Listening to Strangers

Sunday, September 27, 2026

Scriptures: Genesis 18:1-10

• Sermon Summary

  In this third sermon in our current series, Learning to Listen, Jeremy explores how listening to the stranger can teach us about God, using the story of Abraham’s three visitors in Genesis 18. Here’s a quick summary of the four movements in the sermon.

  Strangers: We often find ourselves in this tension when we want to be open to new encounters and experiences, new people and ideas, but we also crave the familiar and need to be in situations where we are already known and accepted. Yet, a stranger is their strangeness can teach us something really important about God.

  Divine Names: We often place outsized emphasis on the events or situations where we expect to encounter God, while in Abraham’s story we see how God's presence appears unexpectedly in an ordinary, unmanufactured moment as Abraham sits in the shade.

  Mysterious Visitors: Jeremy offered three different ways this particular story can be interpreted and the ways it suggest we can view the strangers. First, there’s a Christian interpretation of the Trinity visiting Abraham. Second, there’s an ancient way to imagine God as the Divine Council (God and God’s entourage of heavenly beings) and then finally, these three strangers coming to Abraham can be interpreted through the lens of the Angel of the Lord (a messenger who fully represents God). But in all those interpretations it’s hard to draw a clean line between where the stranger ends and God begins.

  Paused Conversations: Jeremy wrapped up the message with offering us an ancient rabbinic reading where Abraham asks God to hold on so he can show hospitality to strangers, only to find himself walking straight back into a conversation with the Divine.

• Discussion Guide

  Community is shaped by the conversations we share. These questions and reflections are a tool to help you meaningfully engage with the themes of this week's teaching.

  Connect: When was the last time you learnt something surprising from someone you had never met before or who you didn't know very well?

  Share: Share how curiosity (and/or hospitality) shows up in your life these days. Jeremy mentions that while we want to be kind and open to new people, we also hold a natural tension between being wary of strangers and seeking deep, trusted relationships where we are already known.

  How do you personally navigate this balance between staying in safe, comfortable spaces and remaining open or curious toward people outside your usual circle?

  Reflect: Reflect on the rabbinic interpretation of this story from the Talmud and the idea that "greater is hospitality toward guests than receiving the Divine Presence.” Jeremy made a point that Abraham essentially excused himself from a direct conversation with God to welcome three strangers, only to find himself back in the conversation with the divine and receiving the promises of God through those strangers.

  What is your initial reaction to the idea that welcoming a stranger could take priority over staying in an immediate, personal experience of God's presence?
  

  How does this perspective challenge or reframe the way you think about spiritual growth or encounters with God?

  Engage: What do you think about the idea of the strangeness of God? How can holding this theological perspective open you up to concrete shifts in perception or even practical actions?

  Here’s what Jeremy had to say about it in the sermon:

  See this is why I think learning to listen to the stranger is a spiritual practice because God is far stranger than we realize.

  And I don't mean strange as in distant from us, but I do mean strange as in different from us: not our category, not our tribe or our experience, not our echo reflected back. God is — as I say to my daughter when she's being weird — “a stranger.”

  And that means that if God only ever sounds like me, if my God always speaks in my accent, then perhaps I have grasped the profound familiarity of neighbour, but maybe I have lost the beautiful mystery of stranger.

  Which is why sometimes a God who shows up on the road, dusty and unannounced, is the God who calls me away from the conversation I'm already having to enter the one I didn't see coming.
  A new conversation with a God who is wonderfully strange, who speaks in plural and singular at the same time, a God who is here and there all at one.

  A God who reminds me that every single stranger who sits across from me carries a little bit of God I haven't seen yet.”

  Take away: What is one thing that you're taking with you into your week, either from the sermon or our conversation?

  Prayer from the sermon:

  Our God who speaks and who listens,
  Would you help us quiet our hearts just enough to hear you today
  in Scripture,
  in the people we trust,
  and perhaps in the strangers whose stories we have yet to learn from.

  Loosen the walls we build around ourselves
  And grant us new curiosity to listen where we have at times been too quick to jump to conclusions,
  and then, where we find ourselves making room for the unexpected,
  might we trust that we will find your presence waiting in the ordinary moments,
  may our attention to one another open our hearts
  to all the ways you are speaking.

  So you might teach us to love you well
  and to love each other as ourselves.  

  In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray,
  Amen.

• Service Songs & Prayers

  CALL TO WORSHIP Psalm 108

  MUSIC Curated by Kevin B.
  All Sons & Daughters - Great Are You Lord
  The McClures - Reign Above It All
  Mission House - Whole Heart
  Commons Worship - Face to Face
  
  THE LORD’S PRAYER
  Introduction by Scott Wall

  When Jesus was asked by his friends how to pray, he altered their imaginations by teaching them to approach the divine with intimate terms and simple trust.

  And as Christ’s followers, we’re encouraged to adopt these every time we take up the words of the Lord’s Prayer — which I invite you to say with me now.

  The words will be on the screen. Let us pray.

  Our Father,
  who art in heaven,
  Hallowed be thy Name.
  Thy Kingdom come.
  Thy will be done
  On earth as it is in heaven.

  Give us this day our daily bread.
  And forgive us our trespasses,
  As we forgive those
  who trespass against us.

  And lead us not into temptation,
  But deliver us from evil.
  
  For thine is the kingdom,
  The power and the glory,
  For ever and ever.
  Amen.

  SERIES BUMPER
  Learning to Listen