FUTAB

FUTAB is Chat for, “Feet Up, Take A Break.” FUTAB might be what you imagine when you hear the word Sabbath: aimless rest. Mandatory aimless rest, actually.

 But if that’s all you imagine, you’re falling way, way short.

 Because Sabbath has a definite aim

This Sunday is Trinity, celebrated every year the Sunday between Pentecost and the beginning of Ordinary Time.

 Christians have always understood the Trinity as a community of perfect love. Andrei Rublev’s 15th Century icon “The Hospitality of Abraham/The Holy Trinity” depicts this beautifully, seeing the three angels visitation to Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 18 as paralleling and foreshadowing the Trinity we see in the New Testament.

 The most remarkable thing about the icon, though, isn’t what’s there. It’s what’s not there: an empty place among the Three.

 Rublev saw it as evoking an invitation…a seat at the table; a drawing into that loving and unselfish community.

 For Abraham and Sarah in its first sense, and for you and me in its second.

Out of one, many. Out of many, one. In this sermon, Pastor Ian Burgess contrasts the scattering of languages and people in ancient Babel with the unification of language and kinship in the miracle of tongues which descended on the disciples at the feast of Pentecost. Through love and faith, and through generations of faithful Christians before us, we are made one body in Christ our Lord.

This week’s gospel reading is sometimes called the High Priestly prayer, Jesus’ own prayer to the Father at the start of his Passion. It is the longest of his prayers, and comes at the height of his ministry. Hear Bishop Julian Dobbs draw out five points on which to meditate.

In the brief Gospel reading for this week, Jesus uses the words “love” and “friend” 12 times. So, one does not have to be particularly scholarly, or even attentive, to discern that he’s saying something about the nature of love and friendship.

 And because this takes place during his farewell to those with whom he’s spent the last three years living and teaching and serving (and confronting and correcting), it’s probably something significant about what they are.

 And at least one thing they’re not.

This Sunday we read the account of St. Philip sharing the Gospel with a Eunuch from Ethiopia. He had been in Jerusalem to worship God and was returning home, but his worship was from far off outside the temple for a multitude of reasons. Nevertheless he persists and desires to study the Scriptures for himself.

Philip meets him on the road, and tells him the best news he ever heard, the fulfillment of a promise which speaks to hopes of the hearts of all of us who stand far off, outside the Temple, longing to come inside.

In a culture that’s become increasingly driven by divergent ideologies, we’ve become more and more attuned and susceptible to “Either/Or” thinking. “Both/And is something you’re hearing less and less.

The church, because it’s full of humans, isn’t immune from an either/or way of seeing things…even in its orientation to worship. It’s often expressed as Word or Sacrament, one of them being by far dominant.

But Jesus, on the afternoon of the Resurrection sets a pattern for both/and that’s served his Church since.

In fact, it’s how he’s known.

When Redeemer was founded eleven years ago, its leadership laid out seven key characteristics we were hoping for in our stakeholders. Number seven was, “Is drawn more to patterns than particulars.”

That one’s especially important as we pursue our shared vision of the mission of God in the world. Because in order to really understand this, we’ve got to look at some of the bigger stories that reveal important patterns in the Scriptures.

When we get lost in particulars, we lose patterns. And so, we often can’t see the forest for the trees.

But it wasn’t always like this.

When Jesus Christ rose from the dead on Easter morning, he rose as the beginning of the new world God had always intended…and will result in the restoration of everything that is now corrupted, which is everything (Colossians 1:20).

That’s the first—and perhaps most important—thing to know about the meaning of Easter.

And it’s meaning that matters.

I believe that the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from death is a fact. But facts can often be rendered meaningless without a frame to give them meaning.

This is especially relevant in a day in which an unrelenting shower of unframed facts inundates us every day.