The God Who Sees: The Witness Our Neighbors Can See

The apartment door still has last spring's invite card under the magnet. The card says God sees you. The woman who used to lock the church kitchen lives two doors down the same hall. She knows the card. She also knows the last Tuesday they needed her name on a roster and the first Sunday they did not.

A man across the street can tell you the service times from the sign. He has watched the same cars leave after the last song. He has never been asked where he came from or where he is going. He has heard this church talk about the nations. He has not heard this church use a name for the person they finished with.

This is a sermon about the witness our neighbors can already see. 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 where a street can recognize it.

Text

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.