Memories are Made

Psalm 137:1-7
Second Timothy 1:1-7


Rockville United Church
Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

October 7, 2007

Sometimes as children we get lost in thought gazing at something and it becomes an almost indelible memory. One of my timeless visual memories is looking at the four gothic-lettered words carved on the Communion Table in my childhood church. Those four words were: “In Remembrance of Me.” The intricate carving of letters into wood made those words of rare significance. And then I wasn’t, still am not, exactly sure what that floating prepositional phrase means: “In Remembrance of Me.” They seemed to carry a mystery. Most often that Communion Table was empty. What was supposed to be on top of it that was so memorable?

Of course, I was to learn that those beautiful letters were words Jesus spoke. That those items, that bread, that cup, were food and drink from him to me, from him to us. And when we did that, that act, that gesture, it was an act of remembrance. We were remembering him. Just like he asked us to, told us to, with the promise that this was only a temporary ritual action “until he came again.” So these four words, (“Remembrance” being odd to me, and the biggest word) began to involve me in a whole story.

But, you know, we all have very different special memories. Our own private memories take us deep into our own feelings and thoughts, and they may even seem eternal and communal, but they are really more private and often not even very meaningful to other people. One reason people can like psychotherapy is that a therapist cares about your private memories – at least for awhile.

To become a community of memory – which is part of what a church is – is to bring together a lot of people with one memory and a lot of different memory shared together. We had an example of a community of memories at Camp Pecometh last Saturday night.

David Gill planned a contest for us. Breaking us into 4 or 5 teams. Our goal was to identify snippets of songs from the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. We only had a few seconds for each recording. But along with the stimulating task of identifying Count Basie or Glenn Miller or Aretha Franklin or Meatloaf or Madonna or Bruce Springsteen, we had all our memory buttons pushed! It was like seeing your favorite movie from each decade, only on fast-forward so that only the main memory was reignited. Flipping through the index file of a shared past, all of us had some songs in common, a few had all songs in common, and all of us had one joy in hearing all those snippets together. And some of us got to enjoy the awesome victory of being on Nancy Newcomer’s “Rockers and Boppers” winning team! Way winners!

If a goal of religion is to take us to life this church retreat awakened us to real life held in memory and re-experienced as if in a dream, a dream “recurred.”

We had another example of communal memory: Looking at the empty space where once stood the willow tree whose branches held generations of RUC children. Some could see that in their mind’s eye, their memory. Others could image it by looking at the painting that Marty Reid had made, and that we brought with us, of children held in the outreaching branch of that no-longer-there tree. Again, however, so many branches, so many children, over so many years. This was a community of memories, one memory repeated again and again. One tree, many memories, and many sets of children over time, all remembering that one tree.

In philosophy there is defined an ancient problem. It’s called the Problem of the One and the Many: is there any one thing that unifies the many things? We say: one God, but there are many religions; we say the word “tree” but there are many different kinds of trees. Is there anything that unifies our experience? Some “treeness” or is everything just scattered bits and pieces that don’t fit?

A puzzle, like the ones some worked on at Camp Pecometh, is a good example of the ancient philosophical problem called the One and the Many. There are many, many pieces to a puzzle. A thousand, 1,500, 2,000 – all so many and all different. But there is one picture, one picture made up of all those pieces, and one picture only. You can not make two pictures out of one puzzle’s pieces.

But is it true? Is there one picture to life, or only scattered pieces, even lost pieces, that do not even fit? Is there one God even with many religions? Is there one memory that is true even with a thousand stories?

We have many different pieces of bread today for communion. We have many people here. And there are many millions of people around the world, all doing one act of memory today, all remembering the Last Supper of Jesus. All remembering his love and his Spirit, and all becoming one in this one simple act, with that Jesus, with God, and with each other, until we’re one again. Amen.