After over a year away, we’re back home in our little church.
These walls hold so many memories. We all have stories to share about our time together here. Many of you have heard my memory of coming to Port Royal and to St Peter’s for the first time in my life, walking up the sidewalk, and then the steps, standing on the porch, putting my hand on the door knob, turning it slowly, and finding the door unlocked, gently pushing the door open, and then walking into this sacred space for the first time, having no idea that these very walls would end up containing so many years of my ordained ministry, so many memories.
Today we are here to remember. The root of this word “remember” is the Latin “memor”, which means “mindful.” And the prefix “re,” is to go back, to do something again.
So we have come here today to be mindful again.
Today’s gospel is all about remembering. On this Sunday before Easter every year, we are mindful once more of this story of the last hours of Jesus’ life, hours full of ugliness and death, people at their worst. But these hours of ugliness and death also hold within them moments that glow with life and light in that night of deadly betrayals.
One of these glowing hours takes place around the Passover table. The disciples are eating the Passover meal with Jesus. This isn’t a cheerful meal by any means. As they eat, Jesus tells the disciples that one of them will betray him. The disciples are distressed, and they all ask him, “Surely, not I?”
What Jesus does in response to their questions is the glowing with light and life part. He takes a loaf of bread and breaks it and gives it to them, and says “Take, this is my body.” And then he takes a cup, and after giving thanks, he gives it to them and all of them drink from it, and he says to them, “This my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. And then he says, “I will never again drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.”
Later, the soldiers who have taken Jesus to the hill where he’ll be crucified offer him wine mixed with myrrh. But Jesus refuses that cup of wine.
Maybe Jesus wanted to remember that cup he had shared with his disciples around the Passover table the night before, to take that memory with him, to remember that moment, and those friends who had been with him when at last he reached the banquet table already set for him in the kingdom of God.
The earliest Christians gathered around a table and shared bread and wine as a way of remembering.
Paul says that he received from the Lord what he hands on to the Christians in Corinth, “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 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.’”
Paul wanted the early Christians to be mindful again, every time they gathered around the table, of the gift of life that Jesus gave to us all, his own body and blood, the literal gift of himself.
We will have that privilege shortly, of gathering around the table again, and remembering.
We also must remember that we are unworthy.
To be mindful of that fact that we are unworthy is not popular. But when we come to the table, we are mindful that as Rowan Williams says, we can’t bear too much reality. We end up messing up.
No wonder that one of the disciples betrayed Jesus out of greed, that the disciples went to sleep in the garden of Gethsemane as Jesus prayed because they just couldn’t wrap their minds around what was happening. No wonder they ran away in fear when the authorities, accompanied by an armed mob, showed up to arrest Jesus. No wonder Peter cursed and said, “I don’t know that man.” No wonder Pilate washed his hands of Jesus. No wonder. This whole story is a reality too horrible to bear—and the worst reality is that all of us, if we are honest with ourselves, know that we are also guilty of betrayals and cruelties, big and small, of all sorts.
But that’s the beauty of coming to this table in all of our unworthy incompleteness. Because we know that Jesus gives us the gift of forgiveness. Jesus loves us in spite of our unworthy selves!
The love and forgiveness of Jesus reminds us of who we are. And the fact that Jesus loves us even as we are then helps us to remember who God is.
God is the giver of every perfect gift.
As Rowan Williams reminds us, “Our very being is a gift from God. God WANTS us to be here on this earth. God put us here.” And then Rowan says, “God wants us to be recipients of God’s love.”
When we receive the bread and wine at God’s table, we receive God’s love.
And then we remember that when we receive God’s love, we want to share it.
As that old camp song goes, “I wish for you, my friend, this happiness that I’ve found. You can depend on him, it matters not where you’re bound. I’ll shout it from the mountain top, I want the world to know, the Lord of love has come to me, I want to pass it on.”
We remember, when we eat this bread and drink this wine, that our reason for being in this world is to love one another, because we remember that God loves us.
Williams says that “God made us to be endless journeys into love.”
And God will never desert us.
Do you remember in today’s gospel what Jesus said to the disciples after supper when they had gone out to the Mount of Olives?
This statement is another one of those glowing moments of life and light in the darkness of that night.
Jesus says to them all, “You will all become deserters……
BUT
After I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.”
Jesus tells the disciples, although they immediately forget what he is saying, if they even heard it at all, that death and the tomb are not going to be the end of this story.
And Jesus is telling the disciples, even after they have done their worst, that they will still be part of God’s story. Even though the disciples desert Jesus, Jesus will not desert them.
Even when we do our worst, we too, are still part of God’s story, because Jesus won’t desert us either.
Even when we admit to the enormity of our self-inflicted separations from God and from one another, Jesus gives us hope.
“But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.”
Jesus keeps inviting us to discover, all over again, and every time more fully, that God does not ever go away.
God has a future for each one of us.
Even when we betray God, even when we mess up, God does not ever go away. God is with us now, and God is already waiting for us in whatever the future holds.
We can’t see that future, but God has already gone before us into that future and will meet us there!
The future begins today, here at the table, as we remember.
God is with us now, God will be with us in the gift of bread and wine, the body of blood of our Lord and Savior. This is the food that sustains us, our Lord who goes with us on those journeys of love that God has laid out for us.
God goes before us and waits for us, no matter how long it takes us to find God.
“After I am raised up,” Jesus said, I will go before you to Galilee.”
So when you come to the table today, remember.
Remember who you are.
Remember who God is.
Remember that this is the table where we remember to love one another as God has loved us.
Remember that this place, as precious as it is, is only the beginning and then our rest along the way where God feeds us with the gift of love.
Remember that God has set us endless journeys of love, and that God goes with us and is already waiting for us, in whatever the future holds.