Remember...

Remember…

1 Corinthians 11:22-26

So, I tend to be above average at most things, not great but okay. When I played golf, I was a decent golfer—not great but good.  Do you want to play Scrabble?  I’m pretty good but there are people who are better.  Up for some cards?  Let’s play cribbage.  We’ll have a great time but you’ll win your fair share.  I’ve made peace with being pretty good, not great, at most things.

One exception to this rule that my daughters would point out if they took a minute to remember, would be video games.  I am terrible at video games.  I once totally embarrassed myself playing “Rock Band.”  I was sure that I would be an awesome drummer.  Alas, I was not. Don’t even get me started on how awkward I looked trying to play Wii tennis.  If they’re still playing Wii tennis in the nursing homes when I move in, everyone will be in danger!

The truth is that I just totally missed the era when video games became a “thing.”  I played “Pong” a few times and thought, “Whatever…” In the meantime, generations of people have worked really hard to be very good at all sorts of video games. Now, movie after movie is churned out based on these games. Pretty much every time I run into anything that is video game related, my eyes roll back into my head and I think, “I just don’t care…” All of which is evidence for why no one is more surprised by the story that I’m about to tell than me…

There was a teenaged boy whose father died when he was only six years old.  One day, he pulled out an old Xbox game that he and his dad used to play together.  (I’m pretty sure that I bought an Xbox for the girls at some point.) The boy had good memories of playing this game with his father.  When your father dies and you’re only six, you hold onto whatever memories that you have.  What the young man discovered was that a part of his father lived on in that game.  A part of his father lived on as a “ghost car,” which meant nothing to me until I learned more.

Here’s what I learned.  In racing video games, a ghost car is a representation of a previous player’s inputs and actions from when they drove the track earlier.  Often, the fastest laps are stored as ghost cars.  That way, other players can study the race line that the top player took and try to follow them.  Or, if you’re stuck playing by yourself, the ghost car can add a little competition to the day. (See…you were wondering what you’d learn at church today.  Now you know…)

None of that is all that compelling until you hear what this meant to this young man.  (Kind of like when a child draws something elaborate but unclear and hands you the paper and you pause and ask, “So…tell me what this means to you.). Here are his words, recorded on a Youtube video that is about gaming and spirituality…yup…gaming and spirituality.

“Well, when I was 4, my dad bought a trusty Xbox. You know, the first, raggedy, blocky one from 2001. We had tons and tons and tons of fun playing all kinds of games together — until he died when I was just 6. I couldn’t touch that console for years.  It was just too much.

One day, I finally pulled it out.  Once I did I noticed something.  The game my dad and I played a lot was “Rally Sports Challenge,” which actually was a pretty awesome game for the time when it came out.  I pulled that game out and just started messing around.  All of a sudden, I found a ghost…literally.  You know, when a timed race happens that the fastest lap so far gets recorded as a ghost driver.  Yep, you guessed it—his ghost still rolls around the track today.  And so I played and played until I was almost able to beat the ghost. One day, I got ahead of it.  I passed it and I stopped right in front of the finish line.  I wanted to make sure that I didn’t delete it.  Bliss!”

So, in a surprisingly realistic way, this young man was able to

once again play this rally game with his dad.  The dad’s still gone. The kid still has that loss to carry.  Still, there are the remnants of real moment they shared.  His father is right there, showing him the fastest line to follow.  The son is right there, remembering.

On vacation this year, I spent time remembering.  My father and I played a lot of cards and a lot of Scrabble but what triggered the memories for me was his tackle box.  It’s big and clunky and full of lures that I just don’t fish.  However, it is also full of things that he loved.  In particular, this time around, I was drawn to two things.  First, when I opened the box in the boat, I immediately saw his Swiss army knife—you know, the red one with the white cross and all the different blades and the little tiny scissors and, of course, the little white tooth pick…because who hasn’t needed a tooth pick in some wilderness moment? He never really talked about it but I know, because for a long time, I watched his every move, that he delighted in that knife.  I had seen him pull out the little scissors and specifically use them to cut fishing line, working hard, it seemed to me, to make those scissors appear to be a useful tool.  There was a little “MacGyver” to my dad.

The second thing that I noticed was an incredibly long set of needle nosed clamps—the longest ones you can buy.  This made me smile.  My father and I loved to catch northern pike—great fighting fish.  The problem with pike is that they have serious teeth.  Scars from pike teeth are a badge of honor.  They are also annoying.  So, dad and I worked for a long time to find just the right tool for extracting hooks.  I remember the first time he pulled out these particular clamps, I just started laughing:  “Dad, those clamps are going to be longer than the fish!”  He laughed, too, but we both were happy to have the extra distance from those pike teeth.

It was these clamps that came to life for me this year. I’ve learned more lately about how to catch big pike, knowledge which I wish I had one more trip with my dad to share.  It wasn’t long into the trip when I hooked a really nice fish, the kind that my father would have loved to catch, the kind he would have been even more delighted to see me catch, until he didn’t catch one and then he would have been a little jealous.  Anyway, I got the pike to the side of the boat, netted him and laid him down in the boat.  Then, I realized that I had forgotten my own clamps.  “Oh no!”  Then, I saw his tackle box, popped it open, found dad’s clamps and went to work.  I smiled at dad’s presence and I swear my hands looked exactly like his as they extracted those hooks.

It’s a ghost car or a Swiss army knife or a pair of needle nosed clamps.  It’s a hand written note—a love letter or a birthday card or just a letter from when people still wrote actual letters.  It’s a recipe discovered, or a recipe followed that leads to the specific taste that you had all but forgotten that screams, “Mom’s here!”  It’s that song that pops up on the radio that makes you seventeen again and reminds you of your best friend or your first girlfriend or that teacher who broke up your slow dance with that girl for dancing just a little too close.  It’s the moment when you realize that you tie your shoes the way you do or tie a fishing knot the way you do or do any number of other things the way you do because someone loved you enough to show you how to do those things.  You pause and you remember those people who are imprinted on your life.

Life is full of layers of meaning.  Every day objects and occasions can trigger such deep memories.  However, this only happens if we are willing to take the time to remember.  Sure, once the memories are stirred up, we have to be brave enough to follow them, to sit with them, to feel what’s there to be felt.  However, even before that, we have to be awake and aware and open to the notion that we might just run into something sacred any moment, anywhere.  If I’ve decided ahead of time that there will be nothing meaningful discovered today, I shouldn’t be surprised when nothing meaningful is found.  If I’m open…that’s a different story.

I’ve always felt like the way to connect to communion’s meaning is to start with eating as an everyday experience.  For three years, Jesus and the disciples had been eating together—three years.  As a group of homeless people, wandering from town to town, there probably weren’t too many of those days that started with a clear sense of where they would be eating or what they would be eating that night.  Think about that!  We talk, these days, about people who are “food insecure.”  It’s not that they are starving but there is no guarantee that today’s food needs will be met.  The disciples and Jesus were food insecure, every day they were together.

This is why I think the disciples’ overwhelming experience connected to food would have been relief and genuine gratitude each night.  They wouldn’t have taken food for granted.  They wouldn’t have sat and reminisced about which meals were 5 star farm-to-table wonders.  No, I think the thought would have been:  “Somehow, we did eat.  Thank God!  Thank God for the people who shared their food with us! 

Interestingly, the Passover Seder meal they were sharing at the last supper was a meal that was all about remembering. People sat down as families and intentionally remembered God’s grace showered on their ancestors when Moses came to set the people free.  Basically, in the middle of sharing that meal, Jesus delivers a new message:  “Every time you eat, I want you to remember me.  This is my body. This is my blood.  This is how much you are loved.”

This is what makes the last sentence of our text so telling:  “You must never let familiarity breed contempt.”  It’s only been a few years, but Paul is worried that the people are forgetting what’s essential about the communion meal they share.  They’re taking it for granted.  They’re missing the meaning.

Why do we share this meal? We do this to remember Christ, so that, like a ghost car, he can show us the “best way,” so that we might add a tool or two to our tackle box and save ourselves a little pain, so that me might be open to God’s presence with us now.