(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “To Remember”, originally shared on June 21, 2021. It was the 124th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
What are your earliest memories? Your most
important and meaningful? Your worst? Your best? What role does memory have in
making you who you are, and what is the role of memory in the Christian life?
I was thinking the other day about all the
numbers I need or want to remember, like my cell phone number, Sally’s cell
phone number, our son’s cell phone number, our home phone number, our alarm
system code, my ATM pin number, my locker combination, my Marine Corps MOS, my
zip code, and the zip codes of the places I’ve lived, served, or went to school.
Passwords usually contain numbers. I need to remember my desktop, my
laptop, and my notebook passwords just to access the over 100 other passwords I
have stored in them because I can’t remember them all. I remember the addresses
of all the homes we lived in growing up in Wisconsin, and the addresses of the
churches I served and the homes we lived in when I served there.
My memory is still fairly good, though I find learning vocabulary words
for other languages is not what it used to be. At my age, I think about what
would happen if I started losing it.
But, there are benefits. Have you ever heard the Senility Prayer? "God grant me the senility to
forget the people I never liked anyway, the good fortune to run into the ones I
do, and the eyesight to tell the difference."
I asked one of my doctors about Prevagen, or
another memory supplement you see being advertised on the shows you watch in
commercials that are designed for people like you. That’s how you know you are
watching in your own demographic. She said, exercising your mind is the best way
to maintain mental capacity.
If you are literate, if you can read and write, chances are that your
memory is not as developed as someone who is illiterate. If you can’t write
down what you need from the grocery story, you have to remember it. I remember
one of my seminary professors, who was from Finland and an older man then, who
remembered a choir of herders and farmers from the outer regions of Finland
singing scripture from memory for 6 hours. They could do that because they were
all illiterate. They couldn’t read, but they had learned instead to depend upon
their memories.
What is your earliest memory? I think mine is waking up in the morning
in our little house on 6th street and running into my parents’
bedroom to see the baby kicking in my mom’s tummy. I was probably 3 a the time,
or maybe 4. Beyond that, I’m not sure if my memories are of actual events or if
I’m remembering stories someone told about that time, or a photograph I
remember seeing.
Maybe you’ve seen the T-shirt that says, “The older I get, the better I
was.”
Memory is a funny thing. In Alex Trebek’s last autobiography he quoted
Mark Twain as saying, “At my age, the only things I remember never happened.
I was talking with one of my brothers a few months ago and I shared one
of my favorite stories about him. He said, “That never happened.” I think he’s
getting forgetful.
Well, that’s why we have historians, even though they often disagree. Even
historians of contemporary events disagree. We are all polarized, and we tend
not to see things as they are. We see things as we are.
It’s been said, I think it was Erwin Knoll the journalist, that
everything in the newspapers is true except that of which you have firsthand
knowledge. Have you ever watched a speech on TV and then heard the reporting of
it and wondered if you heard the same speech?
I believe that it comes down to who you trust.
Why do some people wind up just reading or seeing or listening to news
sources that support what they already believe about the world? There’s even a
name for that: confirmation bias. It’s easier.
<sigh> I guess that even nostalgia
isn’t what it used to be.
So, how do we know what it true?
One way is by remembering.
Remembering, in the Bible, isn’t about an individual recalling an event.
It is the act of a community to enliven someone who is no longer living on the
earth.
It’s closely connected to the idea of a “name”.
If we were asked where the essence of a person is to be found, we might say
it is their “heart”, or their soul or spirit.
In the ancient world, however, it was in their “name”.
To say or do something in the “name” of God, for example, was not to use
the word “God” as a magical formula to force God to do something. It meant to say
or do something that was in the reality of God’s presence within you, to do
God’s will.
In the ancient world, remembering someone’s name or reading it brings
their essential reality to life. Speaking one’s name carries with it the substance
of someone, dead or alive, in such a way that a whole community of people can
be touched.
That’s why God doesn’t have a proper name. To know God’s name would be
to know God’s essence, and therefore to have control over God, and that’s
inconceivable.
All we can know about God is what God reveals to us, and God reveals
God’s self to us in Jesus Christ.
Remembering, in the Bible, means not just to recall, but to do something,
as in
*Malachi 4:4 “Remember the teaching of my servant
Moses, the statutes and ordinances that I commanded him at Horeb for all
Israel.”
When God “remembers”, God acts with regard
to persons to show mercy or judgement, protection or affliction.
As in Paul quoting Jeremiah in
*Hebrews 8:12
“For I will be merciful toward their iniquities and I will remember
their sins no more.”
On the night before he was betrayed to the authorities, Jesus celebrated
a meal in which he recast the history of God’s liberating power for His people
in the acts of his crucifixion and death for the sins of humanity.
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 11, starting at the 23rd verse:
*1 Corinthians 11:23-26 “23 For I received from the Lord what I
also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed
took a loaf of bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This
is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ 25 In the same way
he took the cup also, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my
blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ 26 For as
often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until
he comes.”
When Jesus says, “Do this in remembrance of me”, he is calling for an
enlivening of God’s action of self-revelation to the world, God’s action in
Jesus Christ, fully God and fully human being. As Jesus says in
*John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave
his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have
eternal life”
Jesus did not command a memorial meal. Jesus invited us to enter into
communion with the living presence of the living God here and now. Jesus
commanded a meal that is, as A. G. Herbert described it, “a bringing back out of
the past into the present” not of our sins but of His sacrifice that took them
away. A meal that brings the reality of Jesus, of Him crucified and risen
victorious over death through death, to the reality of our present time.
Jesus took his bread and wine and declared them to be his body and blood,
inviting us to eat and drink our bread and our wine as an action that brings his
sacrifice, done once for all and unrepeatable, into our living selves, our
whole persons, in God’s present living power. We accomplish none of this. It is God’s action
and the gift of God for you.
All that is required of us is a believing heart.
Today, I invite you to remember, to open your heart, your true self, to
receive the presence of the one true living God in the eternal now.
Some say that we never truly die as long as we exist in someone’s
memory. Christians say that we die in our baptisms and rise to new, eternal
life in Jesus Christ. That life is made real for us, made manifest for us, in Holy
Communion. If you haven’t been baptized, seek it at your church, or find one to
receive the living reality of the one true living God that makes of us
something that endures forever, a new creation in God’s real, living presence.
And if you haven’t had your first communion, seek that out to experience the
real presence of God in the forms of bread and wine, for you.
When Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of me”, he wasn’t saying
“remember me so that what I did won’t be forgotten”. He was saying receive me.
Receive the real presence of me in the forms of bread and wine, receive the
gift of life in the forgiveness of your sin so that you will know me now and
forever.
Beyond our varying natural abilities to memorize, we remember what is
important to us, at any age.
I did a Children’s Sermon once, maybe twice, that I stopped because I
realized it might be embarrassing for the parents, which was not my intention.
I sat down with the children who were usually
between toddler and 12 or so and I asked, “Where did Moses get the 10
commandments?” Nothing. “Where did Jesus grow up?” Nobody. Which disciple is
best known for doubting” Crickets. “Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?”
SPONGE BOB SQUARE PANTS!!!
Remembering, in the Biblical sense, means repentance. It means a shift
in what is important to us. It means turning away from the things that are
killing us and turning toward the one true living God. Of abiding in God’s
presence and being changed, of becoming a new creation, being born again, and
of living from the inside out.
To remember means to know the reality of God’s living presence in the
forms that God gives us by God’s agency.
In Holy Communion we commune with the one true holy God and we know
forgiveness, life, and salvation. We do so because in Holy Communion is God’s
gift of salvation, in the living reality, in remembrance of Jesus Christ.
To remember Jesus is to receive him. Therefore, proclaim his death, his
death that brings life, and remember/ receive him until he comes.
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