March 20, 2008
Do it
Maundy Thursday 2008
Memory may well be the only way we know who we are.
When we lose it, as Alzheimer’s devastation can attest, our world disintegrates. Every morn when we awaken, we must “reinvent the wheel.” We are known, but we do not know. We forget, but we are not forgotten, for so much of us exists now only in the memory of another.
So it is with those who follow the Way from Jesus to the Christ. Come back to this moment. Through scripture and our family history, remember that we are the children of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel and Leah, as many as the stars, as many as the grains of sand.
Come back to this moment. Through symbol and story. Through the cross, through color and chorale, through holy community and Holy Communion. See it, hear it, be it.
Do this — in remembrance. Not like a class reunion to celebrate nostalgia, as sweetly painful as is the sound of it. Not to rehearse our anecdotage, as boringly painful as is the drone of it.
For we are here not merely to share a memory, but to be a memory, to answer a mandate to remember — and not by some lowest common denominator of passive aggression, but by lifting high the cross of aggressive passion. “Do this,” our Lord commanded on the very eve of his crucifixion, and do it “in remembrance of me.”
Do this in remembrance that we — and the world to which we are called in service — may know and may never forget.
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