Celebration!

It will come as a surprise to no one, that I am very much involved in preparing for a huge celebration.  This Sunday afternoon, the Installation service will go forward according to weeks and weeks of planning, and will celebrate the beginning of something new in terms of my ministry, the ministry of the Cathedral, and the ministry of the Diocese.  Friends and family from all over will be present to join in this celebration.  Former parishioners will arrive by the bus load on Sunday afternoon.  Others will be staying in local hotels and enjoying a week on the waterfront as part of the celebration.  It is a celebration that I will remember for the rest of my life, I am sure.  (I remember my inductions at St. Thomas the Apostle and St. David's in Cambridge and St. George's of Forest Hill in Kitchener with great joy to this day.)

Glorious hymns will raise the roof on the Cathedral and beautiful anthems of praise will inspire the congregation.  (The numbers of the cathedral choir will be swelled for the celebration, and all my friends and family tend to really love to sing).  A dear friend will challenge me, and the entire congregation with the message of the Gospel. Symbolic gifts of the ministry to which this Cathedral has been called will be given, and we will renew the vows of our baptism.

As the last couple days have ticked down,  I also have stopped to think about several other celebrations.  I remember birthdays, and graduations; Ordinations and family days.  I remember the honour of celebrating my parents' 40th anniversary by renewing their wedding vows, and of performing my sister's wedding. Celebrations are designed to help us to create and sustain memories. They are days that draw us together in community, and remind us of what connects us.

Which has brought me to contemplate a different sort of Celebration.  Each time that we as a community gather at the Altar, it is a celebration.  It is so much so,  that the person that leads it is called the celebrant.  Each time the family of God comes to the table, it is to celebrate.  And the celebration is a celebration of anamnesis (Greek: remembering). The gathering is precisely about creating and sustaining memories.  And it is a Eucharistic (Greek: Thanksgiving) celebration. It is an opportunity to remember with THANKSGIVING.

So what is it that we remember.  Well,  the primary anamnesis, is of the death of our Lord.  We gather and remember through bread and wine, the sacrifice of Jesus' own body and blood; an act of incredible love; an act of self-sacrifice.  It is not a joyful memory on the face,  and yet the love that it so clearly communicates to us is an occasion for great joy.  And so as we gather, it is Eucharistic; it is an act of great Thanksgiving.

But the anamnesis of our liturgy is more than simply a bare memorial.  We gather at the table to do much more than to simply remember.  We believe in the real presence of our Lord in the sacrament.  We believe that as we remember, Jesus comes and is present in our community.  In our remembering,  we make that sacrifice real once again.  We make it real in that we receive Christ and his loving sacrifice for ourselves, but also we make it real because in that meal, and in the cross,  Jesus is modelling for us how we must live if we are to change this world into a place where God can reign,  and each time we gather in that meal, we are called to get out into the world and live the self-sacrifice and love that we have experienced in our interactions with the world we meet at the door.

I look forward to the huge celebration that comes with the beginning of this new ministry.  Ultimately, that celebration will build to its ultimate point when we gather at the table with our bishop in that great meal.  But every bit as much as I look forward to that celebration,  I am also called forward by it.  The memories that will be created that day are the memories that sustain me in a calling to get out there and make it so.

I hope I will see you there. I hope I will see you in the Cathedral this Sunday,  and I hope I will see you out in the community following the call of your baptism renewed in that meal, and challenging and changing this world as our Lord has modelled and continues to model for us.

To view the celebration, click here.