Week One
November 30, 2021
Our Responsibility
2 Samuel 7:18-29
…for you, O Lord God, have spoken, and with your blessing shall the house of your servant be blessed forever. 2 Samuel 7:29b
In our reading from 2 Samuel, David is sitting before the Lord, confidently spinning out a theology of conquest, celebrating the way God has chosen Israel, and seen fit to use Israel’s military success to establish his, God’s (or might David mean his own) reputation. David’s humility is eloquent, deferring to God’s power and righteousness, but celebrating too—and just a few chapters away from his own fall in the seizing of Bathsheba—how God will establish the house of Israel “forever.”
It is a very human longing—the promise, the guarantee, of forever, of eternal rewards—a longing for divine power, for love that doesn’t end, for certainty, for abundant fullness—that is the longing for a protective God—for a transcendence untouched by pain that protects us and rewards us for our obedience. The problem, perhaps, is not simply with David’s pride going before a fall, but with this vision of God itself—a God whose power protects us in exchange for our right belief, our worship and faithful obedience.
This advent, I wonder afresh at the vulnerability of the child born to Mary and Joseph, the painful ambiguity of her pregnancy, the courage of her yes to the angel, and the courage of Joseph’s yes as well, and I grieve for all the “innocents” slaughtered by Herod, without angels to protect them. What if this Advent we take seriously the presence of immigrant children, separated from families, lost in bureaucracies, pawns of ideological struggles, as figures of Jesus in need of a place of rest, and needing the courage of our response? What if, in seeing all of nature itself in climate travail, we trust not in God’s power to heal the world, but the call to our own responsibility to love and care for the world?
Dr. Joe Bessler
Robert Travis Peake Professor of Theology
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