In Remembrance

Our church celebrates communion once a month.  Some call it The Lord’s Supper.  For others, it’s the Holy Eucharist.  In some church cultures, a worship service is incomplete without this special meal.  Others view it as something to be treasured, and fear its losing some of its special-ness by it being a part of every gathered community. 

Coming from a very traditional, ritualistic even, church background, I understand this concern.  There is a commonly held axiom in communication that to the extent that something is familiar, it loses its impact.  Said another way, the more we know what’s coming, the less intently or expectantly we receive or anticipate it.  I still recall singing portions of the liturgy (the repetitious and routine parts of the worship service) as a child while, at the same time, looking around the room, waving to late-comers, or wondering why I had worn one brown shoe and one black.  Imagine the impact of the words, Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, on my heart, while I am simultaneously winking at the cute girl across the aisle.  Talk about your multi-tasker!

Wherever you land with the frequency and significance of communion in the worship life of the church, know this.  Observing it was a big deal to the one who instituted it—Jesus himself.  For all the ways the church loves to celebrate/commemorate the birth of Christ, Jesus really didn’t say much if anything about remembering the beginning of his earthly life.  What he did not want us to forget, though, was how (and why) he died.

Every four or five weeks, our church hauls out this special table and uses it as the centerpiece of our stage as a visual reminder that during this gathering, we are going to intentionally look back.  In fact, the table has the words “Do this in remembrance of me” etched right on the front of it. The words are from Jesus himself, spoken on the night he poured his heart out to his dearest friends, broke bread, and washed their feet.  He seemed to be saying that what is about to happen, as critical and destiny-changing as it might be, can actually be lost or forgotten if you don’t treasure it, memorialize it, even, in a sense, institutionalize it.  Imagine the passion in his voice at that moment.  He was pleading with them to let the sacrificial act this meal represents be burned into their memory like a brand that can never fade away. Why?  Because we forget.

What was that first “last supper” like?  It was a night filled with drama and profound implications.  If you saw “The Passion of the Christ,” you will recall the opening seen in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus faced the Enemy head on and prayed the prayer, “not my will, but Yours be done.”  What you might have not remembered was that scene historically came immediately after the upper room meal.  So on the night called Maundy Thursday, Jesus loves on His disciples in a final special meal, endures unbelievable spiritual warfare as He prays alone in the garden, suffers the humiliation of betrayal at the hands of one of his own inner circle, and is arrested.  Might it be worth a tradition to recognize those events?  Many still do.

While Jesus warns us against vain repetition (Matthew 6:7), he does not advocate never repeating anything.  Indeed, that is what traditions are: determining those events, occurrences, and corporate experiences which are repeated, whether it is weekly, monthly, annually or otherwise.  This is suggested in the Old Testament in the book of Numbers: “Also at your times of rejoicing—your appointed feasts and New Moon festivals—you are to sound the trumpets over your burnt offerings and fellowship offerings, and they will be a memorial for you before your God.” (Numbers 10:10)  This wasn’t just a Hebrew thing, it was a people of God thing, suggesting that part of trusting God for our future was remembering our past.  And part of retaining the identity as a unique work of God’s hand was to replay, occasionally, our unique story. Doing certain things in remembrance helps keep us, as the transforming people of God, anchored in our spiritual and cultural roots.

If, in this contemporary American culture which seems addicted to the new, we find that nothing we do seems worthy of repeating, then maybe it wasn’t worth doing in the first place.  Conversely, God forbid that we ever allow the priority of our fellowship to become the mere perpetuation of traditions.  But recognizing our propensity as fallen creatures to forget even the things that should matter most, let’s agree on this: some things are still worth doing in remembrance…lest we forget.

                                                                                                                                                                                   tad