Psalm Meditation 858
First Sunday of Advent
November 27, 2016

Psalm 60
1 O God, you have rejected us, broken our defenses; you have been angry; now restore us!
2 You have caused the land to quake; you have torn it open; repair the cracks in it, for it is tottering.
3 You have made your people suffer hard things; you have given us wine to drink that made us reel.
4 You have set up a banner for those who fear you, to rally to it out of bowshot. Selah
5 Give victory with your right hand, and answer us, so that those whom you love may be rescued.
6 God has promised in his sanctuary: “With exultation I will divide up Shechem, and portion out the Vale of Succoth.
7 Gilead is mine, and Manasseh is mine; Ephraim is my helmet; Judah is my scepter.
8 Moab is my washbasin; on Edom I hurl my shoe; over Philistia I shout in triumph.”
9 Who will bring me to the fortified city? Who will lead me to Edom?
10 Have you not rejected us, O God? You do not go out, O God, with our armies.
11 O grant us help against the foe, for human help is worthless.
12 With God we shall do valiantly; it is he who will tread down our foes.
(NRSV)

At a time in which all divine beings are considered local, this psalm makes sense. The psalmist asks ‘our’ divinity to go to war against ‘their’ divinity so that we can be victorious against ‘those people.’ In addition, the earth itself is out to get us as it quakes and splits open underneath us. It is a scary time and what seems to make the most sense is that God has abandoned us to our enemies because of something we did to put us on the naughty list.

We have expanded our view of God to be the one who created all that is and who rules over the whole of creation. In this world view asking God to beat up our enemies for us becomes problematic. When we are all children of the same God, even when we have different opinions and varied allegiances, it is silly to ask God to intervene on our behalf against a disagreeable sibling. I know there are parents who have an obvious favorite child, however that is not parenting at its best. If a good parent doesn’t play favorites, it is hard to ask that God always be on my side or our side in every disagreement.

Tempting as it is to believe that I am so attuned to God as to be on the nice list in every disagreement, it isn’t realistic. Before we call on God to beat up the ‘bad guys’ we do well to check in to make sure that we are aligned with God in a big picture way. If I am right in a particular and miss the broad overarching view, I may be the one God would beat up, if it were God’s way to beat up on the ‘bad guys’ to protect the ‘good guys.’

November 21, 2016
LCM