As you all know, one of the pleasures of being part of a group — a family, a sorority or fraternity, or a church — is the ability to share memories with each other. We get to live through our experiences again through the memories, and other people fill in details we missed at the time. You know this happens with friends, or civic groups, or church friends. “Remember when…?” someone starts, and then everyone chimes in with parts of the memory.

Each memory sparks another one, adding to the pile of stories. But it also reveals that we never remember quite the same things.

Even siblings, in the same family, recall things in different ways.

Our memories merge and blend or fade away.

In this story, Jesus was counting on his disciples to remember. He built it into their faith from the start. They had to remember so they could keep telling the story. “You are my witnesses,” he said.

That’s frightening.

Eyewitness testimony used to be the gold standard in court, and now we know how flawed it is. We know how imperfect, how faulty, how full of holes our memories are. How can we possibly be witnesses for Jesus when we can’t remember what we wore yesterday, or who texted us an hour ago?

Memory can be a soft welcome, or a sharp barrier. It can either include or exclude.

When we assume everyone has the same memories, we leave people out. When we say, “The church used to…” we leave out all the people who’ve come since that time. When we say “We always…” we leave out the people who are doing it for the first time. When we say “Everyone knows me,” the new person will slip away in shame that they don’t.

Christian memory always includes people. “This is my body, given for you,” Jesus said, and he meant not just the people around that first table — and not just the people around our table …but everyone who came along. When we hear “you are a chosen people,” it means claimed, not the kind of chosen that leaves everyone else out.

“You are my witnesses,” Jesus said, and he counts on us to tell his story.

This is not because we have perfect memories - not because we have perfect lives, even, but our lives serve as our witness.

Our evangelical friends have an idea of witnessing to people, which means actively telling about our faith. Some people have a gift for that, and some people don’t. Some people want to hear and some people don’t.

Our truest witness is how we live. It’s not what we say …people forget that. It’s how we spend our money, supporting the things we believe in. The tone of voice we use with strangers, or people who have fewer resources or lower status than we do, in the way we seek honesty and fairness at work, in the way we spend our time, in the way we speak up to call out a demeaning joke or an act of aggression, in the way we tell the truth, even when it’s inconvenient.

When I think about the people who have witnessed to me, it’s not the talkers I remember. Occasionally, it’s something someone said. Most often it’s the example they gave me, not for my benefit, but for their own.

When I was a hospice chaplain, in my early years of ministry, one of my patients was a man named Mr. Low. He was an exceptionally quiet man, near the end of his life when I met him. His wife, Mrs. Low, was a small, round woman who talked enough for both of them. She had gaps in her teeth, and holes in her stretched out shirts, but the brightness of her smile made you forget all of that.

They lived in a battered house on a quiet street in a town that had seen much better days. I would climb up the front porch steps, which were slowly rotting away, and go into the living room, which was stacked high with things Mrs. Low thought she might need some day … or things someone had given her, that she planned to give to someone else. Each month it was a struggle to pay the rent. Mr. Low was too sick to work, and Mrs. Low stopped working at the deli when her feet hurt too much.

Some days there was enough, and other days, she wondered how they would have enough to eat. Somehow, in spite of that, or because of it, she had the most vibrant faith of anyone I’ve ever known. If someone brought them dinner, or a bag of bread, she saw it as a direct gift from God. If the day was hard, she knew God would make it better. If she had more than enough of something, she would give the extra away, trusting that God would bring more when she needed it.

Mrs. Low never asked for anything for herself, but she was never shy about asking for something for her church. If the True Vine Baptist Church needed chairs, or a new bus, or flowers for a Mother’s Day program, she would call me up, fully trusting that I would give her whatever I could.

I think now about how little I really understood her struggles, but she took me and all my naiveté under her wing anyway. When her husband died, she sent a note to my boss saying that we were going to be friends for life …and we were, until the time of her death. Of all the hundreds of hospice families I’ve known, maybe thousands, I’ve stayed in touch with only a handful …and she chose me, for some reason.

Mrs. Low, with the gaps in her teeth and in her education, taught me something about faith, and trust, that I couldn’t have learned from someone with more resources. Her life, and her prayers, were a witness to the power of God through all kinds of adversity. Her complete trust in God stays with me, still.

Our lives are our witness. Someone is always watching. A student in our class, wondering what they want to be like when they’re an adult…a neighbor, who’s in a hard place …a grandchild, who doesn’t go to church because church doesn’t mean anything …someone in our community group, who quit church years ago.

Someone needs our example, just as we need theirs. We do this together, as a community, filling in the gaps in each other’s faith.

“You are my witnesses,” Jesus says. He could find someone more perfect, someone more educated, someone more successful, someone with better words to say, but he chooses us.

So then, may our lives reveal his story. In Jesus’ name, Amen.