Dear Friends:

Memory is powerful. Its presence forms our identity and without it any sense of self slips away from us.

Perhaps that is why Israel was constantly called by God to remember. To remember that she was a people set free from slavery in Egypt by God’s delivering power; to remember that she was a people with whom God had made a covenant to be their God and they to be God’s people; to remember that they were set among the other nations to declare the marvelous works of God. For Israel, sacred memory served to re-establish her identity, to recall her to whom she was.

In most of our Baptist churches as you look towards the front of the sanctuary, you see a table inscribed with Jesus’ words, “This do in remembrance of me.”  Each time we come to this table we remember the core story of our identity: that we have been set free by the death and resurrection of Christ. We remember the depth of God’s love for the world as God in Christ took human form, lived among us, was crucified by and for us, and was raised from the dead that we might have life. We remember that we are a people, a community, now reconciled to God to whom the ministry of reconciliation has been entrusted. 

But memory in worship is more than bringing the past into the present.  As Reinhard Koselleck reminds us, sacred memory causes us to not only look to the past but equally importantly it draws us into the future as well.  In his words, these holy memories form “a horizon of expectation.” At this table we experience not only the past brought powerfully into our present, we are also drawn into the future.  Our horizon of expectation is located in this eschatological banquet table as well.

To be certain, the future to which we are drawn in worship is a particular future – God’s future.  Therefore, the horizon of expectation that dawns upon us in worship is one of hope.  And it bears with it an invitation:  an invitation to live into the future that comes from God, the future that Jesus spoke of as the Kingdom of God.  This “memory” of the future relocates us in the new order Jesus proclaims in his sermon on the mount as God’s reign, an order which begins with the pronouncement of blessedness.”

When we enter sacred memory we are doing more than remembering the past; we are being re-membered (made whole) by the future of blessedness which we live into now.

 
Centered in Christ and United in Mission,

Rev. Dr. A. Roy Medley
General Secretary