an individual activity but something that happens corporately and in community.

The previous Sermon looked at the hurry created by our families of origin. It started with a look at the family of the patriarchs and all the dysfunction there, and how through the work of God in Joseph, healing came to that family.

The story today is of another high profile biblical family that was deeply dysfunctional. David’s son Amnon lusted after his half-sister and manipulated her into being alone with him where he raped her.

It’s key to understand in this context that God hates abuse like this. Violence led to Him causing the Flood; Jesus warns that violence against the vulnerable will lead to millstones around necks; Christ Himself was abused and betrayed.

So when we look at this story of abuse and violence, we should not be centering the perpetrator of that abuse, but rather Tamar herself. We need to listen to what she has to say: “Where can I take my shame?” Ties of family and society barred her from doing more than being silent.

This is in contrast to the four men in the story who had far more freedom of movement and agency. Amnon was infatuated with Tamar, and instead of setting aside an inappropriate desire or finding a legitimate way to address it, sees what he wants and takes it. Then having done that, the deception (self-deception and otherwise) is over and his “love” turns to hate.

Absalom, though ostensibly on her side and offended on her behalf, does not do anything for two years. When he eventually does, it is a mirror of Amnon’s behavior, taking Amnon’s life much as Amnon took Tamara’s dignity.

David, responsible for this whole household, does nothing but wallow in impotent anger, and certainly does not take any responsibility for his own part in unknowingly enabling Amnon.

Finally, Jonadab, who actively and knowingly enabled Tamara’s violation, appears to get off scott free, and is still advising David towards the end of the story.

This is a story with important implications for us as a church. A massive proportion of people, women especially, have been sexually in some way. We have victims in our church and in our lives. When a victim of sexual abuse enters our church we need to be in a place to welcome and love them.

Tamar asked the question “Where can I carry my shame?” It’s a question that goes unanswered in the original story, but we see the answer come under the new covenant: she can carry her shame to Jesus, and so can we.

And as we are Christ’s body, as a church we must be a safe place where the hurting and abused can carry their shame. We must listen, acknowledge and walk alongside the hurting without being presumptuous or impatient.

Abuse and shame thrive in silence, so if you have lived that, find ways to break the silence. Start small, maybe writing a letter and then destroying it if you aren’t ready to share it. But seek someone you can trust to share it with. If you are mired in shame and self-blame for what someone else did to you, forgive yourself, and let go of any self-recrimination. Seek the redemption and healing Christ offers both directly and through His body.

God wants to renew every part of us – mind, body, soul, spirit. He wants to make us all whole again.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, June 9, 2024

Posted on

Unhealed: Origins

To paraphrase M. Scott Peck, life is difficult, and once we accept that, we can transcend it. Much of this difficulty stems from the dysfunction we all have in our family of origin. There are generational messages transmitted, both purposefully and otherwise, that impact our lives.

So no family is perfect – and when we look to scripture we see this emphasized. The families in Genesis paint a clear picture of dysfunction and generational trauma. From Cain & Abel to the Jacob/Rachel/Leah love triangle, we get many, many stories of people chosen by God but still hurting within themselves and hurting others. But out of that chaos comes the legendary 12 Tribes of Israel, the People of the Covenant the line of Christ and the mechanism by which God saved the world.

We can take some comfort in this, that we are not alone – there is nothing we have ensured or are enduring that God has not seen before, that God has not used for the good of His people and the glory of His name.

The dynamics in our families of origin still impact us. They help determine how we interact with people we love, what we value, and how we respond to both hurt and success.

Scripture tells us that the sin of parents impact their children and their children’s children (Exodus 34:7). But it also tells us that His grace is even more pervasive.

We get a picture of this grace and healing in a family, also in Genesis. Joseph came out of this same dysfunctional brood, with favoritism, pride and jealousy all coming together to leave him considered dead by his family and enslaved in a foreign land. But Joseph turns his focus to following God even in his circumstance, so that when he is brought face to face with the brothers who wronged him, he (eventually) finds a way to forgive and find healing. First, though, he is overcome and finds a private room in which to weep. What are your private rooms, where you go to when triggered by a reminder of past hurt?

When Joseph finally confronts his brothers, he does so with mercy and forgiveness that is nearly unfathomable. The story of Joseph is the story of the Gospel, turning trauma and tragedy into salvation.

In the same way, our misery becomes our ministry. When God takes us through healing, He gives us the words and the ability to reach others with that same message of healing. Sometimes that trauma itself will even push us to God and to that healing.

Joseph’s brothers deserved to be cursed and to have revenge taken on them. Instead, God made their sin the mechanism of material salvation for their family, and even of healing for the relational trauma of the family.

What are the traumatic events of your past that have wounded you? God is big enough. There is nothing too bad or too overwhelming such that He cannot bring healing and redemption.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, June 2, 2024

Posted on

God Your Protector – Psalm 121

Why doesn’t God take away our problems and suffering when we ask Him to? Why does God tolerate so much suffering in the world? We heard last month about God as Immanuel, this notion that God through Christ is present with us in that suffering.

But the question remains – if a chef makes terrible soup, does it make it better if he comes out of the kitchen and eats it with you?

But then, the soup isn’t always bad. In fact, often the soup is incredible – but when we are in the midst of those bouts of “bad soup” out makes us question God. Academically we can recognize that we are not in a position to question the nature and decisions of the creator of the universe. But if we are His children, as He tells us, maybe we do have a relationship where that kind of question is ok to ask. Maybe He even welcomes it.

We can all agree that a good parent does more than be present in the pain of their children, but they do what they can to take away that pain. So if God can do that, why doesn’t He always?

Psalm 121 sure makes it seem like there is more of a role for God to play. The word “Protector” or “protect” appears six times in the eight verses. The single word šāmar or “your protector” appears at the exact syllabic middle of the psalm.

The psalm begins with a question and is followed with an unambiguous answer. The psalm includes multiple “merisms” or contrasts between two opposites in order to demonstrate the totality of something. God protects by night and day; from the physical danger of the sun and the emotional danger of the moon (i.e. lunacy); in the going out of the city walls to work to the returning from the fields to our home. And not just now, but from now until eternity.

But what does this protection entail? It doesn’t mean we won’t be hurt. It never has – no ancient worshipper singing this song on the way to the temple thought they would never see any problems. So what does it mean? As a child we definitely see it as a simple protection, but as we mature and faith matures.

Losing that simpler understanding is a real loss, and we do need to work through the “tasks of grief” and reassess our relationship to what has changed for us.

So what does that protection mean? It’s not protection from pain or sadness. It means, for one, that he will not let us get lost. No matter how far we wander, he will not leave us. He knows how he will bring us home, no matter how far we go or how long it takes. This is the heart of the gospel – no matter how lost we are, we are never lost to Him.

When we are in dark seasons of loss, that is probably not what we would pick. We would want the pain gone and the loss restored, right away! But God’s protection means that the doubt and pain will not take us away from Him. We don’t need to be afraid of our feelings – we can feel our feelings and God is still there right beside us.

It also means that there is no journey to God out of grief. God is there with us in the midst of it, and the moment we need Him, He is right there.

— Sermon Notes, Denise Lindberg, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, April 21, 2024

Posted on

The God Who Sees… All of Me – Genesis 16

As we walk through the names of God, let us pray that we learnThis passage is about God seeing us in our suffering, but it is also about much more.

First, God understands us within our context – the context here is thorny. Second, God restores – what did God say that changed things for Hagar?

This story takes somewhere around the turn of the 19th century BC. Sarai and Abram cannot have children (we know that changes, but at this point they don’t). It takes place in a culture where there were various forms of servanthood, slavery and concubinage, all of which were very different than American chattel slavery or modern human trafficking. The idea of a servant coming in as a second wife and bearing children was a well accepted concept, and the raising of Hagar’s status was a natural result.

Unfortunately, Sarai’s messy response was also natural. Often our best laid plans go wrong and when they do, we often blame other people.

So Hagar is sent away, and is then met by the angel of the Lord who asks her two questions. “Where are you from, and where are you going?” But Hagar only answers the first one, because she does not know where she is going. And so the angel provides an answer to that question, and the answer is, back into the context she came from. That’s where a typical sermon might end, with the idea that sometimes God keeps us in our hard situations in order to bless us further.

But that’s not this sermon, so let’s go back to verse 4. Hagar begins to despise Sarai. This despising comes out of pride. CS Lewis sets the stage for this particular sin:

There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are  more unconscious of in ourselves.  And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others…

According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride.  Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind…

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of
it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

So what we can learn from this story is that God sees us not just in our suffering but also in our contempt and our pride.

— Sermon Notes, Paul Cabellon, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, February 18, 2024

Posted on

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

Posted on

Vashti the Prophet – Esther 1:15-20

The Old Testament is full of prophets speaking “truth to power”, advocating for the marginalized and oppressed. Today we’re going to look at one of those prophets that often go overlooked – Queen Vashti of the Persian Empire.

Queen Vashti’s refusal is prophetic because it reveals the injustices of patriarchy in the Persian kingdom. Her denial threatens not only King Xerxes, but the entire Persian Empire and its family structures, revealing the fragility of masculinity and its systems. What unfolds are the layers and manifestations of toxic masculinity: rape culture, victim-blaming, and patriarchal protection.

Bianca Mabute-Louie, Inheritance Magazine

King Xerxes is having a drunken, debauched gathering of nobles while his wife Vashti is having an “alt-party” – he demands that she come and appear to them, but she refuses. She asserts her own autonomy and control over her own body. In response, not only the king but all the nobles explicitly see this as a challenge to not just the king but the entire system of patriarchy that is at the heart of the empire. And so this goes from a simple issue of the king’s harem to a decree to all the lands of the empire codifying the patriarchy and enforcing the idea that husbands rule their households just as the king rules the empire.

We see images of Christ in this story – Jesus’ truth offended those in power, and He was killed for not going along with the systems of oppression that were embedded in His culture.

And we are called to the same thing in our day! At the expense of our own reputation, at the expense of church growth, at the expense of any earthly benefit, we are called to advocate for the oppressed, whether by government, economic systems or sin.

One of the things this means is putting aside our preconceived notions about what roles are appropriate for what people, about what men and women do, what leaders do, what strength looks like and what weakness looks like. Often we put aside the true gifts we are given in favor of who we think we are supposed to be, with expectations and assumptions built by our culture, our family of origin, even our churches. But Christ calls us to be who He made us.

This is particularly true of how women have been treated in the church, where leadership is often seen in the same way that the Persian nobles saw it. But in reality, both men and women are made in the image of God, and God is described in feminine and maternal terms all across the scriptures. God as father and God as mother are both metaphors that speak to the transcendental truths of a God that is far beyond us.

So let women come into the fullness of what God has called you to be. Let men do the same, even when counter-cultural. Let us look within ourselves and see where we have assumptions and expectations that put others in the role of serving us, where we take the role of Xerxes to the women in our life, or others who we see as less than us in anyway. God is doing a work in us and will continue to sanctify and forgive as we seek to serve Him and the others in our lives.

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

Posted on

Competition – Ecclesiastes 4:4-16

Competiton is a natural state of humanity, and isn’t necessarily even a bad thing. Good runners get better when competing against other good runners. But as followers of Jesus, we cannot let competition get in the way of the command to love our neighbor.

Even outside of our specific religious commands, though, Ecclesiastes describes how this focus on competition can turn into a life alone and isolated from one another. We see this in the story of the childless man who nonetheless works himself to death in isolation. We see this in the story of the arrogant king who will take no advice.

That story calls back to the beginning of the chapter, which laments the oppression and evil of the world, to the extent that the Kohelet calls the dead and unborn better off than the living.

As a church, we have a different priority than competition with others, both corporately and individually. Our purpose is to love God and love others, and that toil is never wasted.

— Sermon Notes, Alison Robison, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, June 25, 2023