A Special Kind of Remembering - Nov. 1, 2009
A SPECIAL KIND OF REMEMBERING
Isaiah 25:6-9 Revelation 21:11-14
I am particularly fond of this brief passage, which is one of the very rare Old Testament texts containing an explicit promise of the abolition of death. The prophet Isaiah announces that God will prepare a banquet for all peoples, a feast of the richest possible food and the finest vintage wines. The shroud and the sheet, attire for mourning, will be destroyed, for God will swallow up death forever, and wipe away the tears from all faces. I love this passage, because it resonates with my experience.
When there has been a death in my family, we always gather after the funeral for a big meal. At the funeral service, we express our faith that Christ has conquered death for us all, and that both in life and death, we belong to God. At the funeral feast, we anticipate our future at God’s heavenly banquet, and we acknowledge the presence already there of those who have gone before us. As we share food and tears and memories, the sting of death is softened, and in a tangible way we feel closer to one another and to loved ones no longer with us on earth. Somehow, they are recalled to our minds as alive and lively as they ever were.
We have shared the kind of experience described in the following reminiscence by Dean Snyder:
When my father died (he was not an old man) my grief was as much for my mother as myself. She was a tough Pennsylvania Dutch farm woman. Her face was set hard as steel all during the funeral service, lest it melt into tears. After the funeral we all gathered in my Aunt Emma’s living room. We filled our cups with punch, put little dabs of potato salad on our plates, and tried to swallow it down.
Then my Uncle Leroy talked about how, when he and my father were boys, one winter’s night my father had snuck out after dark to go sledding. The next morning father had to explain to his mother how he had broken his arm when he was supposed to be asleep in bed.
And Uncle Clarence, lighting his pipe, reminisced about the time my father had tried chewing tobacco, didn’t realize he was supposed to spit out the juice, and swallowed it.
He worked in the fields all day sick as a dog, because he was afraid to tell his father he’d been chewing.
That reminded someone else of another story. One after another, my uncles and aunts outlined my father’s life, and I watched the hard lines on my mother’s face soften into a smile. The potato salad began to go down easier, and we refilled our cups with punch. Somehow, in my Aunt Emma’s living room, that potato salad (thick with mayonnaise) became a feast of fat things and that punch (ginger ale and fruit juice) became wine from the lees well refined. Death was swallowed up, and the Lord God wiped the tears from our faces.
The remembrance that lies at the heart of this story goes beyond mere memory. It is the remembrance that lies at the heart of our belief in the communion of saints – our connectedness with all the saints in time or in timelessness. They are not just a distant memory; they are a living presence.
It is also the kind of remembrance that is at the center of the Lord’s Supper. As we take the bread and the cup, repeating the words with which Jesus instituted the sacrament, we are engaged in a very special way of remembering the Christ who directed us: “Do this in remembrance of me.” We experience again the living presence of Jesus himself.
As we celebrate Holy Communion on All Saints Day, we are aware – in a unique way – of the union that exists between Christ and his Church, between Christ and each Christian. In these special moments of remembrance, we feel this connectedness, this communion, with those who by God’s grace still live – but not in this world.
When Steven Burt was pastor of a small Maine church, Mary’s 75-year-old husband, Jim,
lay in an area hospital, slowly dying of cancer. Mary came to the altar rail for communion one morning, and she knelt there looking distraught and distracted. Pastor Burt handed her a piece of bread and said, “This is my body, broken for you.” And then, on instinct – even though it was probably theologically unsound – he took another piece and handed it to her saying, “This is my body, broken for Jim.” Tied by 50 years of marriage, united as one, husband and wife – that certainly has to demonstrate the communion of saints, he thought. She cried as she took it, but she ate for both of them.
He did the same with the grape juice the next time around. Four days later, Jim died. About 2 weeks after the funeral, they had communion in church again. Mary came up and kneeled, and Pastor Burt handed her the bread and said, “Mary, this is my body broken for you.” And then he handed her a second piece and said, “This is my body, broken for Jim. Take and eat.” He did the same with the cup.
Later he wondered. “What would the Methodist bishop or one of my seminary professors have said about that act?” And his answer was simply, “I don’t know. It probably wouldn’t have the same effect if I tried to rehearse it, or if we tried to make doubling up a common practice in the church. I just know that for that time – it worked. Somehow we took advantage of the mystery of God and the communion of saints, the interconnectedness of believers and the invisible church of Christ.”
On this All Saints Day, as we gather at Christ’s table and remember him and those who have gone before us, we will be participating in the communion of saints. We living, breathing believers (and almost believers and shaky-trying-to-believe believers) will be united in sharing the common elements of the meal. But we’ll also be connected to saints and believers across space and time, around the world, past, present and future. We will be connected to Christ and we will be connected to one another and to all the saints through Christ in this remembrance event: all of us united by faith; all of us sharing the eternal love of God; all of us feeling the presence of Christ and the presence of the saints. All of us remembering, all of us remembered, connected in time or in timelessness. All of us feasting together at the banquet table of God, where death is swallowed up, and God wipes the tears from our faces.