Do This In Remembrance of Me

           

           Today is World Communion Sunday, a day in which we will celebrate communion on the same day as potentially billions of others around the world. Today is a wonderful reminder that Christianity is made up of far more people than just our little church here, and made up of far more people than just our Presbyterian denomination or just the American church or just the western church. Christianity is being practiced by people of nearly every nation and language. Indeed, you might be surprised to hear that there are more Christians in Africa than any other continent, and Latin America has the second highest number of Christians. Today, be reminded that as a Christian you are united to believers across time and space, across geographical and historical boundaries, so much so that in a lot of ways you have more in common with a Christian who lived in the middle east a thousand years ago than you do with a non-Christian who lives right next door to you today.

            But for this world communion Sunday, I wanted to look at our scripture from 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 where we get the basis for the communion liturgy that we say every time we share in the Lord’s Supper. And in particular, what stood out to me in the text is Jesus’ repeated urge for us to remember him. With both the bread and the cup, we are supposed to “Do this in remembrance of Jesus.”

            And I had us read from Exodus 13:3-10 because Jesus’ last supper took place during the celebration of Passover. And, understandably then, the Passover meal shares quite a few similarities with the communion meal. Most importantly for today, both are rituals done as a means of remembering. The Passover meal helps us remember how God freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, and the communion meal helps us remember how Jesus freed us from our slavery to sin. But both also involve the eating of bread. And of course both are salvific events that center around the blood of lambs. When the tenth and final plague of the destruction of the firstborn was to come upon Egypt, it was the blood of the lambs on the doorposts that protected the Israelites. And it was Jesus, the lamb of God, slain and sacrificed on our behalf that now protects us from death and promises us resurrection life.

            There are so many similarities one could dive into here, but today I want to focus on how both of these rituals urge us to remember. Why is memory such a major theme in these rituals? For one, these ancient societies were not as literate as we are nowadays, and books were expensive. Not everyone owned a Bible or could simply open up their Bibles to reread the stories of these salvific events of the exodus or Jesus’ death on the cross to help them remember the events like we can nowadays. These cultures were much more rooted in oral traditions. Having heard the story, it was up to them to really remember it, and not forget it. For they couldn’t always simply reread it themselves throughout the year, sometimes they had to wait until the passages were read aloud to them in temple or in church again to be reminded of the exact details of what happened. And so God, and then Jesus, gave us these clever visual and tactile aids in these rituals to help us remember these incredibly important parts of our faith history.

            When I think about how visuals can be memory aids I think it’s comparable to thinking about how so many company logos are just etched into our brain. For example, you could see the Nike swoosh anywhere and it is immediately recognizable. Same with McDonald’s golden arches or Starbucks green siren logo. What if we thought about unleavened bread as being the logo of Passover? Unleavened bread is not something you’d come across every day, it’s not something we normally make our sandwiches from, but that means that every time when you did encounter it, the distinct texture and taste of the unleavened matzah would help you remember, oh yeah, this reminds me of when the Israelites had to leave Egypt with such haste that they didn’t have time to leaven the dough of their bread. Similarly, for the communion meal, the breaking of bread has become such an iconic symbol, that bread cannot be broken in half without that imagery immediately making us think of Christ’s body broken for us. The breaking of bread is a logo of Christ’s death.

            So, yes, God is cleverly giving us these rituals as memory aids to help us remember these important salvific events. And that’s something that would have been very useful in an oral culture where many were illiterate. For God knows that engaging with multiple of our senses aid in memory. It’s one thing to merely hear something. But it’s another thing to also see something. And, in fact, in these rituals you also get to touch the elements and taste the elements and smell the elements. God is engaging all 5 of our senses in these rituals of Passover and communion. When I think of how powerful that is, I think of how there are certain scents that you can encounter that just bring you right back in time to a memory you had not thought of in years. Perhaps the smell of a beach brings you back to a childhood vacation. Perhaps the smell of bacon cooking brings you back to a boy scout camp breakfast. For me, I cannot taste oyster crackers without remembering my grandma because she had a tin of oyster crackers that I would snack on at her house. Jesus is a great teacher and so he seeks to at times do things that engage more than just our sense of sound, knowing it will aid our memory. Take the time when Jesus stooped down to wash his disciples’ feet as a model of service. He didn’t just tell the disciples to live as servants, he demonstrated it in a powerful visual way. Similarly, when Jesus would speak in ways that only engaged our sense of sound, he would still often do something unique: he would often speak in parables and in stories. And it’s because he knows that us humans are far better at remembering stories than a mere list of information. There are certain things God really wants us to remember, and so he gives us ritualistic memory aids like communion, or engaging stories like the parable of the prodigal son.

It’s important to note that memory is a complex thing. So much happens in our lives that we simply cannot remember all of it. Our brain is constantly choosing what are the few inputs we get that we really need to prioritize and remember, and what are the thousands of unimportant things that we need not remember. Likely only a very small percentage of things we experience are chosen to enter into our long-term memory. As an example, I’m guessing that most of you would not be able to tell me what you ate for dinner last Tuesday or what outfit you wore 2 days ago. And that’s ok, because those things really aren’t that important. We need to prioritize what is important to remember. That’s why John, when he wrote his gospel, he kept it to a reasonable 21 chapters. He says at the end of the gospel though that if he really wanted to he could have written far more about the things that Jesus did. He says if everything Jesus ever did was written down, all the books in the world could not contain it. But what use would that be? The amount of information would be so large and overwhelming that who could tackle trying to read it all? John prioritized teaching us the most important things about Jesus. There’s so much we don’t know about Jesus’ life, and yet thanks to the efforts of the gospel writers we do know the things about Jesus that matter most, we know what they really wanted us to remember.

            But yes, memory is a funny thing, and if you aren’t intentional about remembering something, you just never know what things you might remember and what things you might forget. For example, I remember, when I was a child, my parents took our family on a vacation to Minnesota. And of all the different experiences I’m sure we did that they likely paid good money for us to get to do, I don’t really remember most of what we did. All I really remember is that we went out to dinner one night and a waitress accidentally spilled a bottle of wine all over the wall next to us, and that in the house we were renting they had a garage full of cobwebs and dust, and yet, because a ping pong table was in there we spent a significant amount of time playing in that garage. Probably of all the things we did, these weren’t the most important to remember or what my parents would have hoped I’d remember, but memory is a funny thing.

            I say this as a reminder that there are all sorts of things we might not remember if we aren’t intentional about remembering. And the best way to be intentional about remembering something is to regularly revisit something. It’s why in the church we are sometimes very repetitive about things. We say the Lord’s Prayer every week. We celebrate Christmas and Easter every year. We partake of communion roughly every month. There are some things that are just so important that we need to regularly revisit them to make sure that the truths and themes of these things are etched into our minds and our souls, that we don’t forget them.

            And one of the nice things about regularly having things like communion or prayers of confession during our worship services, well, no matter what else the pastor does that day, whatever weird or quirky or wrong things the pastor might say during the service, well it makes sure that the gospel was still preached: we confessed our sins and were forgiven, and we chose to accept God’s sacrifice on our behalf by partaking of the bread and wine.

            Now, despite those perks, if we’re honest, sometimes the repetitive nature of these things can frustrate us. Rituals can become rote. When we say the Lord’s Prayer each week, we might get to the point where we no longer are even thinking about what we’re saying. And that’s unfortunate. Try hard to mediate on the meaning of those words when you pray it and it will be so much more meaningful to you. But regardless, even if is typically only a rote ritual to you, I bet at some point in your life it will nevertheless benefit you greatly that you have memorized the Lord’s Prayer. At some point it will benefit you to call to mind quickly that God is like a father to us, or to call to mind quickly the words “thy will be done” when you need to entrust something to God’s will.

            Sometimes communion too can become rote and we just take the bread or the wine without thinking too much about it. That’s unfortunate. Because there is so much worth meditating on during that ritual if we are intentional. I kind of think about it how most of us have a favorite movie that we’ve probably watched 100 times, especially as a kid, and we still enjoy it each time. For me that’s Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings. Each time the story grips me afresh and I am moved. I think the story of God’s death for us as told through communion should also have the potential to move us emotionally each and every time we partake. David once prayed in Psalm 51, “Restore to me the joy of your salvation.” Lord, give us back the joy of salvation so that each time we take of communion we remember afresh how liberating it felt when we first fully grasped the good news of salvation. Let us rejoice afresh that you are going to forgive all of our sins, that you are going to bless us with the joy of heaven and eternal life. Let us remember the joy, and in remembering let it become a present joy, experienced all over again.

            So, this world communion Sunday, let us remember Jesus afresh when we take of the bread and the cup. And we do this intentionally, knowing that if we do not take time regularly to think about Jesus, he will slip to the back of our minds. It’s rather astonishing, but I think just a few weeks in a row of not attending church can sometimes get us in bad habits where we start to forget about God in our lives. We don’t forget God in the sense of if someone asked us who Jesus was, we could still answer. But we forget in the sense that we start letting the things of God slide in our lives and we neglect them and we prioritize other things instead.

            Yes, God warns us not to forget him. We must always remember Jesus in the sense that we must keep our eyes fixed upon him. We must remember Jesus by living in constant step with the truths he taught us. So, we should let the story illustrated in the communion ritual be the guiding story of our lives, reminding us that we were made by a God who loves us so much that he was willing to die for us. And that Jesus will come again and set another table to feast with us at a great banquet in heaven.

            Remember Jesus, and do this because God will always remember you. God will not forget you. God says in Isaiah 49, “Can a woman forget her nursing child? Even these may sometimes forget.” And yet God says, “I will not forget you. Your name is written on my hands.” The good news is that God will never forget us, so let us always remember our Lord.