Value 5- Week 1 Communion
Word: “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, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ 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.’ For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”
I Corinthians 11:23-26
Reflection: Remembering
Memory is a critical part of relationships because they are built on shared experience. Every time we are apart it is memory that sustains the relationship and every time we are together we are building on the foundation of the memory of past shared experience. It is why we celebrate birthdays and anniversaries to experience through memory the joy a gift received in the relationship. It is the same reason we build memorials, so we don’t forget the contributions or sacrifices others made that enable our lives to be what they are today. The richness that memory offers to relationships is what makes diseases like Alzheimer’s that rob people of memory so tragic. While a person is not lost to us because we remember what we have shared, we are lost to them because they can’t. This is why worship is always building a relationship through an act of remembering. Through Word, song, creed, and sacrament we remember the love God has for us through what God has done, experience again the love of God by celebrating what God is doing, and count on the unfailing love of God by looking to the future securely as we remember that God has promised to love us always.
There is no act of worship that more powerfully conveys the love of God through remembering than the sacrament of Holy Communion. When Jesus was about to go away, he established for his followers an act of remembrance to sustain them in his absence, so they would never forget the depth of his love for them. As disciples of Jesus brought into an intimate relationship with God through Christ, we too become part of a shared experience of his love in this sacrament. In remembering we recreate and relive the experience and His love for us becomes real and tangible again and again. At the table, through the elements, we touch, taste, see, and smell in the moment, but it is the memory of what they represent that turns it into an experience of being loved. Apart from this sacrament we run the risk of an ever creeping spiritual dementia that robs us of the richness and depth of the love of God for us in Christ Jesus. What a gift of memory that Jesus left for us.
Find an opportunity to experience the sacrament of communion at least weekly this month and imagine yourself at that first table and at the cross and in so doing, focus on remembering how much you are loved.
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