Have you ever been wrong about something?  My husband Phil and I used to teach junior high Sunday school, back before we had kids ourselves.  One week our Sunday school curriculum was about sin and salvation.  The lesson book showed a series of diagrams. The first diagram showed God and humanity together, in the Garden of Eden.  The second showed God at one end of the picture, people at the other end, and a deep abyss between.  This division, according to the curriculum, was caused by sin, and people have no way of bridging the gap between them and God on their own.  Thankfully, God sent Jesus to be our savior. So on the third diagram, they drew a bridge between God and humanity with Jesus standing on the bridge in the center.  Through Christ our sins are forgiven, and our connection with God is restored.

Sounds good, right?  Except why show boring diagrams when you could instead do a demonstration?  Phil and I set up two saw-horses in the Sunday school classroom and put a board over top.  We borrowed a Barbie and Ken doll from our neighbors and put them on the board as stand-ins for Adam and Eve.  We weren’t sure how to depict God, but Phil found an old G. I. Joe at his mom’s house and, since G. I. Joe was one of Phil’s childhood heroes, we thought he’d made a good enough symbol for God.  The kids in our class were very intrigued when they walked into Sunday school that day!

At first we had all three dolls close together, representing how wonderful everything was when God first created people.  There was companionship and intimacy between people and God.  But then we talked about sin.  We moved Barbie and Ken down to the far end of the board to represent the distance that sin puts in between us and God.  So far so good.  Things went south, though, when we used Phil’s circular saw to cut the board in half to show how sin creates an impossible distance between us and God that only Jesus can overcome.  Let’s just say the only reason we didn’t have to call the fire department is because there were two volunteer fire fighters in the adult Sunday school class in the next room!

The circular saw successfully cut the board in half, and Barbie and Ken fell, and it was dramatic, just as we had planned.  But we didn’t count on the wiring shorting out, the light fixture in the ceiling above us sparking like crazy, and a whole bunch of smoke!  There was a lot more excitement than we planned!  Fortunately, no one was hurt.  And amazingly, we did not get fired from teaching Sunday school.  Turns out, you can just about burn the place down and they will still want you to lead the junior high class!

But what is even more amazing to me is that, for many years, the thing I felt bad about in all of that was the decision to bring the circular saw to church and plug it into an outlet that hasn’t been updated since probably 1933.  That was wrong, of course.  But what is even more embarrassing for me now is that I realize, we were focusing on the wrong message.  The curriculum made a big deal about how sin separates us from God.  But even if class hadn’t been cut short by a fire, the lesson didn’t celebrate at all how, even when we sin, God continues to come close to us.  Just as God sought out Adam and Eve in the garden, God continues to seek us out!  Instead of trying to demonstrate the distance, I wish I would have come up with a dramatic demonstration about closeness.  Something to show the students that there is nothing we can do, no where we can go, no unholy act, that can keep God from pursuing us.  We human beings, we are the love of God’s life!

Thankfully, God has found some very dramatic ways to demonstrate to us just how much all people matter to God.  God sent Jesus, born not in a palace–but in a stable.  God gave to him not wealthy, prominent, high achieving parents—but regular people who could only afford the peasant’s offering when Jesus was presented at the temple.  Jesus grew up and embarked on a ministry that, time and time again, made it a point to include and bless people everyone else seemed to have forgotten or wished they could just forget:  the lepers, the demon possessed, the lame, the lost, even the enemy Roman soldiers.  After Jesus’ death and resurrection, some of the first and most prominent evangelists shocked the ancient world:  women at the tomb, the Ethiopian eunuch, foreigners and pagans of all kinds, and my favorite, Eutychus, who dozed off while Paul was preaching, fell out of a window, and died, only to be restored to life.  Is it safe to say God has a flair for the dramatic?

And then there’s our sacrament of communion.  If sin creates distance between us and God, communion is the antidote that creates closeness and intimacy.  Every time we share in the Lord’s Supper, Jesus wants us to “do this in remembrance of me.”  Like clips from a movie, we might remember various scenes in Jesus’ life.  But as we take the bread and drink the cup, we are also commanded to re-member.  As in, make the things Jesus did long ago happen again in us and through us now.  We are to re-member ourselves as members of the Body of Christ, and through this meal, experience the mysterious power that binds us to God and to each other.  We become one.

But being connected is much harder in real life than in theory.  That is why the annual observance of World Communion Sunday got started in the first place!  World Communion Sunday began in 1933 at the Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, and grew slowly at first.  But World Communion Sunday spread quickly during World World II, because churches knew they had an important role in trying to hold the world together.  World Communion Sunday emphasized that all Christians are one in the Spirit and the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and their unity has a powerful impact on the world.  The sacrament of communion is not only a gift to each individual believer to strengthen our faith.  It is a vehicle through which God’s grace forms us into a net that can capture the lost, heal the sick, befriend the lonely, and relieve the afflicted.  Linked together, we can re-member Jesus’ ministry that includes everyone.

Recently I went to a workshop led by Dr. Ron Bell, who works for the Upper Room.  He opened the day with the story of the buzzard, the eagle, and the peacock.  Have you heard this story?  It was new to me and goes like this:

One day a buzzard and an eagle found themselves sitting beside each other under the limb of a majestic tree.  This had never happened to them before, so they struck up a conversation about what it’s like to be a buzzard versus what it’s like to be an eagle. They talked about aviation, weather, and how much they love flying.  They compared wing-span, speed, hunting techniques, and the like.  They were really enjoying their chat!

But before too long, a peacock approached them and, instead of saying hello, simply said to the buzzard, “Hey, Buzzard, you’re ugly!  You are U G L Y ugly!”  He was really taunting him and finally asked, “Don’t you wish you had beautiful feathers like me?”

Well of course the buzzard got angry.  But before he could do anything about it, the peacock spoke up again.  “And Eagle, you are bald!  You are B A L D bald!”  The peacock was making fun of the eagle’s shiny head and finally asked, “Don’t you wish you had a colorful head of feathers like mine?”  And of course the eagle got angry.

But then something surprising happened.  Just that fast, instead of the two birds both being angry at the peacock, the buzzard and eagle started fighting with each other over who was going to put the peacock in his place.  The feathers were really starting to fly!

Thankfully, after a minute or two, the eagle and the buzzard came to their senses and said, “You know what?  We’re acting crazy.  That peacock struts around because he can’t fly.  We don’t need to do anything to him.  We can just move on.”  And so the eagle and the buzzard flew away, and resolved to put all the peacock had said behind them.

I thought there would be more to ending, but that’s all Dr. Bell said, and then he moved on to a different topic.  I never heard him come back around and explain why he opened his program with that story or what moral we were to draw from it.  He just left it open for everyone to think about as the day went on.  I’m still thinking about it!

And I think it’s a great story to consider on this, World Communion Sunday.  Our United Methodist denomination is so deeply divided.  Our nation is so deeply divided.  Our world is so deeply divided!  The sinful state of the world has created tremendous rifts between people.  Twenty or thirty years from now, I think this is going to be a time in our lives that we look back on and wonder about, like that day Phil and I did the demonstration in junior high Sunday school.  Are we going to feel badly about the wrong things?  The circular saw and sparks weren’t really the problem.  The content of the lesson was the problem!  We tend to think the issues of the day are critical and of utmost importance.  But World Communion Sunday reminds us there is something much bigger at stake.

In our scripture lesson today, Paul is writing to his protégé Timothy, and Paul has a lot of instructions for him!  Paul has left Timothy in Ephesus to supervise the church there.  The church was growing, but they had a lot of false teaching that was also growing, specifically teaching from a philosophy we call Gnosticism.  This was a belief that the spirit is good and the physical is evil.  That doesn’t really jive with God loving the whole world so much he sent Jesus to live as a physical human being, but it was an attractive teaching because people love categories of good and bad!  Timothy was to be on the lookout for this false teaching and call people a more balanced perspective.  Paul expected Timothy to get some push-back along the way, because he was a young man.  He was still growing in his own faith and understanding.

Maybe we’re not all that young, but we are all still growing in our own faith and understanding.  Paul’s advice to Timothy is good advice for us all.  “Have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives’ tales; rather, train yourself to be godly.  For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.”  (1 Timothy 4: 7-8)  There are always going to be things we get wrong.  Teachings we followed that later we realized weren’t quite right.  Things we emphasized that later we wish we wouldn’t have.  Beliefs we held tightly that later we wished we would have been a little more humble and flexible about.  We are not perfect!  With godly training, hopefully we are going on to perfection.

This morning as we celebrate communion, we have the opportunity to remember all Jesus said and did, and his deep desire for unity.  We not only have the opportunity to remember as in bring to mind, we have the opportunity to re-member, as in re-enact Jesus’ gracious life in our world today.  Human beings are the love of God’s life!  Let us place our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all and especially of those who believe.  Amen.