In Remembrance of Me

1 Corinthians 11:23-25
For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”

Twice Christ mentions the phrase, "in remembrance of me" in this passage. We are to eat the bread in remembrance of Jesus and drink the wine in remembrance of Jesus. In our culture, the phrase "in remembrance" is used in conjunction with memorials for loved ones who have passed away. People have gravestones of their loved ones engraved with the epitaph that begins, "In Remembrance of". Sometimes the phrase is used in obituaries. Typically, these gravestones and obituaries convey very little about the deceased. A gravestone may have the epitaph "a loving wife" or "a faithful husband." An obituary in the newspaper would have the bare facts of a person's life: their surviving relatives, their hobbies or charities, and their vocational accomplishments. The phrase is a way to honor the dead by stating that the deceased is still loved and remembered by the living. In a way it focuses just as much on the living as the deceased.

However, in 1st Corinthians, the Greek word translated "remembrance" does not mean "in memory of" but rather, as my Greek dictionary defines it, "an affectionate calling the Person Himself to mind." My linguistic key puts it another way, "The word indicates to call back again into memory a vivid experience." I was trying to think of an example of this and it came to me that a funeral service we had at Grace in North Liberty several years ago for Darryl Lindley exemplified this idea.

Darryl was one of our Church's most cherished members. He was a big Cub fan and wore a Cub t-shirt and a Cub baseball hat to almost every church service. He loved to talk baseball to anyone who would listen. When Darryl passed away, the funeral service celebrated Darryl's life through stories told by family, friends, and pastors. People laughed and cried. We remembered together his love of fishing and baseball. We recalled his hospitality. People told stories about what a great butcher he was. His family quoted Darrylisms: he had an unique proverb for different situations. We recalled how much Darryl loved Jesus. In other words, we remembered the person himself and not just a slogan or epitaph. We celebrated Darryl's life through remembrance.

When Christ tells us to remember him through celebrating communion, he seems to be emphasizing his death. We are to remember that just as he broke the bread, his body was broken in suffering for us. We are to remember the cup of wine he passed around to the disciples represented the blood of the New Covenant. As it says the Gospel According to Matthew, his blood was poured out for the forgiveness of our sins. In 1 Corinthians 11:26, it reads "For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes." Through this remembering we proclaim how Christ's death and resurrection redeemed us to be a people unto God. Through the proclaiming we help each other to remember how much Jesus loved us and he is with us still. We proclaim the gospel not only to ourselves, but to the world around. This remembrance is not a memorial service for a dead person, but a celebration and proclamation of a living God who loved us and gave himself for us that we might dine with Him at the Lord's Table forever.

Timothy Keller on Medicine and Spirituality part II.

Here's another passage from Tim Keller in his book Every Good Endeavor. He tells a story about Dr. Martyn Lloyd, a famous London preacher in the early 1900's, who had disagreements on how to treat patients: holistically versus physically.

Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones makes the same point in one of his lectures to medical professionals. LLoyd-Jones was on staff at Saint Bart's in London under the famous chief of staff Lord Horder in the late 1920s. At one point the junior physician was asked by Lord Horder to rearrange and reclassify his case history records. He created a new filing system, arranging the cases not by name but by diagnosis and treatment. As Lloyd-Jones did this task he was astonished that Horder's diagnostic notes in well over half the cases included comments such as "works far too hard," "drinks too much," "unhappy in home and marriage." At one point he spent the weekend with Lord Horder and took the opportunity to ask him about what he had seen in the case files. Horder responded that he reckoned only about a third of the problems that are brought to a physician are strictly medical--the rest are due to or aggravated by anxiety and stress, poor life choices, and unrealistic goals and beliefs about themselves. Severe cases, of course, could be sent to the psychiatrist, but most of the time that wasn't appropriate. So, Horder concluded, a doctor should basically mind his or her own business. Lloyd-Jones said that after he heard that response:

...we argued for the whole of the weekend! My contention was that we should be treating [the whole of the person's life]. "Ah," said Horder, "that is where you are wrong! If these people like to pay us our fees for more or less doing nothing, then let them do so. We can then concentrate on the 35 percent or so of real medicine." But my contention was that to treat these other people [taking into account their whole life] was "real medicine" also. All of them were really sick. They certainly were not well! They have gone to the doctor--perhaps more than one--in quest of help.

Lloyd-Jones was not proposing that physicians were by themselves competent to do this, but rather that together with other counselors and helping professions they needed to address the whole person. People have a spiritual nature, a moral nature, and a social nature, and if any of these are violated by unwise or wrong beliefs, behaviors, and choices, there can be interlocking physical and emotional breakdown. And even patients whose original illness was caused by strictly physical factors eventually need much more than mere medicine to recuperate and heal. (pp. 177-178, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work)

Doctor Matt Anderson's views and goals on the practice of medicine has a historical and theological foundation :)

Timothy Keller on Medicine and Spirituality

Timothy Keller, in his book Every Good Endeavor, quotes a journal article about one doctor's frustration in his practice. This doctor's experience mirrors Dr. Matt Anderson's experiences. Matt is the instigator of our Haiti Mission Trips.

One woman I corresponded with pointed me to an article in The New England Journal of Medicine titled "God at the Bedside." The author was a doctor who often found that patients' spiritual beliefs and practices were very much a factor in their health issues, but "in the modern era, religion and science are understood as sharply divided, the two occupying very different domains." He wrote that he often found that patients' guilt and fears were factors in their illness and also that their faith in God was part of how they healed, but he felt completely unprepared by his training to address any of these realities. "Doctors," he wrote, "understandably are leery of moving outside the strictly clinical and venturing into the spiritual realm."(pp. 176-177)

Matt Anderson talks about these issues on every trip to Haiti. He wants to develop a model of care that addresses both the body and the soul. May God bless his work!