Tuesday, November 03, 2020

Theology Lesson On Election Day

This kind of thing takes me all the way back to the book of Samuel, because I imagine God saying "You said you wanted to be in charge, and you wanted a fancy government like everybody else." Israel got Saul and then David, who was a good king but he had to have Bathsheba, and then Solomon, who was a lot more like Nicolas Cage in that movie about arms trading than he was the "wise king" who tried to split the baby (Solomon bought his own propaganda long before Nixon came up with the idea of selling himself like soap. Oh, ask your grandpa, I can't explain everything to you!). There's kind of a through-line from Saul to the Exile, is what I'm sayin'. Deuteronomy and ultimately rabbinical Judaism were attempts to clean that up and get back to the original. Not in a "start over" kind of way, but in a "we screwed that pooch but good!" kind of way.

Nah, we're not goin' that way (we ain't Israel in the Hebrew Scriptures), but God leaves a great deal up to us, and everytime we screw it up we cry "Why did you leave us in charge?!"

A lot like children, I suppose.

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