The Jesse Tree: Love and Sin
Advent 2021 – The Jesse Tree
This is a series of reflections on daily readings designed for families during the season of Advent.
Today is the third Sunday in Advent. We light the rose-colored candle. Joy is the theme of the day and week. After two weeks of longing, for hope and peace respectively, there’s something rejuvenating about marking this third week as different from the others. We need something to lighten the mood. We need something to remind us not only that another way is possible, or necessary, but that another way is already here, the way of love.
Maybe that’s why it’s counter-intuitive to start our prayers for the third week of Advent with these words.
Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen.[1]
This prayer feels strangely off theme. Shouldn’t we be praying something about God’s comfort in the midst of difficulty, or about the generous love of God? Shouldn’t we be praying John 3:16 or Psalm 23?
Day Fifteen – Love and Sin
David is a fitting character to reflect on for the third week of Advent. He embodies this counter-intuitive connection between love for God and being hindered by sin. David is praised in scripture for being a man after God’s own heart (1 Samuel 13:14), especially in contrast to Saul, who quickly turned from God to his own political posturing and grandstanding. Seen in this light, it’s easy to turn David into a hero of personal piety. After all, isn’t David the one who wrote, “One thing I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple.”[2]
Unfortunately, this vision doesn’t capture David’s full story. David made a rash vow to kill the household of Nabal because of an insult (1 Samuel 25). He became a murder and adulterer (2 Samuel 11). David perverted justice, refusing to punish his son Amnon after he had raped his half-sister Tamar (2 Samuel 13). Even the end of David’s life has an unsavory aspect of vengeance and spite (1 Kings 2:6).
David’s life shows us that earnest love for and confidence in God does not exempt us from being, “sorely hindered by our sins.” We, like David, are a jumble of good and evil. We are monstrous saints, or perhaps, saintly monsters.[3]
Earnest love for and confidence in God does make us honest. The more we experience the love of God the easier it is to admit how desperately we need it.
How have you experienced love that made you feel safe enough to admit your faults?
[1] Episcopal Church. The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church : Together with the Psalter or Psalms of David According to the Use of the Episcopal Church. New York :Seabury Press, 1979.
[2] The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. 1989. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers.
[3] Deeply grateful to the author Don Everts for this phrase.