Ps 89 for Advent

 Maybe the preacher could take on the role of Ethan the Ezrahite. It could be useful to think of him within the words given us, or the entire corpus  of the psalm. It ends book 3 of the Psalms (a la Leviticus???).

Our broken selections start out with the steadfast love (hesed) /loyalty/fidelity of God. Later the psalm struggles with the seeming end of the promise, given the demise of the monarchy.

Clearly, well to me at least, this psalm is a pastiche of different materials from different times that then serve to ask deep abiding questions about God’s engagement with our lives and times. In that sense it is a great Advent selection.

Son of God had a royal referent to the king as God’s representative, or image, on earth in the Near East. How well do we capture it with Christ the King? 

How could we continue to use this idea of divine representative to examine Jesus Christ? See Douglas John Hall on Christ as representative in the 2nd volume of his trilogy, Professing the Faith.

This psalm refers to the national trauma of the fall of Jerusalem. Much work has occurred in trauma studies and good be a good entry point for this psalm, including the virus.

The father son language could be explored. While I concur with our current look for other divine role relationships and divine metaphors, we may well be in a time to assess this language in light of new conceptions of fatherhood. Clearly our psalm does not consider a biological relationship. So, what would be some  good ways to explore Jesus Christ as Son of God?

One could examine the ways that we could read Christ into the words of the psalm that we have been assigned, in both sections but especially lining it up with the gospels.

I would think a Lutheran would be able to use this to discuss theology of glory and theology of the cross.

At v. 19, we have a good deal of disagreement in translating faithful one/holy one or faithful people.

The creation v. chaos material on river and sea could be an allusion to Christ on the sea.

One could also explore this element of the mythic background of the OT, as other nations employed similar notions.