ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 27.LW2 Captioning provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 ******** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ******** >> DAVID: I may be asking this question a bit awkwardly so please correct me if I'm not phrasing this quite right. I want to understand more about the concept of eschatology. Does the sense of eschatology still exist today in our understanding of time? >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: David, this is not an awkward question at all. This is an excellent one and one that we really need to wrap our minds around if we really want to understand our own relationship to time today. The reason why this is difficult or it might seem awkward is because we're talking about two different perspectives on time. We're talking about the way we look at time, and we look at it through a finite understanding. And then we�re now looking at it as the way God looks at it from his perspective which is an infinite understanding of time. And we're trying to bring together in our own finite minds God's sense of this eternal character of time. Perhaps the way to begin is to recognize that Jesus is the timeless one. When he enters our world, he shows us a glimpse of eternity, of infinity, of timelessness. And yet, because he comes flesh, there is this concrete particularity of Jesus that focuses in on how eternity can be encapsulated in something finite. I believe that we've lost this sense of eschatology in our worship and our understanding of Sunday because we no longer see Sunday as this eschatological day, and that's because we've lost the sense of how Christ's bodily presence among us brings us now into this eternal time. Now, this isn't something we can understand or grasp. It's very abstract, and yet, in many ways it's very concrete, abstract in the sense that this is something that we can't rationally explained, concrete in that we hear words from the eternal one and we receive in our mouths his very body and blood. There's nothing more concrete than that. But at the end of the day we have to stand back and say, like all these things, this is a great mystery. This is something that we cannot fully comprehend. And yet, it's something we embrace that even now in our worship in this twenty-first century, we see Sunday as an eighth day, an eternal day. And that's why we should have every Sunday communion because every Sunday we want to enter into his presence. We want to participate in his eternal life. We want to receive him, the eternal one, in our bodies so that we might understand ourselves now as being spliced into this eternal life. This is something that is so fundamental to the Christian understanding of time. And yet, as you so beautifully said in your question, in our own human finite way, this is awkward and in some cases incomprehensible. But more and more, we must speak this language because this is the language of scripture, and this is the language of our worship.