Isaiah 38:3: Remember, O Lord, I beseech you, how I have walked before You.

We saw in the sermon today that Hezekiah’s prayer is a memorial. All prayer is anamnesis, an appeal to God to remember something – His promises, His great acts of the past, our loyalty to the covenant.

This table too is an anamnesis, a memorial: As often as we eat this bread and drink this cut, we show forth and memorialize Christ’s death. This table is an enacted prayer. This is why our main pastoral prayer comes just before the Eucharist. We bring our prayers to the Father along with the signs of Christ’s death, His body and blood.

This Eucharistic memorial is also a work of the Spirit. Jesus is present here, and feeds Himself to us, by the power of the Spirit. We present these signs of Christ’s body and blood before the Father together with the witness of the Spirit.

In the Spirit and through the Son, we call on the Father to remember Jesus, and all He has promised to give us in Jesus, which is everything. We know that He will keep His promise because our memorial is the memorial of Jesus, offered in the Spirit. We know He will keep His promise because He gives us this bread and wine, down payment on our inheritance of heaven and earth.