Tag: Paul

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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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

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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

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Names of God: The Unknown God – Acts 17:18-28

Paul here is speaking to two very discrete groups of Athenian scholars. On the one hand, the Stoics, dutiful pantheists who literally give their name to being stoic. On the other, there are the Epicureans, essentially hedonistic deists, to simplify things. And all throughout, of course, you have the standard polytheists of paganism. They are all interested in what Paul has to say but accuse him of being a “spermologos, ” sperm meaning seed and logos meaning word or idea – the picture being of a bird picking and choosing between seeds.

And so Paul gets in front of the Aereopagus, both a governing body and a philosophical debate society. He dives into a “first principles” version of the gospel, one that touches on many names of God.

God “made the world and everything in it” – He is Creator. This is in direct opposition to the Stoics who saw God and nature as the same.

God “is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything” – a strike against paganism and polytheism that saw the need for service and sacrifice. He is the All-Sufficient One.

“From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth, and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.” – God is the King of Kings, and this cuts directly against the Epicurean idea of a distant, uninvolved God.

Then Paul starts quoting the Greeks’ own philosophers. “For in him we live and move and have our being,” – He is the sustainer. “We are his offspring,” He is Father.

When we meditate on the attributes and names of God, it draws us closer to Him. Let us go forward and think on this in our daily life.

— Sermon Notes, Alison Robison, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, January 21, 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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Renewal – 2 Corinthians 5:17

The resurrection rocked the cosmos, offering new life to all of humanity.

Just as the beloved Lazarus has been resurrected into new life, when we accept Jesus as our Lord and savior we are no longer the same person we used to be. We are made new in Christ and our old self is gone. We are no longer slaves to sin but are free to live a new life for Christ.

Our passage is situated in Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth, which was a wealthy, cosmopolitan city and ancient Greece known for commerce and trade. It was also a center for the worship of Aphrodite and sexual immorality was prevalent in the city that at this time was under the Roman Empire. Paul is addressing some issues in the church at the time. First there were false teachers challenging Paul’s authority as a legitimate apostle. They were introducing an “alt gospel” that emphasized intellectualism and rhetoric.

Paul fights this by pointing towards his own suffering and the immense power that is found at the cross for salvation even– and maybe especially–for the weak and the foolish. Secondly, there were divisions and conflicts within the church which reflected the cultural context of factionalism and social caste. Paul urges the church to set these aside and pursue reconciliation. Finally, Paul uses the idea of new creation along with the concept of citizenship to accentuate the new society in Christ as summa exemplar. In Roman society, citizenship was highly value and conveyed many rights and privileges. Paul uses the language of citizenship in Second Corinthians to describe the status of believers in Christ. He says that believers are citizens of the new kingdom with a new identity and new set of values.

If we zoom out, the Bible is the greatest love story ever told. It’s a story of God’s plan to renew and restore the whole creation, not simply individual, isolated souls.

As a church, we participate in this renewal of ourselves, reach other, our communities and our world.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, May 21, 2023

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Living in the Resurrection – Be Relevant – Acts 17:16-28

In this passage we see Paul actively waiting – exploring the city of Athens and engaging with the culture. He started, as was his custom, at the synagogue, beginning at the religious center that was closest to his starting point, where religion is a matter of ethnicity and nationality. From there, he goes to the marketplace, a center of both material commerce and intellectual commerce.

We see in this Paul’s versatility – he can move between these two worlds and go back and forth between these cultural contexts in order to meet people where they are at and speak in their language.

From there, he is taken to the Areopagus, aka the Hill of Ares, aka Mars Hill if you ever wondered where that came from. The name was both a place and a ruling council that met there.

Note that Paul starts his Sermon by finding common ground, rather than by highlighting their divisions abs differences. Some might react against his use of something pagan in order to talk about God, but Paul does not shy away from it.

We have a tendency to be anthropocentric in how we look at the world and the Greek gods were examples of that. Paul worked to get them to look beyond their own humanity, including that humanity reflected in these invented deities. Paul specifically uses their own poetry to point out that God does not come from us, but we come from God.

How does this impact us? We also are called to engage the marketplace. We are not supposed to build our own fortress to hide away in and create our own culture, but we are to be out in the mix of the society that we live in. And we don’t always need to do it in the same way Paul did, by standing up in a public place and talking. God goes before us in the person of the Holy Spirit and all we have to do is be open to that He is doing. We don’t have to have it all put together, we just have to engage.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, May 14, 2023

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Be Reconciled – Ephesians 2:11-22

Reconciliation is not simply the speaking of magic words “I’m sorry” and “you’re forgiven”, but is a process that takes time, that takes into account the context of the relationship and the damage done to it. Today we’re going to look at what the resurrection of Christ means to this process of reconciliation.

Renew Church is built on Reconciliation, Restoration and Relevance. The resurrection of Christ sits at the center of these. Though there is mourning, pain, chaos and suffering, the resurrection is the promise that joy comes in the morning and that the banquet of God is belt prepared for us.

Looking at this passage, it comes right after a section (Ephesians 2:1-10) focused on the vertical relationship between us and God. We are dead in our sins – BUT because of His great love for us, He made us alive in Christ.

In this section, Paul addresses the horizontal relationship between people, specifically addressing the relationship between Jewish and gentile Christians. Many of the former were seeking to impose their cultural and ritualistic requirements onto these new converts who had no history or heritage of following God.

To think about this, let’s go back to the gospels, and the story of Jesus clearing the temple after the Triumphal Entry. The temple’s outer courts were called the Court of the Gentiles, and there are stones archeologists have found warning gentiles not to go past certain points on pain of death. It was filled with people selling animals for sacrifice at high prices as well as money changers changing Greek and Roman coins into the temple currency, again at exploitative rates. The practices were explicitly taking advantage of the poor and the foreigners. This is what drove Jesus to the extremes He went to in that situation, stating “Is it not written: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations’? But you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’”

The term used here for “nations” is ethonos which is the same team Paul uses to for gentiles, while the term “house” was oikos, which means “household” and which Paul uses in verse 19 of our passage to describe how God has folded gentile Christians into the people of God, into His household, “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.”

We ourselves need to look at how we also put barriers up for those who are unlike us to come near to God, as Jewish Christians did in Paul’s time. Our own cultural practices and expectations can cordon us off from each other. But in the power of the resurrection, our role is to be agents of reconciliation. We keep short accounts, we understand the systemic barriers of hostility that divide is, we champion and empower those in our own “court of the gentiles” and overturn the tables that keep people from God. We are to seek to reconcile and worship with “all the nations,” building relationships across cultural boundaries, taking risks and opening yourself up to other experiences and perspectives. Let’s be people of reconciliation and be part of bringing people together under one family banner.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, April 30, 2023

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Unfinished: Journey of Faith – Romans 5:1-11

Sometimes people will go through a graduation ceremony even though they still have classes. Other times, people have sold their houses but haven’t yet jumped through all the hoops to make it final and are still living there. Or even as simple as food in the oven but not yet being eaten. We see this in scripture as well, with Abraham & Sarah promised a son but still barren, or the Israelites freed from Egypt but not yet in the Promised Land.

And that’s the situation we find ourselves in. Forgiven, justified, redeemed – but not yet perfected. That’s what Paul addresses here in the letter to the church in Rome. He has spent the first part of the letter describing the need for and nature of this justification and the grace extended to us. Here, he describes this state as something we enter into, not merely a moment, but a new state of being. But even within that state of being, it is not yet complete. We stand in grace, but not like we will one day. We are saved from slavery but are not yet in the Promised Land.

This chapter is Paul pivoting to describing the implications of this situation in our current state. Naturally, he addresses suffering. The word Paul uses here is not just about persecution, but all forms of suffering, all distress brought about by outward circumstances. There is plenty of suffering to go around, and it can make that grace and redemption seem fleeting.

But Paul urges us to rejoice in our suffering, to exalt and even boast. This is the same word used when he warns us not to boast in our own strength & works, and the same word used to describe how to respond to the “hope of the glory of God.”

And in fact it is that hope Paul points us to through our suffering, by way of the character built by endurance, itself built by the suffering that we endure.

But we still find ways to block ourselves off from this suffering. We can deny it, ignore it, rationalize it away. But to rejoice in suffering we have to acknowledge it, to sit in it and experience it. This is not something we are excited to do, but this is the offer of transformation we can only attain by going through this sequence Paul describes.

Elsewhere, Paul tells us we are predestined to be conformed to the likeness of Christ, and this transformation begins as we endure and rejoice in suffering, acknowledging and engaging in our experiences, even when they are unpleasant. The hope produced in this process is ah extravagant effusion, an inexhaustible supply, like a cloud burst on parched countryside.

This all means that our already-not-yet period is of supreme value, a purposeful part of God’s plan to bring us to fullness and oneness in Him.

–Sermon Notes, Karen Howe, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, March 12, 2023