FROM THE PASTOR
Our Remembering
It’s never been my habit to do a lot of baking during the Christmas season. It may be I was traumatized by the notoriously unreliable ovens in seminary apartment kitchens. (Apartment maintenance was not a priority for LSTC back in the cash-strapped 1970’s.) Or it may be as I started out in the parish there never seemed to be time for baking and other holiday activities. Or it may be I know if I bake, and we have goodies in the house – we will eat them.
This year I made three holiday treats (and only one required baking) – my mother’s peanut butter fudge, my mother-in-law’s rum balls, and Scottish shortbread from my father-in-law’s heritage. The work I did with my hands – creaming together butter and sugar, forming rum balls, pressing shortbread dough in the baking pan – was an act of remembering. I was thinking of my in-laws, both now long dead. I was thinking of many Christmases with my mother – alive and well, but 800 miles away. They all were with me in the kitchen through the work of my hands and the memories the preparations evoked.
Sometimes memory is a work of mind and hands.
When we gather together around Word and Sacrament during the season our Lord’s Nativity, we gather to remember the true Christmas gift – the Word made flesh, the Light shining in the darkness, the Christ Child. Our remembering is an act of the mind. It is assent to texts read, the Word proclaimed, the faith confessed. But our remembering is also the work of our hands, the reaching out to receive and consume bread and wine, the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ given for the forgiveness of sin, new life, and salvation.
In this Christmas meal we remember and are present to so many Christmases past. In this meal we are joined by those who once gathered at the Table with us and who are now part of the heavenly and eternal banquet. In this meal the Child is present anew among us.
Take, eat, drink, and remember.
Pastor John Schumacher
