Time Travel for Beginners (mid-week message)

Time Travel for Beginners

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

May 3, 2017

“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 to remember me.’” 1 Cor 11:23-24

There are different ways of remembering.  One is nostalgia, fleeing from the present moment and losing yourself in some moment of the past.  This tends to be isolating, replacing the living, breathing people around us with the images and mental ghosts we have of people from our past.  Nostalgia goes well with other isolating behaviors.  The half-drunk middle aged man sitting alone in a sports bar remembering his glory days as a high school football star comes to mind.  The other form of remembering, recollection, is nostalgia’s opposite.  It is when we actively bring people and incidents from our past into the present moment.  A widow who suddenly feels the presence, there next to her, of the departed spouse is actually bringing him to the present moment, not fleeing to it in the past. Frederick Buechner writes in Wishful Thinking, “When Jesus said, ‘Do this in remembrance of me,’ he was not prescribing a periodic slug of nostalgia.”

Theologians often say that the Holy Eucharist is a re-presentation of the sufferings of Jesus on the Cross, that is, a setting before us once again of what went on before.  It is not a re-enactment or an additional offering up of Jesus.  The Prayer Book in the Rite I Holy Eucharist describes it this way:  “[Jesus] made there, by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction” (p. 334, emphasis added).   The point is that the Eucharist does not recreate Jesus’ offering of himself, but rather that we ourselves become present for that one-time and all-important event.  We do not flee into the past by taking the bread and the wine.  Rather, we allow that past to become real and ever-present for us.   This is one of the main reasons why we talk about the real presence of Christ in the sacrament rather than sharing the Lord’s Supper as a memorial only. 

Christ on the cross is an event that took place in our time line 2,000 years ago.  But when seen sub specie aeternitatis (under the lens of timeless-ness) it is ever present, always occurring.  The sacrament participates in this timeless-ness, even as it occurs within our experience of a forward-moving directional time line. 

The pre-communion prayer says, “Be present, be present, O Jesus, our great High Priest, as you were present with your disciples, and be known to us to us in the breaking of bread” (BCP, p. 834).   For this to happen, we need to be present, in the present.  Thus the past is brought to us, and we find communion with God and each other.  It is not Dr. Who-like time travel, isolating and solipsistic.   Time itself travels and brings us together. 

Grace and Peace,

Fr.Tony+