#FCCWSermon: ”No Hands But Ours” by Rev. Will Burhans on January 16, 2022

Scripture: Luke 4:14-21; “God Has a Dream” by Tutu Over the course of Christian history the saints are those people who have embodied through their lives the Spirit of Christ, the love and truth of Jesus, in ways that help the rest of us see it better, believe it better, live it ourselves better. If there’s one common characteristic of the huge cloud of witnesses that are the saints across human history and what distinguishes them from superstars and heroes, the famous and the powerful it’s that their lives do not point to themselves, but to Christ. The saints wherever they are, whenever they live, and however they conduct their lives, embody the words of the Apostle Paul – “it is not I who live but Christ who lives in me”. They say not “make something great of me, worthy to be admired, liked and followed” but they say “make of me an instrument of Yours…” They are instruments of God in a world that at times plays a very different tune than God intended, so more often than not are battered and bruised and suffer to produce the music that God plays through their lives. Jesus, abandoned, betrayed, executed, being the model instrument himself. It is in weakness not in strength that Jesus and the saints reveal God’s truth and love to the world, in their own weakness and in the way they direct their lives not towards the strong and powerful, the mighty and popular, but towards the weak and powerless, the dismissed and disfavored.