What time is it there?

I must admit to finding much angst over the whole issue of time zones.  Having lived on both the eastern and western ends of one time zone and finding out how different the day and night hours are from those ends, I wish I lived on the western end and enjoyed a bit more of the daylight!  Having lived in one time zone where family lived in another, I know how hard it is to remind yourself that the people you are calling might still be asleep or at work and therefore you needed to delay that phone call.  Having lived with the strangeness of being in one time zone while thirty miles away was in another, I know the how confusing it is to try and be on time when crossing an imaginary line.  I also know how hard it is to remember what time it for friends in England, South Africa, or Russia.  

That said, there is another time zone difference that is equally confusing and confounding.  That is the different time zones of this mortal day (the day of salvation) and the eternal day (the day of consummation).  I feel this all the time.  On one hand, you can say that the dead in Christ sleep but on the other hand they are awake and in God's eternal presence.  Time zones.  I also know that while the world lives in angst over the moment, those whose citizenship is in heaven live by another time -- God's kairos!  The day of salvation is our time zone and, planted already in eternal life by baptism, the eternal day in which there is no night is also part of that reality.  In addition, we live by the events of God's work of salvation, the theologian's delightful term heilsgeschichte -  salvation history.  

I fear that this tension is at least as great as the irritations of time zones that divide nations and continents. We would rather have God's work finished -- both in us and in the redemption of all rather than the unfolding process of events that lead to a final consummation and completion.  That is surely the problem of faith.  Eschatology is the discipline of last things, of time zones, and it has proven to be more than a minor problem for Christians and their scholars.  The word was used first by the Lutheran theologian Abraham Calovius (1612–86) but only came into general usage in the 19th century. Millenialism is a big issue -- or perhaps issue is not the right word.  After reading a letter from a young woman enthralled with millenialism of a particular stripe, it is a pain in the you know what.  It leads us past what we know into the realm of what we do not and it begs us to have confidence in what Jesus claims not even to know rather than in the plain and clear Word of God!

The tension of faith is related to time -- the already but not yet tension in which we live.  We would rather see it all and have it all but for now, we must live by faith.