My Aunt Elsie was our family’s amateur genealogist. Every time we visited Aunt Elsie (who was actually Great Aunt Elsie), she would impress upon me new stories and things that she had learned about our Winters side of the family. She would display pictures and tell stories of the heroes and outlaws of our family tree. It was interesting seeing these black and white people in their pictures, even imagining them living in a black and white world – because it might as well have been, it was so foreign to my experience that was in bright colors in front of me. 
Last Sunday we talked about how we are related to one another, and that Paul makes it clear that we’re related through God. We’re related through God in that He is the “Allfather”, through whom all lineages trace – this is the sense in which we are related to all humans and even all beings on the planet. We’re related through God in the Church in that we are related through the “Allbrother” Jesus Christ, the one who came to join our family to give it the necessary righteousness. And we’re related through God, again in the Church, by the “Allpower” the Holy Spirit who makes us all holy, giving us the ability to do good works.
But sometimes, these relations look like my distant grand cousins. God can seem like He lives in a black and white world, far far away from the hyperHD color world we live in today. Sometimes we imagine we can go back and meet Him in that black and white world – that is perhaps sometimes why we attend worship services, to give ourselves a break from hyper realism of our lives, and to find some rest in the beautiful simplicity of Christ’s work for us. For us Christians, going to worship services can seem at times like a little Mardi Gras, a little Carnival, some time and place in which the normal order of things is reversed and we are able to breathe a little easier in the relief of the difference.
In that sense of relief, we have a little bit of the Gospel. When I would listen to Aunt Elsie, as a Christian, I would frequently wonder what it would be like on one day when I met those “black and white people” from the pictures in the Resurrection. Worlds will collide on that day in all sorts of beautiful and astounding ways. Order will meet chaos. Black and white will meet color. Digital will meet analog. And the “Allfather” the “Allbrother” and the “Allpower” will be there to join it all together as surely as He joins us today in His grace.
p.s. Speaking of family, a big congratulations to my brother and his wife who welcomed their son into the world yesterday