Worship as Remembrance
Before We Gather by Zach Hicks
| Scripture
Read Psalm 66:5-7
| Devotion
The word remembrance is a really important Bible word, especially when it comes to worship. The Christian tradition, throughout the centuries, has zeroed in on this word as a key to unlocking an important facet of what we’re doing when we’re worshiping together. Worship in its deepest sense, they say, is remembrance.
Christians probably began fixating on this word because Jesus used it in connection with one of the most important rituals we engage in during worship-communion. In that famous passage from 1 Corinthians that many of us hear before we come to the table-what many traditions call “the words of institution”-Jesus says twice, “Do this in remembrance of me” (1 Cor. 11:24-25).
The basic meaning of remembrance is “recollection of some thing in the past.” Remembrance is creating or reforming a picture of a memory, whether of a life-changing event, an impressionable moment, or what you had for dinner last night. But according to the Bible, those experiences are just the starting place for what remembrance really is.
To remember in the biblical sense isn’t only to recall an event, it is to understand yourself as actually present there, powerfully united with the event’s original participants. Remembrance, bib- lically, is the closest thing we have to time travel. Remembrance is to so identify with a past event that you are convinced that you were actually there.
Did you notice it in the passage we read? No, the word remembrance isn’t there. But the act of rich biblical remembrance is. In Psalm 66, we have a songwriter who lived generations past the time of Moses recalling the exodus and its famous moment- that great marker of redemption the Israelites passing through the Red Sea. Listen carefully to the psalmist’s language (and I’ll help by emphasizing a few things):
He turned the sea into dry land;
they passed through the river on foot. There did we rejoice in him.
– PSALM 66:6
The psalmist understands what worship does. As the gathered assembly sings this worship song, the “they” of Israel’s story becomes “us.” The psalmist rightly understands that when it comes to the story of redemption, we were all there. You see, wor- ship is a mystical time-travel. It thins the membrane between past and future.
When Jesus says that we partake of the bread and the cup in remembrance of him, therefore, we’re not merely recalling his death on the cross. We are being transported there. We are so identifying with the event that we become one with it, once again. We are gazing up at our crucified Savior and finding ourselves there with him–or to use Paul’s better language, in him. Through remembrance, Paul’s words to the Philippians and Galatians become our words. I am “found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ” (Phil. 3:9), and I am “crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).
The famous Good Friday spiritual from the African American worship tradition asks, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” By remembrance, the faithful Christian always answers, “Yes.”
There are many applications to explore about remembrance in worship, but let’s focus on just one: We live in a cultural cli- mate where personal identity has achieved nearly godlike status. Who I am, and who I feel myself to be on the inside, is increasingly unassailable. To challenge my understanding of my identity is tantamount to attacking my personhood and violating the core of who I am.
Remembrance challenges this by reminding Christians that their fundamental identity is outside themselves, there in Jesus. Now, of course, the Holy Spirit inhabits us in such a way that Christ himself is inside us (John 14:17; Rom. 8:9-11). But what we mean is that fundamentally who we are is found in Jesus and his work of redemption for us, not in ourselves and our work for God. And if worship is to take us there, it can only be by the power of the Spirit. And so we pray.
| Prayer
Aim your prayers in this direction:
- Pray for God’s people to have a rich experience of biblical remembrance in worship.
- Pray for people to find space in worship to confess and let go of lesser identities to cling to Christ.
- Ask for the Holy Spirit’s power, particularly so that the gospel of Christ’s finished work would be so clear and powerful that people feel transported to, and present at, those saving events.