For the remembering of me

Today I made good decisions (maybe) by going to Friday Eucharist instead of finishing my Greek homework. Dr. Saliers was presiding, which meant everything in the service was extra poetic. He threw something into the liturgy about "memory on the tails of the stars" or something. Very Dr. Saliers.

When he got to the words of institution, instead of "Do this in remembrance of me," which of course is ingrained in everyone's mind who has ever been to church on a regular basis, he said "Do this for the remembering of me." And while I was sort of sitting there floating along with his liturgy, I heard that and went, damn! I LOVE IT! It's amazing how such a small, almost semantic change of wording can make such a big difference (to me, anyway). It's close enough that the Greek could probably encompass either or both equally. But the first one, the one we always say, sounds like we do the Eucharist because we remember Jesus, because we're supposed to. And the second one sounds like we do it in order to remember Jesus, or to keep remembering him.

I wrote a paper for New Testament last year about how Jesus' institution of the Lord's Supper gave the disciples (and the early Christian communities who the Gospels were written for) a way to keep acting out the Kingdom in Jesus' absence. It's a way to be, for just a fleeting moment, the community we're meant to be, in the hope that as we practice this more and more, that moment will be less and less fleeting. It's a way that God reminds us who we are as the Body of Christ.

The truth is that we don't always remember Jesus, not like we should. We remember that he lived and that he died and that we're supposed to do what he would have done, but we don't often remember in practice who Jesus is and how we participate in that. That's why I love communion. Because we do it for the remembering of him, and the remembering of the Kingdom he embodies and leads us to.