ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 34.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. ******** >> PAUL: I admit I'm struggling a little bit here. Will you please help us resolve the tension between the eschatological character of Sunday and the historical shape of the church year. >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: Actually, Paul, your question is a wonderful way of summarizing everything that I've said so far about the Christian concept of time and about Sunday and the church year. There is a very simple way of coming to grips with this struggle, this tension, between the eschatological character of time as it is expressed on Sunday, the eighth day, and the historical understanding of time as it is expressed in the church year. Both of them are centered in Christ. Sunday, the eighth day, is about Christ being present among us bodily as the eternal one and how we participate in eternity even now because heaven is on earth in the person of Jesus. And when we enter into that presence, we see very clearly how we enter as eternal beings who have been baptized in water in an eight-sided font where we enter now into this eternal life that knows no end. Every Sunday as we gather around the presence of Christ in word and sacrament where he speaks to us and he feeds us his holy food, we are already now having one foot on earth and one foot in heaven as we described or illustrated through the transfiguration of our Lord before the apostles and Moses And Elijah. But when we look at the church year, what we see is that as finite human beings who believe in the historicity of the scriptures and the historical character of Christ's life, that we ground ourselves in time in historical events and in historical places. That Jesus actually did take flesh and walk among us, that he sat down at table with people, that he walked on streets that we can walk on now, that he visited with people, had conversations with them and performed miracles that demonstrated that he was, in fact, God made flesh. The church year is also all about Christ, about his life, about the events of his life, about the places where he lived, and the times in which he lived. And what we do when we celebrate the church year is that we ground ourselves in history and we show very clearly that Christianity is a very deeply historical religion. What we have here in these two things is the very tension that is embraced in the person of Jesus himself, the greatest mystery of all, and that is the incarnation. To embrace this tension between Sunday and church year is simply to embrace the fact that Jesus Christ is both God and man, that the finite can take on the infinite. And in the flesh of Jesus Christ, we see heaven and earth coming together, God and man. And in our understanding of time, now, with Sunday as the big day that the church year is giving context to that Sunday, we see both heaven and earth coming in our understanding of time. And so we now look at time both from our perspective and from God's. And in both of them, we see Christ, the one who has come to show us what our true humanity is like, that it is a humanity that is like his, perfect and holy in every way.