FCC Winchester

Sermon: “In Widening Circles” by Rev. Will Burhans on World Communion Sunday 10/02/22

Sermon: ”Bottom Line Prophet” by Rev. Will Burhans on 9/18/22

Jeremiah 8 – 9:1

 

That is one intense passage, isn’t it, Sarah has laid on you this morning?! The words of the Prophet Jeremiah known as the Weeping Prophet and now you know why – “Oh that my head were a spring of water and my eyes a fountain of tears that I might weep day and night for my people.”

The Hebrew prophets were a remarkable group of people, mostly men, but the Tanakh says at least 7 women and probably more. The way we think of prophecy now is the foretelling of the future and while the original prophets did predict the future and their veracity was often dependent upon what they said, coming true, they are more importantly to be understood as the voice of moral conscience for the nation, speaking on behalf of God or in the words of God to the ways Israel had fallen away from God. The prophets were the original speakers of truth to power. And it was never very pleasant for them…speaking truth to power never is. Poor Jeremiah was one of the more tortured of the prophets required by God to ignite the flame of moral conscience of kings and rulers who frankly were at the top of the heap by ignoring their moral consciences.

Jeremiah was called by God as a teenager and like many of the prophets was like “uh, no thanks” and God was like “uh, yes thank you” And so began his miserable career as a prophet of God and we learn by reading the book of Jeremiah that he was - cursed by crowds, beaten and arrested, nearly lynched, thrown in a cistern, tortured, his hometown and friends came to hate him so much that they tried to assassinate him… remember Jesus saying a prophet is never welcomed in his hometown? There you go. And you might think, well at least he was close to God… but that really wasn’t so great either. He accused God of lying to him and failing him, saying “the God who was once a fountain of living water has become to me no better than a deceitful brook” and he became so utterly depressed that he not only cursed his own birthday. (from Westminster Guide to the Books of the Bible, William Ramsay, pgs. 201-202)

That’s all there in the book of Jeremiah. So you can understand why he was called, poor thing, the Weeping Prophet! And now you can also be grateful that God hasn’t called you to be a prophet!

Sermon: Grace Reigns (and Rains) by Rev. Will Burhans on 9/11/22

Sermon: Grace Reigns (and Rains)

Scripture:  Luke 15:1-10

Preacher: Rev. Will Burhans

Date: September 11, 2022

 

O Living Water, O My Redeemer (Oh God my Savior) (O My Great Shepherd)

If I ever needed you. I need you now. 

If I ever needed you. I need you now.

 

            And that is how we come to God… or rather how God comes to us, not in how we’re filled but in what we need, not in all we’ve found but in what we’ve lost and how we are lost. We say in prayer “if I ever needed you, I need you now” and that’s a prayer that lays us open for grace.  It’s a good place to begin here at the start of another fall, with this beautiful little 5-letter word - grace.  It is the Christian faith in a word, it all hinges upon it, the whole story, the arc of how we begin, how we are sustained and where we will land, so needless to say it’s a big, deep, rich, you might say inexhaustible notion, grace is, and so this morning I thought I’d offer a brief meditation on grace and I want to do so by asking 4 questions - 

what is it? 

How is it gained? 

What does it do for us? 

And how do we respond… to such a thing as grace?  

Sermon: A Non-Transactional God By Rev. Will Burhans on 3/20/22

We call Lent the penitential season coming from the same word that penance, repentance, penitentiary derives from, a latin verb paenitere which means to be sorry. It’s an important word as it’s one of the first that Jesus speaks in the Gospels.  For those of us who come from conservative Christian churches, the word comes with quite a bit of freight – “we must repent for our sinfulness or face the wrath of God – repent you sinners!”  

#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.

Sermon: ”For All The Saints” by Rev. Will Burhans on 10/31/21

Sermon: ”The Ensouled Ones” by Rev. Wil Burhans on 10/24/21

10/10/21 Sermon by Rev. Judy Arnold

Sermon: Choice of 2 Cities? by Rev. Will Burhans on 10/03/21

Sermon: Mark 9:30-37 by Rev.Judy Arnold on 9/19/21