What does it mean… to “remember”?

Memory is a fluid, liquid thing.  It plays tricks on us.  We remember to brush our teeth, to take out the garbage on the right day, we remember names – sometimes.  We’re frustrated when we forget things.  We get scared when we forget things too often.  On Remembrance Day we say that “At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.”  Lest we forget.

In Quebec the license plate motto reads “Je me souviens” – I remember…

Memory can be the nostalgia of fond memory, and it can be the sudden realization that we remember things very differently from someone else.

Sometimes we want to forget.  Wish we could forget.

We walk in someone’s home and smell roast turkey… and have a flood of memories of people, and gatherings.  We smell stale alcohol, or a certain aftershave or perfume, and are overwhelmed with painful triggering memory.

We remember the words to songs from 40 years ago – word for word! – when we hear it on Musak in the store…

Memory can be tricky terrain for many of us – and at the same time, it can be inspiring, a source of motivation, and at other times comforting.

Today is about memory… and story… of a different kind, still.  An act of memory that makes the past present, as future coming to birth.  Memory not as past only, but as brought to life in the present, empowering a future – our future, God’s future.

In a world of continuous change, what does it mean to “remember”?

Physicists understand time as a construct that keeps everything from happening at once. Storytellers arrange time, condensing it, expanding it, to serve their narrative purpose.

But, like most of us, Jesus’ early followers, are constrained by time’s linear flow – we live each moment as it occurs, one event after another.  Unlike us, however, they lack the advantage of knowing the end of this particular story before it happens.  We experience Maundy Thursday and the story of that last meal together, from the perspective of both sides of the cross – so, while Good Friday has not yet happened, we live in the reality of Easter.  The disciples experience these events only as they unfold, but then write of their growing understanding, much later.

“Remembering our future” is not a clever play on words (well, okay, it is – but it’s not just that!). It’s what we say at Communion as we gather… Writing to the Corinthians in the sixth decade of the 1^st century, Paul gives the first account we have of Jesus’ last evening with his disciples.

His description, like the similar gospel accounts that came later, shows how deeply this memory – and practice – shaped the early church.  Paul sketches the details with economy of language, conveying the essence of the meal in spare words.

The words come to Paul from the tradition the church has already begun to form, but he hands them on here because he is troubled.  This is not about correct worship, getting the words, and the order of things, right.  It’s about how the memory and the re-enactment of that meal equips us with a worldview, and with integrity as we seek to be an alternative expression of human community – then and now.

Communion is about how we nurture our common remembering to carry us into a distinct future that is God’s future – of justice, peace, healing, and wholeness.

But, you see, formal meals in Corinth were class-specific. People of different social status did not eat together.  From what we know about the life of the early house churches in Corinth, their gatherings began with a meal that followed the usual social customs – those of less status would dine in outer rooms or the courtyard on less costly food, on down to the servants who would not eat at all, but only serve the others. In the case of the house churches, the final ritual would involve coming together for the sharing of bread and wine, accompanied and explained by the words of institution.

What was accepted Corinthian practice was not acceptable to Paul.  Where common practice underlined social divisions, the Words of Institution declared a “new covenant” uniting the church into a single body, just like the one loaf that is broken and shared among them.  When the Corinthians allowed social norms to infect their time together, the supper was not a meal that “re-membered” Christ in the body of the community, as one.  It was a private dinner.

Simply put, God’s future is not what’s going to happen if the way we gather reinforces the class differences, the social stratification that divides us along the lines that society has imprinted on us.  These blind spots and subtle biases may be virtually invisible to our eyes and ears, so normalized have they become.  But they are visible to others, and to God. And if we take the time to connect our values, and practices to our core faith identity, we will see the contradictions too. So… Paul tells the story, again.

So much more than a religious ritual, Paul is conveying to the Corinthians that their actions in sharing the common meal – “do this” – are the place where their faith and their spirituality is expressed.  Beautiful, soaring celebrations of Communion, without awareness of hunger and hospitality to others is, he goes on to say, to share the bread and the cup “in an unworthy manner”.

Paul’s words tell us that “remembering” means to have our lives and our actions reshaped.  When God “remembered” the Jewish people in exile, the result was mercy and return. To “remember” God in the Hebrew Bible is to repent and obey.  For Paul to “remember the poor” in Jerusalem was not only to recall that they exist – rather, they became a life-changing concern. That this meal is done “for the remembrance” of Jesus is not just so we don’t forget the past.  We are met here, once again, by him, and our lives are given new focus and impact.

Our actions at the table are an act of proclamation.  Coming to the table without distinctions is scandalous, unseemly.  This witness, to what the cross makes possible, is what the church is called to proclaim “until he comes.”

When this all began for us, in 1887, or in 1912 when George Pidgeon became the minister of Bloor Street Presbyterian, or 1925 when the Presbyterian Church entered Church Union by a vote at Bloor Street… no one could have predicted that in 2024 the United Church would proclaim that we are a people of Deep Spirituality, Bold Discipleship, and Daring Justice as we do in this centennial year and beyond.  But our church founders had the foresight and vision to know that we would need new expressions for each generation of the church to say and do its faith in fresh and faithful ways.

We, as Bloor Street, or as the United Church, have never fully or perfectly been the revelation of God’s love for the world.  Our journey has proven, both in spite of, and because of God’s grace, that our human brokenness can never be the full expression of what is the divine intention.  God is always saying, in the words of Isaiah, “Look—I am doing a new thing! Can you not perceive it?”

God does not repeat the same thing over again. God is the Creator. God is creative. God is innovative.  God always creates new things.  Being grateful for what God has done with Bloor Street in the course of an amazing 137 years is a beautiful thing to do. But God doesn’t want us to stay where we are.  At the same time, we cannot live as we have lived before and expect a change. God is always calling us to set aside our human fallibility and to make space for each other.  For others. To make space for love.

When Christians remember, we are not retreating to the past; we are being catapulted toward the future.  God’s people inhabit time in this strange tension, where we are called to remember so that we can hope. Our traditions propel us toward the future with hopeful expectation. Christians inhabit time as a stretched people.

People speak today of “paying it forward” – when someone does something for you, instead of paying them back, you pass it on to another person – and so on.

Perhaps, as we discern what God’s Spirit is saying to us today as Bloor Street United Church, we work to “remember forward” who we have been as we live into who we are, and all that we are becoming.  May it be so.  Amen.