The God Who Sees: What This Changes Between Us

The fellowship hour still has a name for her when a table needs a body. It does not have that name when they sit down. She filled the nursery through two winters. She ran the Wednesday meal until the roster learned to print her as a slot. A household used her and sent her out of the story. The hallway learned to walk past the person it still needs on paper.

A man who greets at the door can talk for twenty minutes about this church as a family. He cannot tell you the last time he asked a dismissed person in this building where they came from and where they are going, then waited for an answer he did not already own. Invisibility in a church that talks about family rarely looks like an empty building. It looks like a full hour and an unasked name.

This is a sermon for what a used person does between you. If you preach Genesis 16 as a map of the hearer's feelings, you will lie. If you preach it as Yahweh finding Hagar in the wilderness, you give this church a God whose seeing can be obeyed as a people.

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Hear the finding as Holy Scripture tells it, from the World English Bible: "Yahweh’s angel found her by a fountain of water in the wilderness, by the fountain on the way to Shur.