Do This in Remembrance of Me

Jesus sat at a table with four fishermen, a skeptic, a wealthy tax collector, a political activist, and an embezzler who would get him killed.  He passed out some bread and wine and gave them one poignant instruction: do this in remembrance of me. 

Weekly, the pastors of my past would recreate this scene in my mind as I held a small plastic cup of grape juice in my left hand as my thumb traced the edge of an oyster cracker.  Modeling those around me, I knew that to eat these things in remembrance of Jesus meant to call to mind all of the awful things I had done that required his body to be broken on the cross for my sins.  I often hung my head in shame.  Once I got chastised from the pulpit for laughing with a friend during this portion of the service, for it was not one of joy and laughter–but one of somber heart and mind.  On the worst days, when I felt I couldn’t even cultivate the sense of shameful sorrow laced with gratitude, I would let the elements pass by me.  I was not fit to remember Jesus.  

But Jesus sat at a table with four fishermen, a skeptic, a wealthy tax collector, a political activist, and an embezzler who would get him killed.  If these men were fit to remember Jesus, maybe there was something unfit with my approach to remembering, not something unfit with me. 

I’d always associated the word “remember” with the act of calling something to memory, until Cathy Cox–a courageous mentor in the faith–expanded my view.  “Member” is defined as an animal, person, or plant belonging to a particular group–a piece of a complex structure.  To dismember means to rip that structure apart.  The prefix “re” means “back or again”.  Remembering involves a restoration back to belonging.  To be unified again. Sometimes we do that by recalling a moment within our mind, but sometimes we do that by action

God so loved the world that they sent their one and only son to re-member Love on earth.  Remembering Love involved bringing back together again what had been ripped apart, so humanity and divinity coalesced.  Love sought no division; there was no need.  In Love, all pieces find their integrated place.  
I think there’s a beautiful purpose that Jesus first said this famous line to such a rag-tag group.  We can become guilty of picturing them all as fishermen.  It helps me to modernize the image. 

God sat at a table with a factory worker, a fast-food employee, a mechanic, a maid, a curious professor, a corrupt government official, a ponzi schemer, and a protestor.  He passed them bread and wine.  And then he told them, “This.  You are all around the same table with the same bread and the same clean feet.  This is what I urge you to do to remember God. This is where you can start with restoring Love.  You all belong together, again.”