Holy Week Chapel service explores the what, how and why of remembering Christ’s mission
The Rev. Jihyun Oh challenges Presbyterians to discern ways to more effectively proclaim Christ’s life, death and resurrection
LOUISVILLE — As part of Holy Week observances on Wednesday, the Rev. Jihyun Oh asked Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) staff gathered for worship online and in the Chapel at the Presbyterian Center to consider why, what and how we remember the life, death and resurrection of Christ Jesus.
Oh, the Stated Clerk of the General Assembly and Executive Director of the Interim Unified Agency, explained a word she learned in seminary: anamnesis, a recalling to mind, especially from a supposed previous existence, or a preliminary case history of a medical or psychiatric patient. For Christians, especially those in the midst of Holy Week, anamnesis is “how we describe what we are doing at the Table,” Oh said during a service that also featured scripture reading, confession, singing and poetry.
That first definition for anamnesis comes from the Socratic suggestion that the soul is immortal and therefore reincarnated, Oh pointed out. Learning is thus helping the soul to remember what was forgotten. The teacher “is a midwife, assisting in the rediscovery of forgotten knowledge, rather than the one who banks information or imparts the wisdom of experience and perception.”
“I wonder if as the body of Christ, as a community of believers, remembering sometimes functions this way,” she said, pointing to the familiar words of Paul in 1 Cor. 11:23-26. While we weren’t around to witness Christ’s ministry, “we remember through written and oral history and rituals as parts of the body share their remembrances of God’s story with us across time,” Oh said.
“I wonder how we remember toward wholeness, repair, and restoration and reconciliation, and also toward being made new instead of being stuck in old cycles that no longer serve the church and the world, or perhaps never did serve the church and the world,” she said. “I wonder what we remember and how we remember is just as important as why we remember.”
Paul’s reminder to the Corinthians about the what of the table “wasn’t just a reminder of content, but a critique of their how of the table,” Oh said. Paul’s letter challenged the church at Corinth for allowing some believers to leave the Lord’s Table hungry. Paul “invites them to a judgment of themselves to avoid being judged by others,” Oh said. His invitation is to engage “in self-examination and discernment as a body to determine whether they were living and communing in a way that was worthy of the Table — and if not, to repent and change their ways to make it so.”
Today’s church is judged by many outside the faith to be unworthy, and some even hurl charges of hypocrisy, Oh said. “I wonder whether the remembering and the proclamation of the Lord’s death can be a yearly or periodic reset to examine and discern the body,” Oh said. “We are invited to name where we fall short and repent and be transformed.”
Oh asked: Why is it important to remember?
It’s not “just the content, not just what happened in [the events of Holy Week],” Oh said, “but how we remember and why we remember.” We remember “not just the story of God with us, but the proclamation of the nearness of God’s reign … so that we are being sent out from the Table in line with the witness and ministry to which we have been called.”
Oh made the case that our self-examination and our discernment of the body happens in the medical sense of anamnesis: the physician involves the patient and the people close to the patient “to collect reliable, objective information for managing the medical diagnosis and proposing sufficient medical treatments,” she noted.
“May we, all of us, accept the invitation to anamnesis, to find ourselves transformed in our proclamation of Christ’s death, until he comes again. Amen,” Oh said.
Earlier in Wednesday’s service, the Rev. Samuel Son, Manager of Professional Development and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the IUA, offered up a reading of “All Vulnerable God,” a poem he wrote. Among the lyrics:
“All Vulnerable God,
a mother is burying her child
who died of malnutrition;
it’s happening every 10 seconds
and there is nothing you can do since
we who zealously study Yelp reviews
are too busy judging the world.
“All Vulnerable God,
the refugees keep filling up the rubber dinghy beyond
capacity, and spilling out to sea, though knowing
their neighbors never made it to shore,
and those who did, only their bodies and not their souls,
and yet they keep filling up the boat; they forget
that the sea is merciless as tyrants,
that the sea does what she wants,
And you can’t do anything about it,
… can you?
“All Vulnerable God,
you didn’t want to hear your boy’s dying cry,
so like Hagar, you abandoned him on a
tree, to spare yourself the suffering;
Hagar at least had you to save her.
But who do you have to rescue your child?
Who will answer your prayers?
You are all vulnerable
because there is
no one else besides you.
You are all vulnerable because
you are all powerful.
What a lonely burden.”
Also participating in Wednesday’s 40-minute service were the Rev. Marissa Galván-Valle, the Rev. Dr. David Gambrell and Phillip Morgan.
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