You might have already lseen these words if you logged on to the ELCA Website recently—they are the new “slogan” selected to lead the national church towards its assembly in 2009. We here at Holy Communion have also chosen to use them to head our newly-designed webpage, and to help us in understanding our mission as a Philadelphia congregation gathered to be “in the city for good.”

It is both a humbling and empowering idea for us to consider—that God chooses to accomplish the purpose of God’s own divine heart through the workings of our own very human hands. And yet, in Christ, this is no mere idea, but our reality—our gift and our call—to be not only the hands, but the feet and the mouth and the ears and the eyes—to be the actual body of Christ in the world, going forward with each step and living with each breath, the good news of God’s steadfast and life-changing love out into the world God created.

Now, we don’t have to go too far or live too long before we discover just how imperfect God’s work can look in our sometimes clumsy, always human hands, but the promise, in Christ, that God will take who we are and what we do and use them to fashion God’s new and perfect kingdom is the promise to which we cling when the going gets rough. “God’s work, our hands” is the confession we make to each other that what we do in faith matters and that who we are in faith counts, often in ways we don’t always see for ourselves.

And yet, sometimes, we do. When some unsettling stranger appears at our door; when some risky opportunity shows up in our midst; when some completely alien-to-our-minds possibility confronts our hearts, then the impossible begins to unfold. Then lives begin to change and then the world is transformed.

We have been blessed to witness this kind of transformation again and again in our congregation, and we are confident that, with God’s guidance, the blessings will continue to make themselves known. Because this is truly the promise of Christ—in our ministries, in our fellowship; in our joys and sorrows, our laughter and our tears—the promise that with our hands, in our lives, among us all, God’s life-saving work is being accomplished.

That God’s will is being done.

--Pastor Kari Hart