Ann Arbor Community Church Sermon Podcast

Out of Egypt: The Power of Being with Jesus - Pastor Hannah Witte - a2cc.org. Watch our livestream Sundays @ 11:00am - vimeo.com/annarborcommunitychurch 

Summary: 

What makes someone’s life so compelling that others can tell they have been with Jesus? In Acts 4, Peter and John stand before powerful religious leaders, boldly proclaiming Jesus even when doing so puts their safety and livelihood at risk. These ordinary men have no impressive credentials or societal power to leverage, yet their presence with Jesus has formed them into people whose courage, humility, and conviction cannot be easily explained away. In a world that teaches us to dominate, control, and manipulate outcomes for our own gain, Jesus invites us into a radically different way: the way of the cross, where we embody a love that costs us something for the good of others. This kind of boldness isn't about being the loudest voice in the room; it's about spiritual honesty, generous attention, and the willingness to love vulnerably without needing to be right or in control. What might happen if we learned to pause when we feel the urge to power up, making room for the Holy Spirit, and becoming a people whose lives shine with the unmistakable light of having been with Jesus?

Out of Egypt: Send Someone Else - Pastor Donnell T. Wyche - a2cc.org. Watch our livestream Sundays @ 11:00am - vimeo.com/annarborcommunitychurch 

Summary: 

This Sunday we come back to the burning bush, because Moses is still standing there, and he is still talking. Five times Moses tells God no. Last week Hannah walked us through the first two objections, "Who am I?" and "What is your name?", and God answered both with presence: I will be with you, I am who I am. In Exodus 4:1-17 we get the last three. They won't believe me. I have never been eloquent. Please send someone else. And God does not argue with him. God asks a question: What is that in your hand? A staff. The most ordinary thing Moses owns, the thing he walked up to the bush already holding. God does not hand Moses something new. God asks about what is already there. Everything Moses says about himself is true. He did have his shot in Egypt and miss it. He did run. He has built a quiet second chance keeping his father-in-law's sheep, and he is content in it. His story is grounded in truth, and it is incomplete, because he has left out every part where God has been at work. That is the most dangerous story a person can tell, because it is true enough to believe. God's answer is not a renovation. In the Hebrew, God does not say I will help you speak. God says, I will be with your mouth. And God being with you is not the same as God agreeing with you. God is with Moses and disagrees with Moses in the same breath. Then Moses runs out of reasons and says the true thing underneath all of them: send someone else. The Lord's anger burns, and if you grew up in church you know what is supposed to happen next. It does not. What comes out of God's anger is a brother. Aaron is already on his way before Moses finishes his fifth objection. God does not fix Moses' mouth. God sends Moses a person. The sermon ends in a country that is deciding, right now, who gets to speak and who gets taken away mid-sentence, and with the pattern of God across this whole book: the people the system tells to send someone else are the people God sends. The baby in the basket. The midwives. The fugitive with a heavy tongue. So, what is that in your hand? Name it. Then name the one place where you have been telling God, send someone else, and take what is in your hand and go there.

Out of Egypt: The Burning Bush - Pastor Hannah Witte - a2cc.org. Watch our livestream Sundays @ 11:00am - vimeo.com/annarborcommunitychurch 

Summary: 

What if the questions “Who am I?” and “Where do I belong?” are ultimately answered not by what we accomplish, what others think of us, or where we come from, but by the God who comes to us and calls us by name? In Exodus 3, Moses encounters the God who sees his people's suffering, speaks into his identity, promises His presence, and invites him to participate in God’s work of liberation and redemption. Like Moses, we may feel disoriented, inadequate, or unsure of what God could possibly do through us—but God keeps pointing us back to his sufficiency rather than our own. As we learn to notice where God is coming to us, receive our identity as God’s dearly loved children, and respond to the calls He places before us, we discover that even the broken places in our stories can become places through which God’s love reaches the world. As she shares her own testimony of God's love bringing her healing, Pastor Hannah boldly challenges us to not look away, remember who(se) we are, and to not delay if God's given us a call.

Out of Egypt: Getting Egypt Out of Moses - Pastor Donnell T. Wyche - a2cc.org. Watch our livestream Sundays @ 11:00am - vimeo.com/annarborcommunitychurch 

Summary: 

This Sunday we come to Moses. Not the baby in the basket and not the man at the burning bush, but the man in between, who sees something and does not know what to do with what he has seen. Exodus 2:11-25 is built on one verb, to see. Moses watches his people at their hard labor, sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, looks this way and that, and kills the man. Pharaoh spent a generation teaching Egypt not to see the Hebrews as human, and Moses sees through it. The question the passage asks is not whether Moses sees. It is what he does with what he has seen. What he does is answer injustice with the tools of the house he was raised in: violence, done in secret, by someone with power, after checking who was watching. His own people are the first to say so: "Who made you ruler and judge over us?" Nobody sent him, and seeing an injustice is not the same as being sent. Then Moses is afraid, the same word the midwives used, pointed in the opposite direction. He runs to Midian, defends seven daughters at a well without looking over his shoulder, and names his son Gershom, "a foreigner in a foreign land." Moses is the first person in this book to get out of Egypt, and look at what he carries out with him: the fist, the secret, the fear. Getting out of Egypt is one thing. Getting Egypt out of Moses is going to take a long time, and it happens first to the man who will lead everyone else out. The chapter ends with a king dying and nothing changing, because Pharaoh is a system, and then God becomes the subject of four verbs: God heard, God remembered, God saw, God knew. When Stephen retells the story in Acts 7, he says that this same Moses they rejected is the one God sent. God never prosecutes Moses. God calls him. The sermon then turns to us, in a country where nobody can say anymore that they did not see, and names two Egypts: the Moses who meets injustice with the empire's own rage, and the Moses who flees to a well where the groaning cannot reach him. Name your Egypt. Trust the God who heard, remembered, saw, and knew, and who sends the very people who ran. And take another step toward becoming the people God is forming.

Out of Egypt: Part 3 - Jonathan Hurshman - a2cc.org. Watch our livestream Sundays @ 11:00am - vimeo.com/annarborcommunitychurch 

Summary: 

Jonathan Hurshman brilliantly walks us through Acts 6:1-7, exploring how the ways of Pharaoh are still showing up thousands of years later in how the church takes care of its most vulnerable. He points out how giving power away to the least powerful brought some of the most powerful, the priests, into the community of Jesus followers. The apostles defy Pharaoh's ways by sharing power, refusing to separate, and charting a course of mutuality. Following Jesus is indeed the good life, but it is not the easy life. Jonathan challenges us to practice discomfort for the sake of loving each other across our differences and prioritizing unity.

Out of Egypt: Who Will You Fear - Pastor Hannah Witte - a2cc.org. Watch our livestream Sundays @ 11:00am - vimeo.com/annarborcommunitychurch 

Summary: 

In Exodus 1:15-2:10, we meet women who refuse to let fear determine who they obey, what they see, or how they live—and through their faithfulness, God protects life and moves his story forward. We, too, are invited to become people whose deepest allegiance is to Christ, so that the fears, powers, and pressures around us no longer get to decide who we become. Freedom is not the absence of fear; it is becoming so close to Jesus and so immersed in his way of seeing the world that fear no longer determines what we do or who we embrace. As we pay attention to God, repent of the ways “Egypt” has found its way into us, and take the next faithful step from our own location and with our own limits, we trust God to weave our faithfulness together into something larger than any one of us could see.

Out of Egypt: Introduction - Rev. Donnell T. Wyche - a2cc.org. Watch our livestream Sundays @ 11:00am - vimeo.com/annarborcommunitychurch 

Summary: 

This sermon opens the fall series Out of Egypt, in which we read Exodus alongside Acts. Exodus is the story of God freeing a people from empire and teaching them to trust; Acts is the story of that same God pouring out the Spirit and forming a new family that crosses every border. Why tell the story of a people held in captivity? Because getting out of Egypt is one thing; getting Egypt out of you is the work of a lifetime. Pharaoh, who is never named in the story, represents the powers of empire: fear, greed, violence, material wealth, and scarcity, and everyone in the story is confronted with the same choice, empire or God. Every week this fall we will return to one invitation: Name your Egypt. Trust the God who brings you out. And take another step toward becoming the people God is forming. The heart of the sermon is Exodus 1:1-14, read slowly as a plan that unfolds in four phases. First, Pharaoh attacks the nation’s memory: a new king comes to power “to whom Joseph meant nothing,” refusing to remember that Egypt is standing because of a refugee, which is exactly where Stephen begins his own retelling in Acts 7. Second, he misrepresents the Hebrews to exploit social divisions, teaching his people to “look” at their neighbors as a threat over a betrayal that had not happened. Third, he enforces division through forced labor, building store cities for a king who had all the grain in the world and still believed there was not enough. Fourth, he institutionalizes it as a caste system, bitter labor in brick and mortar with no rest for anyone, not even for Pharaoh. God is not named anywhere in these fourteen verses, and yet “be fruitful and multiply” is still running underneath Pharaoh’s feet: the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied. The sermon closes by looking at the fear behind the plan. Pharaoh’s anxiety is fear of the future, and it asks him to partner with evil today to prevent tomorrow’s evil, what the sermon calls a demonic imagination, against which God invites us to a prophetic imagination of liberation, peace, healing, and jubilee. Then the text turns and looks at us: forget the ones who saved you, teach the people to see their neighbor as a threat, build the warehouses. It is read from the good book, not the newspaper, but the pharaohs are not only out there. There is a pharaoh of fear, of scarcity, and of exclusion in each of us. The invitation stands: name your Egypt, trust the God who brings you out, and take another step. God is not named in these verses, but God is not absent. God is in the “And.” God is in the multiplying. And next Sunday the story reaches the delivery stool, where God is finally named in the hands of two women who decided they were not afraid of Pharaoh.

Waking Up: Our Vision - Pastor Hannah Witte - a2cc.org. Watch our livestream Sundays @ 11:00am - vimeo.com/annarborcommunitychurch 

Summary: 

What happens when we move through life—or even our faith—on autopilot? What does it cost us? Others? In Ephesians, we’re invited to wake up to God’s presence and the beautiful vision God has been unfolding for centuries: a people being transformed by Jesus, learning to belong to one another across differences, and living with freedom, joy, and boundless generosity. Pastor Hannah explores how we can move from simply going through the motions to becoming more awake to what God is already doing in us, among us, and around us. There are several directions we're heading as a church community to press into our vision and move toward God's dreams together this year. We'd love for you to take a step with us toward becoming all God made us to be.

Prodigal: The Merciful Father - Pastor Donnell T. Wyche - a2cc.org. Watch our livestream Sundays @ 11:00am - vimeo.com/annarborcommunitychurch 

Summary: 

After three weeks with the younger son and the older son, this sermon turns to the one character in the parable who never gets a name: the Father. The sons are the mirrors; the Father is the point. Jesus tells this story, along with the lost sheep and the lost coin, in answer to the Pharisees’ complaint that he welcomes sinners. They say exclude the lost; Jesus reveals a Father whose heart is a picture of pursuit, with a party thrown at the end. And if “prodigal” means recklessly extravagant, it is the Father, in his mercy, who is the truly prodigal one. The first thing the story shows us is a Father whose love does not hold anyone hostage. Asked for the inheritance, he lets his son go because he would rather have a son who is free to leave than a prisoner who stays. The heart of the sermon is Luke 15:20 and its six verbs, every one of which belongs to the Father before the son has said a word. He saw him because he had been watching the road every day. He was filled with compassion, not anger. He ran, something no dignified man in that world would do. He covered his shame, meeting the boy on the road so he would not have to walk the village’s gauntlet of contempt alone. He threw his arms around him: the son deserved punishment and received an embrace instead. And he kissed him while the rehearsed speech was still in the boy’s pocket. The embrace and the kiss are forgiveness offered before repentance is spoken; the Father forgives first, and the confession comes second. When the son does begin his speech, he never finishes it. The Father interrupts his repentance with mercy and calls for the robe, the ring, the sandals, and the feast. The Father then leaves the house a second time, going out to the older son, who refuses to come in. He does not defend himself or argue about fairness; he pleads. He is entitled to justice from both sons and collects it from neither because, as Paul says, it is God’s kindness that leads us to repentance. The sermon closes by asking about our picture of God, which A. W. Tozer called the most important thing about us. If God is a master to be served, we will live like the older son—in the house but never at the party. If God is a creditor waiting to collect, we will stay in the far country. But if you have been the younger son, the Father is already running. If you have been the older son, the Father is standing in the yard with you. You can stop behaving like a servant because you were always a son. The prayer is simple: Give us the Father Jesus gave us, whose love for us is unrelenting.

Prodigal: The Older Son - Pastor Hannah White - a2cc.org. Watch our livestream Sundays @ 11:00am - vimeo.com/annarborcommunitychurch 

Summary: 

In the second week of our Prodigal series, we step into the story from the perspective of the older son. While the younger son’s rebellion is loud and obvious, the older son’s lostness is quieter—comparison, jealousy, entitlement, and a transactional relationship with his father. Jesus reveals that both sons have misunderstood their father's nature, and both are invited home by a father whose love cannot be earned. The father’s words to the older son—“My son, you are always with me, and all that I have is yours”—invite us to let go of our report cards and receive the gift of being God’s beloved daughters and sons. Pastor Hannah calls us to allow God's imagination to change us. What would it look like to become a people who celebrate rather than compare, repair relationships rather than keep score, and make room at our dinner tables for people who look, think, and live differently from us?