Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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    The Jews had a story to tell, an old, proud story.  You're familiar with it, of course: how they were founded on the faith of Abraham, how they endured four hundred years of slavery in Egypt, how they escaped (in a most dramatic way) by the hand of God, how they conquered the promised land, established a kingdom, built a Temple, survived an exile, returned and rebuilt.  And, through it all, they remained fanatically faithful to God's law, the Torah.  And all this was true.  A chosen people, obviously!

    The first Christians (all of whom were Jews, remember) told the story differently.  They saw that same history, the history of the Jewish people, as a disgraceful story, a story of people rejecting God time after time and, as the result, being alienated from him.  The Jews had railed against Moses in the wilderness, stoned the prophets, broken their covenant with God in a thousand ways.  And now, in their most recent shame, they had called for the death of God's Son -- insisted that Pilate release a murderer and crucify Jesus -- Peter reminds them.  "…you killed the Author of life whom God raised from the dead."  And all that was true.

    Of course, the Jews didn't like having their story told that way, having the dark side of their moon exposed.  As we get older, I think, we like to find comfort in the past, so we tell it the way we want it to have been.  My mother, at 89, likes to tell people that my brother and I were never bad, and that she never had to spank us.  I remember her spanking us!  And I know we were bad more than a little.  Like my mother, the Jews wanted to remember only the positive things from the past.  They took comfort in that.  But Jesus comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.  In him we see all sides of ourselves.

    It strikes me that we all have stories to tell.  And that all our stories could be told either way.  Peter himself had a double story.  The story of bullheaded Peter, impetuous, unthinking, denying his Lord when the chips were down.  That would be one way of seeing Peter.  And it would be true.  But there would also be the story (just as true) of the Peter who got up from his fishing boat and followed, no questions asked, who with great courage declared that Jesus was the Messiah "the Son of the living God,"  the Peter to whom Jesus promised the keys to the kingdom.  The strong, risk-taking man who loved his Lord so much it made him cry.  Same Peter.  Different story.  He was a complex person, as we all are.

    Many ball players have hit 250 in a season, a much smaller number have hit 300, and there are a precious few who have hit 400.  But nobody bats a thousand!  Nobody even comes close.  And, I suppose, we could tell any baseball player's story either way, emphasizing the hits he got or emphasizing how far short of perfection he fell.
 Now when we understand that there are two ways of telling our stories, one flattering and the other not, and that therefore, at some level, we are at war with ourselves and with God, we agonize over that division and plead for healing and wholeness.  What can bridge the gap between God's holiness and our imperfection.  What can move us from batting 250, or 300, or even 400, to batting 1000 with God?

    The answer lies outside ourselves and beyond all our efforts.  And that's what communion is all about.  God provides an appropriate sacrifice, and promises us that "by the merits and death of his Son, Jesus Christ," we might be saved.  Made whole.  Brought up to snuff.  Have the great distance between us and God made as nothing.  I am just back from the Capon Springs retreat, where Charles and Dottie Schmidt were the speakers.  (Charles is the minister of Emmanuel's Church, up New Hampshire Avenue, and Dottie teaches adult classes there and works right beside him.)  They were wonderful.  It's no wonder that church has grown the way it has.  The theme of the retreat had to do with the promises of God.  At one point Charles said that there are 40,000 promises in the Bible, but the most important two are these: that Christ, by his death, will wash away our sins, and make us fit to stand before God, and that he will send the Holy Spirit, in the meantime, to comfort us.  Fit for heaven, and comforted for our trials here on earth.  We need to claim these promises as our own.  It doesn't matter what our batting average is.  God has made up the difference between it and 1,000.  He has taken our faith, something of which we are capable, and he has reckoned it to us as righteousness, something of which we are really not capable.  That piece of news (sometimes called "the gospel") changes us from the inside out and prepares us to change the world.