Living Memory

First Presbyterian Church of Metuchen 

April 23, 2023 

Written and delivered by: Rev. Ashley Bair 

Title: Living Memory  

Scripture: Luke 24:13-35 

 Prayer - God, may your presence be known to us this morning, in the hearing of your word and the openness of our hearts, we pray. Amen.  

I have a tiny bottle of lotion that can fit in the palm of my hand, smaller than any hand sanitizer or lipstick, and I’ve carried it around half full since 2012. Over ten years now. I took it from my aunt's dresser. It’s called Creative Solutions in the scent fig and it smells wonderful. It smells like my aunt. She used to wear that scent all the time.  

I took it from her dresser one day I went to visit her in her bedroom in Sanford, Michigan. She had been bedbound at that point for a month. She was on a lot of painkillers and could barely talk but could recognize me. She was only able to eat ice cream, so she was thin and gaunt. On that day I sat by her bed and was remembering all of the times I used to crawl into it with her when I was a little one. At one point she had a waterbed, what a disaster those were, I’m sorry. Thrilling once and then just painful and dangerous. I remembered that and she laughed with her eyes drowsily closed, squeezed my hand and remembered with me.  

I sat there with her for a long time in silence, when she fell fully asleep, I went over to her dresser and found the tiniest bottle of lotion, that fig scented lotion she wore all the time and put it in my pocket. I have it still and I have never used any of it, it’s remarkably just about as full as it was when I took it.  

My aunt isn’t alive anymore, but sometimes, I find that bottle in my house and I open it and I smell it and I see her again. I see her tossing me around a swimming pool, making her famous coffee cake with 3 sticks of butter, showing me her poker hand at the table while we listened to the beach boys, tucking me into bed at night and making me feel very safe.  

A smell of the lotion and her presence finds me.  

Sometimes all it takes is a smell or a sight, a sound, a texture to bring us to someone who was close to us…this works for someone we knew and loved well, it also seems to work for someone we feel close to but never got to meet.  

My mom lost her mother to cancer when she was in college, so none of her children or my cousins ever got to meet her. But we have heard stories about her, touched her passed down jewelry, seen her in pictures, heard her voice in the way my mom and her brother talk.  

Last Christmas I went home to visit my cousin who had recently given birth to her first child. And while we were marking up a wall with paint tape, she told me when she was pregnant she was having a very hard time handling pregnancy and all that anticipation of motherhood. One night she laid on her couch to rest and after a few minutes, she sat up straight and said, “Grandma.” She said she felt her grandmother’s presence with her in the room.  

Though she didn’t know her in person, she knew her from the stories her father and my mom had been telling her since she was born, from the pictures, the jewelry, the voice of her passed down. She knew how to recognize her, and when she felt her, she did. When I asked her what it felt like for her, my cousin said, it felt like a lost memory and just knowing her memory and presence was with me, brought me deep peace.  

We are able to bring about these moments because of what is called sensory memory. Sensory memory refers to our memories found in perceptions of the world through the five senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. Throughout our lives, we absorb a tremendous amount of information via our senses.  

And since it is impossible to permanently register every impression we capture through our senses, as we momentarily focus on a detail in our environment, our sensory memory registers a brief snapshot of our environment, and helps our brain determine what’s happening around us. 

When you feel a water drop on your arm, your sensory memory tells you, it must be raining. I’ve experienced this before. It’s how we remember someone’s face when we see it another time.  

When you see, hear, touch, or taste something, that sensory information first heads to your brain's relay station. Which then sends that information to all of the relevant brain areas, including the hippocampus, which is responsible for memory, and the amygdala, which does the emotional processing. And the rear lobe of your brain’s cortex - which is able to serve as an archive for long-term memories. 

So not only does your brain's sense center connect right to its memory center, but it also stores long-term memories in-house.” Including memories of things we've been told or dreamt, sometimes we call it deja vu or just a feeling of our body and brain remembering something.  

When you feel old rubber cleats and remember childhood soccer games. When you hear the bark of a dog and remember a past pet. When you drive into your hometown and remember getting your driver's license. When you open up a bottle of your aunt's lotion and remember her.  

Our sensory memory can be painful when difficult memories surface, - and it can be the most beautiful, still hard, experience when it helps us keep our loved ones close long after they have gone from us.  

Today we read a story about two of Jesus’ followers who meet him on the road to Emmaus after he has resurrected. This story is one of the many near the end of the Gospels where Jesus meets people to tell them how to recognize him, even after he is gone.  

It’s Easter afternoon. In this story, Jesus appears not in Jerusalem, but on a minor road to an obscure village. And he appears to two followers on the road. Though these two followers of Jesus clearly originally staked their lives on the idea that he was the Messiah, “the one to redeem Israel,” and though they’re heartbroken to have those hopes dashed, and though they’ve spent many months, perhaps years, walking with Jesus and listening to him along roads just like this one — still, they don’t recognize him. He’s right there, talking with them, walking beside them and they don’t realize it’s him. But, why would they? They thought he was dead; they were grieving and weren’t prepared to encounter him.  

As they arrive in Emmaus, night is falling, and the two followers insist that he stay over with them before continuing on his journey. At supper, though he is their guest, not the host, Jesus takes bread, blesses it, and gives it to them; gestures that echo the Passover meal they just had with him three nights earlier. Then, and only then, they recognize him and he vanishes from sight. 

Stunned, the two disciples are left alone at the table. In retrospect, they realize that the stranger was Jesus all along. They say “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?”  With haste, they immediately return to Jerusalem to breathlessly tell the others “how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.” 

In the breaking of the bread, they recognized Jesus. The symbol of all he did with them: the wisdom he shared, the healing touch he gave, and the purpose he brought to their life came to them. A breaking of the bread and Jesus’ presence found them.  

In this story I hear a reminder that Jesus’s presence will find us, and it won’t necessarily be in a form we’d anticipate; so we need to stay open-minded and imaginative. While all of our creeds and scriptural knowledge have their place, by themselves they’re not enough. We should be looking for the risen Jesus not so much in the form of a single figure, that’s not likely for us, but we will find his presence in memory and actions of love, which can take all kinds of forms.  

When the two disciples see Jesus along the road, they don’t recognize him; and when at last they do recognize him, they no longer see him. It’s almost as though Jesus, knowing he won’t be with them for much longer, is leading them toward a more expansive way of seeing him, and a deeper form of life together: no longer dependent on his physical presence with them, but rather focused on how he is incarnate in all kinds of ways, spiritually and tangibly present wherever bread is broken, wherever love is done, wherever captives are set free, and wherever “our hearts are burning within us” along the way. 

For Jesus’ followers the breaking of bread was like me opening up my aunt's lotion bottle. For us today it’s like my cousin sensing her grandmother's presence.  

We who have not seen Jesus in person, know his presence from the stories that have been handed down to us, through the ancestral traditions, through scripture and memories of unbearable love and good will.  

Jesus had said, find me in the bread, find me in the cup, remember me. Listen to the stories and find my voice ringing in your ear saying, "As I have loved you, so you must love one another. "Recognizing the long memory of Jesus in our world, that’s the Easter resurrection we can experience all year. Moments when we, without seeing or knowing, experience Jesus’ presence with us.  

A taste of the bread, a sip of the cup, a voice in your ear, let Jesus’ presence find you. Amen.