This is a reposting of something I did last year on my old blog around memorial day…

This is, obviously, Memorial Day weekend.  Many will be packing up the family and heading to not-so-far-off destinations, as I did with mine.  Others will betaking part in picnics and meeting up with family or fellow believers to memorialize the fact that we do this every year.  OK, I know it is to remember our fallen war heroes and those who fought bravely for the freedom of our country.  Honestly, how many of us actually remember that on Memorial Day?  I am not saying this to discount it’s importance, but to simply make a point.  I believe we should make mention of this fact on a day, when most people just see it as a day off for celebrating, well a day off.

This anticlimactic response to the day’s supposed meaning is a parallel to the way in which we treat the memorial known as Communion or the Lord’s Table in the Evangelical Church. (For those who want to start in on the Calvinistic vs. the Zwinglian  meaning, you know where I stand by my use of the word memorial, let’s please leave it at that and get to the point.)  Many unknowing people treat this ordinance with the same disinterest as remembering the fallen War Heroes on Memorial Day.

For many Communion or the Lord’s Table was known as Mass for most of their lives.  Others may simply see it as wrote religious practice that must be done every Sunday, once a month or once a quarter.  Does it have significance in the life of the Christian today?  I would say yes and it all depends on two questions…

“What is Communion?” and “Who Instituted It and Why?” (I guess you might categorize that as 3 questions, but I’ve never been that good at math!)

I guess we might have to answer the second (& third, oh never mind you get what I mean) in order to answer the first.  In Matthew 26:26-30 (as well as the accounts in the other Gospels) Jesus inserts new meaning into the tradition of passover.  He takes the bread (the Afikoman), breaks and distributes it to the men and tells them to take it and eat it, and Luke adds, in remembrance of Him.  He took the after dinner wine (the fourth cup Hallel) and in the same manner told them that it was an emblem of His blood and that they should drink in remembrance of Him.  Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 that we are to do this as often as we do in remembrance of Christ, until He returns.  So, there is the Who and the why.  In this we get the answer to the “why” question.

It is not as the Roman Catholics put it, that the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ.  In that they eat and drink condemnation unto themselves, supposing that they earn favor with God in the re-sacrificing of Christ (in which the priest commands Christ to come down and be sacrificed again for sin.)  No, we are remembering what Christ did, in the fashion in which He asked us to.

Understanding this remembrance is of utmost importance!  We cannot let it go the way of other ceremony, somehow only giving a nod to it’s intent and purpose, while religiously adhering to its practice.  It is one of the activities that God has called us to and one in which we must obey with not only doing, but thinking as well.