this overlap period

A student went to his teacher and asked, "How can I experience MORE of God's presence?"

The teacher replied, "How do you make the sun rise?"

The student, understanding the teacher's point of these things being beyond his control, then asked the teacher, "Why do you instruct me in all these spiritual disciplines?"

The teacher replied, "So that you will be awake when the sun rises!"

[taken from an Advent devotional led by Clark Hess, Cornerstone UMC]


"...the biblical stories are not just interesting illustrations of moral and religious truths. They are the earlier parts of a long narrative that has now reached its climax in the Messiah and in the people who have come to belong to him through the gospel. They - we! - are the people 'upon whom the ends of the ages have come', the people who live in the strange period of time when God's long-awaited fulfillment has begun to appear, in Jesus and the spirit, even as the old age rumbles on to its close. "

[from N.T. Wright, Paul for Everyone - 1 Corinthians]

Wright goes on to talk about "this overlap period" in which we now live. He states, "...the old age and the new grind against one another like two tectonic plates, ..."


So here we are, that is if you take Wright's reading of Paul seriously, in the greatest (strangest) age of human history.

The sun has risen, are we awake?